News release

HP Delivers Sophisticated Software and Service Delivery Capability to Automate the Link Between Business and IT

Business-triggered automation brings customers one step closer to an Adaptive Enterprise

HP today announced new products and solutions that automate the link between business processes and information technology (IT), allowing for IT resources to be delivered to meet shifting business priorities.

Unveiled at HP's Software Universe event, the offerings enhance IT's ability to positively impact businesses' bottom lines with tools that provide deeper service-level insight, allocate IT resources more rapidly, run IT more effectively and achieve higher service levels.

When patterns of business demand change in IT, HP OpenView Automation Manager automatically optimizes the configuration of services and applications to match predefined service levels. The software achieves this IT service desired state through model-based or "business-triggered" automation - such as peaks in order processing or increased use of e-mail - as well as business process intelligence.

HP OpenView Automation Manager is the first product to result from the combination of technologies from Novadigm and Consera, companies HP acquired earlier in 2004, in addition to innovative business intelligence technology developed by HP Labs.

"The introduction of HP OpenView Automation Manager demonstrates progress in the integration of the acquired technology during a relatively short period of time," said Stephen Elliot, senior analyst, IDC. "Today's news provides users with proof points and a glimpse into what the overall HP OpenView portfolio can provide through integration and automation across multiple product lines. HP's focus on providing users with business change automation is a positive step in the right direction."

HP OpenView Automation Manager expands the current generation of HP OpenView change and configuration management solutions by determining when the desired state needs to be changed in order to satisfy business priorities and automatically provisions based on capacity and current demand.

"A year ago, HP announced its strategy to refocus management software from the process of collecting management information to the process of converting real-time management data into insight that enterprises can act on to better serve their changing business needs," said Todd DeLaughter, vice president and general manager, Management Software Organization, HP. "Today, we are executing this strategy with solutions that extend intelligent automation to help CIOs more insightfully allocate IT resources and flip the ratio of spending from maintenance to innovation."

Automating IT service management

The first automation product to use critical business performance information to allocate IT resources, HP OpenView Automation Manager allows customers to respond quickly to business demands by dramatically reducing the time between business decisions and IT's implementation of change. Combined with monitoring, analysis, event-response and virtualization capabilities, the automation of data center reconfiguration will enable enterprise IT managers to move beyond manual reactive management, without adding new hardware or applications.

Additionally, HP OpenView Automation Manager will help improve service quality through the use of IT service models that define application and IT resource dependencies and automate the execution of the workflows orchestrating changes throughout the data center to ensure repeatable, auditable and error-free delivery of services. An automated predictive and proactive approach reduces costs incurred by over-provisioning and dependency on manual, error-prone operations.

"We believe service providers, like T-Systems, that manage multiple data centers can benefit from HP OpenView Automation Manager," said Michael Hanzlick, project manager, T-Systems International. "The solution's open architecture would allow rapid integration into any server environment or monitoring system, so visibility, control and service-level compliance could be assured even more easily and cost-effectively."

Deeper insight for real-time decision-making

HP also announced enhancements to HP OpenView Service Desk, which enables enterprises and service providers to successfully manage service levels from a customer experience perspective. With all IT critical operations data centralized through a common Configuration Management Database (CMDB), data is always synchronized and consistent, which helps improve service quality levels.

HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0 responds to customers' requests for an easy-to-use solution with quicker time to value and lower total cost of ownership. New out-of-the-box reports, service and service-level agreement (SLA) templates and a new "Webstart" tool enable quick and simplified operational deployment. Additionally, an improved web graphical user interface allows access anytime, anywhere.

The enhanced HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 module of Service Desk enables the process of defining, agreeing, measuring, reporting and improving the quality of service to run IT like a business. The only comprehensive ITIL-compliant (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) solution built entirely around a common database, this module adds the ability to measure, show historical reporting of, and provide real-time alarms around compliance.

Used in conjunction with Service Desk, Service Level Manager enables sound IT decision-making with immediate access to SLAs to evaluate in real time how a change would disrupt service at any given time.

More information about these products and services and others announced at HP Software Universe is available at www.hp.com/go/softwareuniverse2004media.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Oct. 31, 2004, HP revenue totaled $79.9 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they ever materialize or prove incorrect, could cause the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the expected development, performance or rankings of products or services; statements of expectation or belief; and any statement of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the development, performance and market acceptance of products and services and other risks that are described from time to time in HP's Securities and Exchange Commission reports, including but not limited to HP's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended July 31, 2004 and other reports filed after HP's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2003. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.