The first main day of the VMworld show was great. Over 10,000 people filled Moscone center to learn about how the hottest trend in IT can help them reduce their operating expenses and improve the quality of service. (Follow us at the show on Twitter #hpvmw)

In the main keynote, Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware reiterated the statistic we often hear in our conversations with customers and analysts. “70% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on.” He reminded the crowd that IT needs to focus on delivering more business value. In this economy that is more important than ever.

In the next keynote, Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group, mentioned the new virtualization SPI (Smart Plug-In). Readers of this blog will know that SPIs supplement our agents in collecting data, performing some autonomous management based on policies, and sending alerts to the Operations Manager console. The virtualization SPI supplements the agent on collecting virtualization-specific metrics on both host and guest systems. This provides a single management console, freeing the virtualization administrator to work on more strategic matters than managing a separate event console for the virtual environment.

Concurrently with Ann Livermore’s address, HP issued a press release on our new virtualization offerings. My colleague, Michael Procopio summarized it on the Business Service Management Blog.

The theme of “convergence” is pervasive at the show. Just as virtualization spans servers, storage, and networks, the management software must also span these domains on both physical and virtual devices. Deploying Operations Manager allows organizations to have a single event console, saving money on licensing, training and maintenance costs. Even more important, it improves service quality by providing a single location for all events, speeding time to problem resolution and eliminating confusion about which events are symptoms and which is the true causal event.

Stop by and let’s chat in HP’s booth #2023 .

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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