by Michael Procopio

Today was the first day of Software Universe. I had customer meetings all day today. Here are some interesting items from my conversations.

1. Most said budgets were down in 2009 and will be flat to down in 2010. But a few who were related to government stimulus said theirs will be up.
2. Co-sourcing and outsourcing continue as ways to reduce costs
3. A few were focusing on asset management with the express purpose of getting rid of things in the environment they don’t need anymore. They know they are out there but they need to find them first.
4. Most customers I spoke to said they keep aggregated performance data for 2 years the range was 18 months to 5 years.
5. There was an interesting discussion about the definition of a business service versus an IT service. The point being made was a business service by definition involves more than IT. While I agree this is a good point, I think the IT industry has focused on business service as a way to say - “I’m thinking about this IT service in the context the business thinks about it not just from my own IT based perspective”
6. A number of customers have or are about to implement NNMi. If this is something you are interested in check out the NNMi Portal
7. Many customers are moving to virtualized environment highest percentage I heard was 70%. Another customer forces all internal developers to deliver software as a virtual image.
8. Another topic was how to monitor out tasked items. For example, some part of what you offer is delivered by a third party - how do you make sure they are living up to your standards. Two methods I heard were 1/ use HP Business Process Monitor 2/ get the 3rd party to send you alerts from their monitoring system.
9. On the question does your manager of managers send back data to sync the original tools 1 did, 1 didn’t. For the one who did it was part of a closed loop process.
   • Monitor tool finds problem send alert to MOM (Manager of managers).
   • MOM send event ID to monitoring tool
   • Subject matter expert uses monitoring tools to diagnose problem
   • Once diagnosed updates monitoring tool which updates MOM

A very productive day for me. I hope some of this is useful information to you.

For additional coverage my blogger buddy Pete Spielvogel is also here and beat me to the first post. You can read his posts at the ITOps Blog.

There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow as well as the hashtag #HPSU09

HPITOps – Covers BSM, Operations and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer 

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio