HP adds services to ease supplier sprawl

by Stuart Wilson, Tuesday 14 February 2012

Hans Peter-Klaey, senior VP software at HP

Vendor giant HP has introduced a range of new services designed to enable enterprises to integrate, manage and govern complex multivendor environments. HP reckons that the new services will result in reduced risk and costs for enterprises. The new HP service integration and management offering gives enterprises a single view into multisourced services, including cloud services, whether provisioned internally by IT or externally by non-IT business groups.

The new offering provides transformational consulting services, including a roadmap that identifies required processes for improving management and performance of multiple supplier environments. The problem of supplier sprawl is being driven in part by the growth of cloud services. Research house Forrester recently stated in March 2011: “Business groups are adopting cloud two-and-a-half times faster than IT groups. Procurement of cloud services from external suppliers by business groups separate from services developed by IT is creating supplier sprawl.”

Will Cappelli, research VP at Gartner, stated: “Managing and measuring complex IT sourcing environments in terms meaningful to the business has become a pressing need for the CIO, particularly with the recent and rapid adoption of cloud computing. An end-to-end management solution to govern and measure multisourced IT environments will be critical to gaining timely service performance and financial information in order to optimise the IT supply chain and avoid the costs of supplier sprawl.”

By providing a standard IT architecture and integration model for all services, HP service integration and management aims to help clients create an agile and easily governed IT environment. HP claims that benefits include improved service performance by tracking performance status against operating budgets and business goals. HP also reckons that enterprises will see decreased service disruption and related business risks by rapidly identifying those suppliers responsible for critical service interruptions. IT maintenance costs should also be reduced through integration and centralisation of multiple supplier services management.

Hans Peter-Klaey, senior VP software at HP, said: “The lack of visibility into services delivered by multiple suppliers, including those from cloud providers, leads to inconsistent service levels across the organisation and increases IT management risk and costs. Our new offering gives organisations the processes and tools needed for improved insight and better governance of all suppliers, while reducing complexity and cost.”

HP service integration and management hopes to help organisations develop the right supplier integration and management roadmap to achieve business goals by providing an overall topology of IT services as well as indicating how each service maps to different business objectives. With real-time visibility into business service performance, as well as the performance of relevant suppliers, clients also can proactively monitor their service delivery, according to HP.