Business Service Automation: HP and Virtualization

Michel Feaster, Director of Products, Business Service Automation, of HP and I had an interesting conversation about managing, automating and orchestrating workloads and system resources. Although a cringe a bit when HP uses "BSA" as an acronym because it makes me think of things such as the BSA Motorcycles or the Boy Scouts of America rather than HP, an understanding of the concept behind this HP-centric catch phrase is important to those who have embarked on the journey to a more virtualized environment.

HP has developed a long list of software products and services to help organizations discover, virtualize, manage and update client and server software that make up an organization's IT infrastructure. In the end, HP says that hopes to help organizations do the following things.

• Create a common view of the businessservice across the IT environmnet
• Automate change across all of the device making up the business service for cost effiiency
• Connect IT processes and coordinate siled teams through a common workflow
• Integrate with monitoring and ticketing tools for a holistic service management solution

HP is one of the few suppliers that both has a comprehensive view of the complex systems environment that includes clients, midrange and industry standard systems, storage and network resources and has both products and services organizations would find necessary to round up all of these resources and get them headed in the proper direction to achieve business goals.

In my review of HP's thoughts on this topic, I noted that mainframe based solutions, Apple Mac OS based solutions and some important mobile environments are not supported as well as some organizations might hope.

HP customers would be well advised to gain an understanding of HP's single-vendor catch phrase and acronym laden environment. If they can get past the complexity created by HP's attempt to articulate what they're doing to really understand the products and services being offered by the company, they'd see that it really can deal with many of the most complex IT environments found in the wild today.