Vivit Worldwide

I can actually speak about the group from first-hand experience since I've been a member of Vivit for several years and just recently signed up to be a chapter co-leader.

Vivit simply put is a user group. It's a group of users, for users. It's a web presence, a virtual Special Interest Group presence, and even a local chapter presence. It's a place where users can come together to share, to learn, and to grow. What kind of users are we talking about? HP Software users. Vivit is not a part of HP though. It is a completely separate non-profit organization of volunteers bringing HP users together for an even better experience with HP Software. It all started with several users thinking it would be great to reach out and meet other users in the same boat, and it's grown into a worldwide network of users.

Curious to know how others are using, installing, upgrading, or administering the same HP tools you use? Vivit can do that. Curious to know the latest product developments and process improvements with HP Software between conferences? Vivit can do that. Want to add some cost-effective deep dive training to your conference experience? Vivit can do that. Looking for a convenient place to get online webinars, white papers, and other related resources or looking for a good way to communicate your needs to HP? Yep, Vivit can do that.

Now you may be thinking, aren't there already a dozen online support communities? How is Vivit any different? Vivit is the only independent HP Software User Group officially recognized by HP. Vivit Special Interest Group leaders produce targeted content and news to members across the globe, and local chapter meetings provide productive face-to-face learning and sharing opportunities that are not easy to come by in this day and age.

At www.vivit-worldwide.org, you can find information on worldwide SIGs of interest to you and check to see if there is a local chapter group that meets in your geographical area. Vivit local chapters can be found in many locations throughout the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific. If there isn't a chapter in your area, why not pull together a few users and start one? You might already be doing that informally and it's not hard to become an official Vivit local chapter - attracting additional users for even more information sharing.

I encourage you to explore Vivit's potential even further and see how your experience with HP Software can grow.

The Leader of the Year awards are given out twice a year (the Americas region in June and the EMEA region in December) and is Vivit’s way of thanking leaders for their outstanding service to the HP Software and Solutions user community.

This year’s winners are Todd DeCapua, Colin Fries, and Rocky Pisto. Their enthusiasm, dedication, passion for quality, and ability to motivate their colleagues to share ideas and best practices has resulted in strong user groups in their local areas. It was from the voices of their local groups that they were nominated.

Leader of the Year Award Winner

Todd DeCapua

Production Quality & Process Group Leader for ING Direct
Leader for the Vivit Delaware Local Users Group

Todd built a solid users group focused on Quality Assurance, Software Testing, Functional Automation, Performance Engineering, and Agile Scrum. His vision and leadership provides a highly engaging and collaborative learning environment for all participants. Along with his Co-Leader, Jim Wootten, his leadership has resulted in sustained growth of a very active local user community.

Leader of the Year Award Winner

Colin Fries

Quality Assurance Engineer for ESSENCE Group Holdings, Inc., Wellinx Division
Leader for the Vivit St. Louis Local Users Group

Colin eagerly took on the Leader role for the St. Louis Local Users Group in 2009. He focused on HP Quality Center and HP Performance Center product offerings while growing the group to over 100 members strong in one year. Colin has been instrumental in increasing the frequency of local events as well as organizing Vivit Regional events. His tireless effort to bring presentations of interest to the St. Louis Local Users Group has also been key to its rapid growth. His Co-Leader is Charles Fleisher.

Most Valuable Player Award Winner

Rocky Pisto

Vice President of Sales, Professional Computers Inc. (PCI)
Leader for several Midwest Local Users Groups, Vivit Board Member, Trusted Advisor to the Board, Nomination Committee Member, Chair of the Membership Committee, and mentor to Chapter Leaders around the world.

As Vice President of Sales for Professional Computers Inc. (PCI), Rocky has been working with HP hardware and software solutions for over 23 years in a channel partner capacity. His success has come from his customer-first strategy, focusing on customer service.

This approach to HP customer service led to Rocky’s involvement with Vivit and his commitment to adding value to the HP Software and Solutions community.

Rocky has been an active member of Vivit for over 15 years and a Leader for the Michigan and Ohio Local Users Groups for the past 11 years, adding Local Users Groups in Indiana and Kentucky in 2009. He also supports the Chicago Local Users Group and recently coordinated the 2010 Midwest Road Show in six cities. Rocky has facilitated at least eight to ten local Vivit events a year since 1999 so that HP Software and Solutions customers can network and share best practices, learn about HP updates, and hear about third party solutions.

In 2004, Rocky took on the role as Vivit Membership Chairman with the responsibility for growing Vivit’s local users group community around the world. Under his leadership and Vivit staff support, the number of chapters has grown from about a dozen to over 45 chapters worldwide with chapter start-ups in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.

Hats off to the other nominees for the Leader of the Year awards:
Steven Kiss, Leader for the Vivit Toronto Local Users Group
Charles Fleisher, Leader for the St. Louis Local Users Group

Travis Depuy and Ryan Palkovic, Techport13
Service Manager 7.x Leveraging Web Services Architectures for Secure, Reliable, Real-Time Application Integrations

Chuck Warner and Ben Vargas, Techport13
HP Service Manager 7.x Advanced Tailoring Concepts and Best Practices

Jake Burman, Pepperweed
HP Operations Orchestrator: Implementation and Integration Strategies

Chris Munro, Greenlight Group
Network Node Manager 8i Implementation Best Practices

Joe Madden, Greenlight Group
HP Network Automation Hints, Tips, and Implementation Best Practices

Aaron Magi, xMatters
Best Practices for Customizing AlarmPoint Integrations with HP Operations Manager and Network Node Manager

Richard Verburg and David Van Heusden, Westbury
A Practical Approach to Operational Reporting from HP Service Manager / HP Service Center

Vivit, the independent, worldwide users group for the HP Software community has closed their elections and announces their new board members and officers.

IT environments-and the task of managing them-are orders of magnitude more complex than they were ten years ago, or even five.

Companies demand new business applications at a rate unimaginable a decade ago. Everything changes-the business requirements, the applications themselves, the underlying technologies. And those technologies-composite applications, virtualization, Agile, outsourcing, cloud service delivery-all trend toward more complexity.

All of this means that IT organizations are being forced to assume new roles. They've gone from acquiring, deploying, and managing systems to partnering with the business to produce business outcomes. And now they need to evolve further-into in-house IT service brokerages that:

This new role requires new IT management solutions. Today's IT management software has to focus on visibility, integration, communication, and collaboration. It has to empower IT staff to know the IT infrastructure, know the sourcing ecosystem, know the technical and business interdependencies among components, and know how everything is performing-from a business perspective, in real time.

The BSM solution that redefines IT operations

HP Business Service Management (BSM) is more than keeping pace. The latest version, HP BSM 9, enables IT operations teams to:

Align with the business
Integrate fully within the team and with other organizations
Automate extensively
Get the full benefits of virtualization and cloud services

How? Let's start with a truly major innovation - the HP BSM Run-time Service Model. It's the industry's first run-time service model that is dynamically and automatically created and maintained. And it's the key to managing IT operations for rapidly changing virtualized and cloud services.

It encompasses the entire physical and virtual service infrastructure, including transactions, applications, servers, storage, and networks, to give IT Ops a complete, integrated view for managing all enterprise services-on company premises, delivered via public or private cloud, or outsourced altogether.

And native BSM discovery technology makes sure the Run-time Model is fully automated and constantly up to date, so that at any given moment, the Ops team understands the most accurate IT service state, even in complex virtualized and cloud environments.

Add to this the automation of the entire event-handling process-from detection to troubleshooting to resolution-and you have proactive, business-focused service management with dramatically reduced costs and lower mean time to repair.

Bottom line? HP Business Service Management 9 is really new, and really different. Contact HP Software & Solutions to learn more about how it can help your IT operations organization step up to the new role it needs to play in today's complex IT environment.

We are excited to announce the release of HP Configuration Management System (CMS) 9, which includes HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) and HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) and is a significant advancement from version 8. Here are some of the highlights clients will get with CMS 9:

HP CMS can perform event-driven discovery for VMware environments when new virtual machines are created or when virtual machines are moved with technologies such as VMware VMotion. It automatically updates these changes into the HP Universal CMDB. This is critical given the dynamic nature of virtualized environments. HP has broadened discovery breadth with new partnerships with Troux, a leading enterprise architecture tool, and Aperture Vista, a leading data-center planning and management tool. These two partners allow HP CMS to decompose services from the business-process layer down to the physical-rack and power-system layer.

HP UCMDB 9 features a new user interface to help organizations with integration, federation, and reconciliation. HP UCMDB 9 federation capability helps companies deliver on the promise of the ITIL version 3.0 definition of a federated configuration management system.

More organizations are turning to Agile to reduce development cycles and improve IT efficiency. Not surprisingly however, many organizations are struggling to deliver on the promise of this new methodology.

Has your organization been successful with Agile, or are you still struggling in chaos? Create a short video to show us your Agile experience-good or bad. All entries will receive a free Agile Crew T-shirt and be entered to win an HP Mini Laptop! Enter now!

Tuesday August 3, 2010
7-8 AM PDT - Los Angeles / 10-11 AM EDT - New York / 3-4 PM WEST - London / 4-5 PM CEST - Berlin / 5-6 PM EEST - Helsinki
Check Your Time Zone

Brought to you by the worldwide HP Service Management Special Interest Group of Vivit. Join Vivit and Ben Vargas of Techport Thirteen, Inc. to discuss the features and enhancements found in the new release of HP Service Manager 9.20. Topics covered will include the key changes within version 9.20, the new HP Release Control (RC) embedded change calendar, Integration Manager (SMIS), consolidating your web tier into a single embedded Release Control instance, and the form upgrade utility to assist in your move to Service Manager 9.20.

Don't miss the upcoming HP webinar series on the fundamentals of testing. You'll hear from customers, partners, and product experts on an array of topics ranging from test data management to load testing to application security.

See how the latest release of HP Service Manager gives you an enterprise-strength service desk proven to handle the volume, scale, performance, and globalization requirements of your business through an ITILv3 service-oriented solution. In this webinar we'll show you a pragmatic approach that can enable you to see results faster, automate change management, integrate your service catalog, and leverage the power of automated discovery and service dependency mapping with HP Service Manager 9.

Considering migrating to Service Manager but are facing challenges such as long implementation times, lack of trained resources and risky deployments? You are not alone. Speakers Erkki Laanaments (Playtech*) and Steven Kiss (Achievo) share their experience of deploying Service Manager on HP's Software-as-a-Service environment. This allowed Playtech to regain their IT focus on service delivery by removing the cost and headaches around onsite application infrastructure and support while leveraging Achievo's Service Manager expertise. This then allowed them to achieve an accelerated time to value for their production deployment.

The Pragmatic Agile series by HP R&D presents key agile concepts and their implementation in HP BTO products development process. This video focuses on HP R&D most-used metrics for development and QA. View it now.

Are you interested in learning more about how organizations-like HP's own development team-are getting better results using Agile?

Join Dave West, senior analyst, Forrester Research, Inc, as he discusses the latest research and trends on modernizing application portfolios and application delivery methods, including Agile. HP R&D then discusses how they have adopted Agile, leveraging HP Quality Center software, to improve QA coverage and market adaptability and achieve numerous application delivery improvements. Register now.

Are you dealing with hundreds of web applications, thousands of vulnerabilities, and only a few security experts? Join Caleb and Kathy as they discuss the best ways to overcome these challenges and to launch and grow an enterprise application security program. You will learn:

During this webcast, Oscar Salazar will demonstrate detailed, step-by-step hacking scenarios that show how hackers can take advantage of even the most mundane-looking developer mistakes to expose security vulnerabilities and take complete control of a remote server. Register now.

Watch this 25 minute on-demand demo to see unique features that allow you to manage all facets of your ITSM environment with emphasis on ITIL v3 service oriented approach. The latest release of HP Service Manager automates and integrates key IT processes such as incident, problem, change and release management. See how you can give users the convenience of self-service, catch unplanned changes, analyze risk and gain ultimate order, efficiency and control. Watch it now.

HP Service Manager is now certified in NINE ITIL v3 processes at the Gold Level by OGC, the creator of ITIL. This is more OGC-certified ITIL processes than any other vendor. See it for yourself.

Listen to this webcast and learn how the Boeing Commercial Aviation Services (CAS) division built a series of best practices and services for all its application support teams to implement performance and availability monitoring services in a secure, scalable, and repeatable way. Hear from Boeing and HP how to apply these best practices and lessons learned to your IT operations to increase your critical application availability and reduce downtime. You'll learn why moving to a proactive IT management model can help enhance your overall application performance management strategy to achieve business alignment and customer satisfaction.

Watch and learn from the experts at featured analyst firm, Gartner, Inc., and HP on solutions that allow IT organizations to detect, prioritize, isolate, diagnose, repair, and prevent problems before users and the business are impacted.

Register to download this recorded web event and you will see and hear how the combination of these three key capabilities can be used with applications in development, testing, and production to quickly isolate, triage and resolve performance issues at the source.

With HP Diagnostics the end results are happy users as well as applications performing as you need them to perform.

Download the new study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of HP and learn how companies are optimizing their productivity and modernizing their methodologies to make application development more efficient and effective. Key findings include: