Vivit Worldwide

Vivit is pleased to announce the annual Volunteer of the Year Award for the Americas region. The purpose of the award is to recognize an outstanding and highly motivated volunteer who has helped you as a Vivit member. The winner will be announced and recognized at HP Software Universe Washington, D.C. (the week of June 14).

Colin Fries is a co-leader of the St. Louis chapter of VIVIT. With his help, the STL chapter leadership coordinated four chapter meetings in 2009. In addition, he assisted in planning and coordinating last November’s 2009 VIVIT Hewlett Packard Midwest Regional Users Group meeting.

Colin first joined VIVIT to take advantage of a training discount offered by one of VIVIT’s training partners, Span Technologies. Through Span Technologies, he learned about the basic and advanced features of QuickTest Professional and used this new-found knowledge to improve and expand his organization’s library of automated test scripts. Because VIVIT proved valuable for him and others, Colin decided to be a part of the tradition of excellence and join the ranks of volunteers as an independent, impartial chapter leader to support the HP Software community in St. Louis.

Colin has been in Software Quality Assurance for nearly five years and has been involved with HP’s quality assurance tools for the last two of them. He is currently a Quality Assurance Engineer in ESSENCE Group Holdings' Wellinx Division, where HP tools are used on a daily basis.

In addition to being a co-leader in the St. Louis VIVIT Chapter, Colin is also an active member of the St. Louis Quality Assurance Association. In his free time, he enjoys exercise, music, gardening, scale model aircraft, and watching re-runs of “Arrested Development”. He is married and has a two year old son.

Want to join the active ranks of Vivit volunteers? Click here for some ideas on how you can contribute your time and services or email volunteer@vivit-worldwide.org

Vivit will be conducting deep dive technical implementation and integration training sessions on the afternoon of Monday, June 14, and the morning of Tuesday, June 15, before HP Software Universe kicks off. We have eight four-hour deep dive technical sessions planned. You can sign-up for these courses when you register for HPSU.

Outcomes that matter—now
HP Software Universe 2010 is all about what matters today—to you, your organization, and your business. Join your fellow VIVIT members this June to immerse yourself in techniques, product knowledge, and best practices that will help you cope with your day-to-day challenges, deliver better results, and build your professional skills.

HP is pleased to announce the 5th annual HP Software & Solutions Awards of Excellence for the Americas region. The 2010 awards honor customers using HP software solutions in effective and innovative ways to deliver business value. Let us know what you’re doing to drive the success of your business or organization!

HP Awards of Excellence offer you the opportunity to be recognized for your accomplishments within your own organization, with your business leaders, and among your industry peers. Selected honorees will receive:

Submissions will be accepted until March 15, 2010 and the winners will be notified during the middle of May. All winners will be officially announced at HP Software Universe in Washington, D.C. in June.

Roughly a month ago, I set out a plan to create a new IT Service Management blog as a way to interact not only with our community of ITSM experts but with YOU, our customers. People in positions like director of IT Service Management and others have tough decisions to make around topics such as change and configuration management, lifecycle asset tracking, software compliance, virtualization, migrations, upgrades, ITIL, UCMDB, CMS, and more. So we are launching the ITSM blog. It’s the web companion and direct link into a community of ITSM experts. From YouTube to Facebook, blogging to text messaging, our HP ITSM bloggers will talk about topics like:

We are lucky to have a large team of engaging and experienced ITSM bloggers, David Cannon, Martyn Birchall, David Flesh, Jody Roberts, Chuck Darst, and more. All come from different parts of the ITSM practice and their different perspectives will make for comprehensive and lively commentary.

Click on the following link to join, comment and be part of the HP IT Service Management Community! http://www.hp.com/blogs/ITSM

Do you have a technical article or case study that you would like to share? Click here to submit your article for consideration for publication in the Inforum newsletter.

Regardless of where you have turned, the focus over the past couple of years has been on cost—doing the same or more with fewer resources. Benefits and cost savings associated with IT management process standardization, improvement, and (frequently) consolidation definitely come into play, but these have been balanced by a strong dose of “do it quickly and efficiently.” Reflecting the theme of efficiency, strong consideration has been given to how much is enough versus elegant, more customized processes and supporting technology solutions. And through all of this, how IT shows its value back to the business and users has been more important than ever.

Reflecting the interest in these themes, HP recently hosted a webcast—Pragmatic Approaches to Standardizing IT Service Management—featuring IDC. Click here to listen to the webcast on demand. We also invite you to join in on the conversation at www.hp.com/blogs/itsm. Read more about PRAGMATIC ITIL.

As hints of an improving economy become visible, attention is also coming back to how IT can align with and better support the business going forward. With this, there is a groundswell around pragmatic ITIL, also known as practical ITIL or pragmatic IT Service Management (ITSM). Here are some common trends that HP is seeing and hearing surrounding pragmatic ITIL:

Looking for wins in areas such as change management, self-service catalogs, discovery, knowledge management, service level management—especially combined with reporting and dashboards, better leveraging asset management, and then automating associated tasks. A couple of companion ideas: first, core processes and solutions around incident management are more mature and harder to make substantive improvements around; second, as opposed to all of the areas of potential consideration, there is a smaller set of areas that are easier to realize returns with.
Getting basic processes up and running quickly—this, then, has flavors of less customization and more leverage of best practices. An example is leveraging—as much as possible—the built-in best practices (e.g., implementation accelerators) provided by HP Service Manager. There is still a role for process assessment and more complete design and implementations, and many customers have benefited from the approach. But this is more measured than it would have been two or three years ago, and now typically starts from a built-in, best-practice perspective.
Keeping the destination in mind—a service desk is one of the most interconnected of all IT areas, if not the most significant IT communication hub. As such, it doesn’t stand alone. Beyond common integrations with event or operations management systems, HP is seeing more customers pursuing approaches to sharing management information. With HP, this manifests itself as a federated approach to a configuration management system (CMS) increasingly leveraging discovery and dependency mapping. Another hot topic is automation; subsequently, how IT processes take advantage of task automation for delivering services is also important to keep in mind.

Looking to improve quality and consistency of your agile initiatives? HP application lifecycle management solutions go beyond traditional development management. It’s the agile development solution that delivers quality and value, speed and control, for the whole team and the whole application lifecycle.

Get information on the latest HP agile whitepapers, case studies, webinars, and more at www.hp.com/go/agile.

New research from IDG Research Services reveals that virtualization has reached a tipping point as it moves from development and test environments to mission-critical production environments. Read on to find out how IT can maximize virtualization ROI while preparing for the cloud.

Companies are increasingly using virtualization in mission-critical environments and across multiple platforms. The benefits of virtualization—cost savings, efficiencies, and agility—have given companies incentive to expand adoption of virtualization beyond test environments into production. But production must be managed in a more structured manner. In addition to ensuring availability and performance, IT must consider automation, compliance, and business continuity.

According to the survey, IT has on average only realized 58 percent of expected ROI. The top three barriers to strong ROI haven’t changed since last year. IT is coping with increased management complexity, managing change across physical and virtual devices, and ensuring high availability. One way to boost ROI is to implement common management tools and processes. This allows virtualization specialists to transition tactical tasks to the operations team, freeing them to focus on virtualization adoption and reducing capital expenses. By centralizing management, IT can drive efficiency by eliminating silos.

What’s next for virtualization management? The buzz is all around the private/public cloud, and virtualization is correctly viewed as the first step. It’s critical to get virtualization management (people, process, technology) in place because virtualization provides the framework for cloud computing. Getting virtualization management right sets the stage for a sound cloud strategy and greater ROI.

HP Software Professional Services is pleased to announce a new, redesigned set of Fast Track Data Protector product deployment services. This set of services represents an update and simplification to our existing packaged services for Data Protector, and encompasses the new release of Data Protector Notebook Extension. The result for our customers is a flexible set of packaged Fast Track services for faster implementation while minimizing cost. To learn more visit www.hp.com/go/IMDMprofessionalservices.

HP Quality Center Agile Accelerator can be imported into HP Quality Center 10.0 as a base project to manage both development and testing efforts within the same HP Quality Center project. It comes with pre-built agile user roles and related privileges, pre-defined agile process workflows, configurations, and rules to help you manage projects driven by agile methodology, while allowing you to track progress burn-down, burn-up, and velocity.

Basic Agile Accelerator is free and downloadable from hp.com, is suitable for up to 25 HP Quality Center users, has basic functionality for getting started with agile using Quality Center, and includes a user guide and feature comparison matrix. Advanced Agile Accelerator has additional features and is available through a Professional Services engagement only. For additional information contact AAforQC@hp.com.