HP Sees More MSP Demand for Discovery and Dependency Mapping

Hewlett-Packard is experiencing growing demand from managed service providers for its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Inventory Advanced Edition (DDMA). That’s according to Jimmy Augustine, group product manager of Configuration Management Database for HP Software. I caught up with Augustine to find out why more MSPs are suddenly seeing the value of HP’s DDMA solution.

“When we look at it, we see more demand from MSPs because when it comes to visibility there’s no one that needs to see how applications work with servers more than MSPs,” Augustine said. HP started to see a rise in MSP adoption roughly a year ago, around the same time the company released its UCMDB Configuration Manager, though Augustine said he couldn’t say with full confidence that the configuration manager was the main reason for the increased MSP adoption.

HP’s configuration manager is a sort of add-on to its Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) and DDMA software. The HP DDM helps companies see which services and applications depend on one another, and the HP DDMA finds and evaluates IP connected devices. The configuration manager provides analytics on top of all of the other data. And that, according to Augustine, is the most important part of the process. “The power is not in the data, it’s in the intelligence,” Augustine said. “And the configuration manager brings new analytics to the forefront.”

The configuration manager can determine when a network is in and out of compliance, so it’s no surprise that MSPs serving heavily regulated industries like healthcare and finance are interested in the solution.  It can also identify consistency issues within a network, and we all know that no one is more aware of the virtues of consistency than MSPs.

Augustine said the solution is mostly tailored to enterprises, though improvements in the configuration manager’s ease of use is making it more realistic for the mid-market. Augustine also hinted that we can expect more improved simplicity and enhancements over the next 12-18 months, though he didn’t give any specifics.