HP Network Management Center: Evolving for Cloud Management?

Just about every major network management and systems management software company is evolving its platform for cloud computing. Hewlett-Packard is no exception. Paul Muller, VP of marketing for software at HP, sees three areas where traditional IT management needs to evolve for cloud services management.

They include:

Muller, says 60 percent of all unplanned outages are caused by poor network management. That means financial losses both in terms of the the inability to work and in terms of soft costs like customer dissatisfaction and the loss of referrals.

All of that, Miller says, can be prevented by being able to quickly identify the root cause of a network problem with something called topology-based event correlation, through which IT departments can attribute a network problem to a handful of causes and then focus on those problems. Then comes automation, so that IT technicians don’t have to manually correct every problem.

To that end, Hewlett-Packard has been busy promoting Network Management Center 9.1, which debuted earlier this year. “We focused on developing automated techonology to set policy and ensure compliance of that policy over time,” Muller said.

He clams the solution addresses compliance standards such as HIPAA and HITECH. According to Muller, the solution proactively manages vulnerabilities and stops threats before they become serious problems, captures logs across physical and logical access devices and comes with intrusion prevention.

HP isn’t the only company connecting the dots between cloud management and overall IT management. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c surfaced at Oracle OpenWorld this week. Oracle is positioning the management platform for cloud services providers and managed services providers.