The Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center 7.0 is HP's first software rollout to result from its acquisition of Mercury Interactive Corp., a deal that was finalized earlier this month.

"For years, HP software did not have products that touched on the closest thing to the CIO's heart -- managing and optimizing the business outcomes of IT," said Zohar Gilad, HP's senior vice president of strategy. HP's new software, however, straddles IT and business interests to help IT officials make decisions that are more aligned with corporate goals, he said.

The software includes an optimization engine that will automatically rank certain IT projects based on predefined criteria such as budget issues or overarching corporate goals, HP said. In addition, the software can define enterprisewide standards and policies used to measure the health of IT projects, said Chad Haftorson, HP's director of product management.

"If all the project managers use different thresholds, you really don't know what red, yellow or green [alerts] mean," he said. "You are comparing apples to oranges."

Anna North, senior analyst in the project management office at Salisbury, N.C.-based grocery store chain Food Lion LLC, said that her organization is planning to implement the new software early next year. About 300 employees now use Version 6.0 of the tool to manage both IT and non-IT-related projects, she said.