HP unveils dashboard tool at French event

12.12.2005
Hewlett-Packard Co. last week unveiled OpenView Dashboard, which is designed to let users quickly create views of complex systems to monitor the health of business services.

The offering was brought out at HP's Software Universe event in Nice, France, along with a new version of OpenView Business Process Insight and other tool revisions.

The dashboard, priced from US$60,000, will start shipping in the first quarter of next year.

Bill Emmett, manager of OpenView advocacy at HP, said the product allows IT managers to create views of systems based on various criteria within a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks.

'Quick and adaptive'

A major U.S.-based financial services firm has been using a prerelease version of the dashboard for a pilot online trading project over the past two months, said the company's vice president of architecture and engineering, who asked not to be identified. The system will be fully deployed next year, he said.

The dashboard has been flexible in providing information about systems used to support online trading, he said. "It's been quick and adaptive," he said, pointing to one case where a view of a process was revamped to reveal other information in only a day -- far less time than it took in the past.

"We support 70 different business units and deal with 30 of them daily, and not all 30 are going to want a plain-vanilla dashboard view that I put out," the vice president said.

For some time, the company's internal developers have built dashboards to get comprehensive views of parts of the business, a process that can take months. "Dashboards are important to us to take that summary in a usable format, but creating them has been one of [our] biggest challenges," he said. "Now we have something with scalability and flexibility."

The financial services company executive said he was initially concerned about the cost of packaged systems, estimating the value of his firm's configuration of the HP dashboard tool at about $250,000.

However, he said, the packaged system was "far more cost-effective," taking only a month to set up. In comparison, it took six months to create dashboards internally.

HP last week also released OpenView Service Desk 5.0 and OpenView Business Process Insight 2.0, which can monitor and report on predefined business processes.