Mark Olesen, head of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business unit within the company’s software division, said the service desk offering will follow the merger of HP’s OpenView Service Desk software with the Service Center package from Mercury Interactive, acquired by HP for $4.5bn in July last year.
The merger of the two products takes place in the next release, to be called Service Management Center, said Olesen, adding that the SaaS offering will follow but declining to specify the timeframe.
The exec, who himself came to HP with the Mercury buy, recalled that SOA governance also came from that acquisition. Mercury had bought Systinet, but we hadn’t had time to ‘SaaSize’ it prior to our acquisition by HP.
He explained that the technical process behind ‘SaaSization’ fundamentally entails making the software available over the internet, though there is clearly also the issue of enabling shared or multi-tenancy. Beyond these concrete plans, Olesen said HP is looking at the possibility of SaaS offerings of both the SPI Dynamics and Opsware technologies the Palo Alto, California-based acquired in mid-year.
There are, of course, parts of the expanding HP software portfolio that are not suited to SaaS offerings, and in those cases, said Olesen, his business unit is looking at integration so as to add a SaaS dimension. He cited OpenView Network Node Manager, which is the cornerstone of HP’s network management framework.
It deploys agents around a company’s network to monitor it for purposes of problem and incident management, he began. We could offer the correlation and reporting functions as a service as part of the [Mercury] product monitoring service, he explained.
