We never get tired of having fantastic things to announce – good job, because after the excitement of last week’s SMI 2011 announcement, we have another major feather to stick in our collective, metaphorical cap.

After a period of extensive testing, the folks at HP Software have bestowed upon SMI 2011 the first ever ITSM Product Quality Certification.

For us, this is huge news.

It means that our product, which is only for HP users, has proved itself to HP, and that the HP people are happy to endorse SMI 2011 as a reporting solution for Service Manager. We’ve always had an excellent working relationship with HP, but this represents a significant strengthening of that relationship.

The man responsible for the certification is Jacques Conand, Product Management Director – Service Manager at HP Software. He said:

“We’re excited to renew and strengthen our partnership with Westbury by certifying SMI 2011 for HP Service Manager. We see Westbury SMI 2011 as a key off the shelf solution for HP Service Manager customers. It provides ad-hoc, operational reporting that is powerful, user friendly and flexible. There is a wealth of ITSM information in HP Service Manager and Westbury SMI 2011 is its ideal complement to get at that information.”

We understand HP will be making their own announcement about the certification, and when they do we’ll post the link up here.

Tom

It’s been far too long since we posted anything here, and for that I apologize.

What can I say? We’ve been busy.

This is a bit of a self-promotional blog entry but I hope you’ll forgive us as we don’t do it all that often.

In conjunction with Vivit, the HP user group, we’re hosting a webinar, this Wednesday (January 26th), at 2pm EST all about reporting from HP Service Manager. Specifically, Chris, an HP customer and user of Westbury’s Service Management Intelligence Suite, will co-host a session with Westbury’s David de Swaan Arons, looking at the challenges in reporting from HP Service Manager.

In the session you will hear from Chris about:

- what LA County’s reporting needs were before SMI Suite, and what their reporting needs are now

- what challenges they faced around ITSM reporting

- their key drivers in choosing SMI Suite

- their experiences with SMI Suite so far, and their future plans

And there will also be a brief demo of SMI Suite so you can get an idea, first hand, of what SMI Suite can do.

Westbury SMI Suite is the defacto reporting solution for HP Service Manager. It is an out-of-the-box solution designed specifically for HP Service Manager, HP ServiceCenter and HP Service Desk, and comes complete with more than 100 start-up reports, drag-and-drop functionality and a standard implementation time of just ten days.

To sign up for the session, please email info@westburyusa.com with your name. We will include you on the Webex invitation that will be circulated on Tuesday 25th, and which will include all instruction on how to join the session.

Hope you can attend.

Tom

We recently stumbled across an interesting blog post (http://trianzblog.com/wordpress/?p=203) by Subhankar Das of Trianz that summarized fairly comprehensively the ongoing debate about data integration: do you Extract, Transform and Load data from one data repository to another, or do you Extract, Load and then Transform.

The question is of obvious interest to us because core to the back end of SMI Suite is an ETL utility that takes the data from the Service Manager database, then does a lot of translation to make the nasty array fields, BLOBs and CLOBs readabale, then loads that data into the relational SMI database.

The difference really boils down to where the translation takes place. Under an ELT model, the translation happens once the data has already been loaded into the target repository. And, as Subhankar points out, new technology is making this an increasingly viable option, and is gaining traction in the marketplace.

Check out Subhankar’s full piece for an excellent breakdown of the pros and cons of each approach.

For Westbury it’s an ongoing discussion that will, no doubt, shape our future development initiatives and give us some serious food for thought.

Tom

Now that the holiday hangover has passed, it’s time to start putting some new year’s resolutions into place.

Alongside the usual personal goals – do more of the things that are good for you, do less of the things that are bad for you – you should also be thinking about business goals for the year ahead.

Everywhere, it seems, including this week’s Time magazine, people are agreeing that 2010 was a dreadful year, but 2011 is going to make up for it. Predictions abound regarding the continuing economic recovery – great news for the unemployed and for business owners, and also great news for ITSM.

During the worst times of the recession, “discretionary” spending – things like process improvement initiatives – were put on the backburner. Now there’s a little more budget available, the best way to spend that budget is in improving the way business is conducted.

If you do, next time the bust part of the boom/bust cycle rolls around, and budgets are cut, you’ll be better prepared. If you can demonstrate that your IT department is already running super-efficiently, then there will be less fat to trim. And if your processes are more streamlined, you’ll be better able to cope with staff changes, layoffs and other side-effects of economic instability.

Process improvement can be a little like going to the gym. I don’t really need to convince you that it’s beneficial, but it still requires some willpower to do. Now’s the time, while you’re still full of good intentions! Good luck!

Tom

We were intending to follow up our show opening video with a recap at the end of our time in Barcelona, but our booth ended up being so inundated on the final day that there simply wasn’t chance.

However, that our booth was inundated gives you somewhat of an idea of how the week went compared to our hopes and expectations. We were simply blown away.

We’d never before seen such enthusiasm and interest  – across the board, from customers to partners to HP folk. And the people we spoke to were all confirming the things that we’ve been saying all along – that reporting from HP Service Manager is difficult without a dedicated end-to-end solution.

David vH and I seemed to be on an endless rotation of demos for interested parties and almost everyone I spoke with got it straight away – they understood the value proposition of SMI Suite and seemed genuinely excited about what the solution could do for them, and how it could impact their organization.

If there was any negative from the event, it was getting home. While my flight back to Boston actually landed 40 minutes early, Floris got stuck in Dublin overnight when his first delayed flight meant he missed his connection. He assures me the Guinness helped.

Tom

Not to be outdone by Michael Collins, Jason Kennedy of the University of British Columbia and Vivit stepped in front of our camera at the HP Software Universe show to share his thoughts about Vivit and why it’s so important to have an independent HP user group.

For more information about Vivit and what the organization does, visit (or should that be vivit) their website at www.vivit-worldwide.org. Here’s Jason:

We’ve been working with Vivit for a while now – we set up the Service Management special interest groups, and from time to time you’ll even see Floris in a soccer jersey on the Vivit booth at events like HP Software Universe.

As we’re here at HPSWU in Barcelona – and since our booth is directly opposite the Vivit booth, we decided to sit Michael Collins of xMatters and Vivit down so he could share with you some more information about what Vivit is and what it does.