Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

New Release: SMI Suite version 7.206

March 8th, 2010

The latest release of Westbury’s SMI Suite is now available, introducing exciting features that will serve our rapidly expanding customer base.

Building tomorrow’s product requires listening to the market. And with this version, Westbury’s product team has done just that. Process owners, for example, will find their quest for process optimization finally answered with this version’s ability to automatically analyze and identify inconsistent use of the processes implemented in HP ServiceCenter or HP Service Manager.  The latest version furthermore offers full support for HP ServiceCenter/Service Manager environments that rely on the IBM DB2 database platform.

Continuing to work in tandem with our customers, we are looking forward to further enhance SMI Suite in upcoming versions.

The Westbury Product Team

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Vivit HP Service Management SIG update

March 8th, 2010

Latest news from the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group

HP Service Management at the HP Universe 2010 in Washington DC:

If you’re planning on attending the HP Universe event, there are several activities and sessions taking place that might be of interest to you

1) Vivit training sessions

There are two special Vivit training sessions taking place:

- The first is called ” A practical approach to operational reporting from HP Service Manager and HP Service Center” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/trainingandcert.html#4) and takes place Monday afternoon from 1pm to 5pm.

- The second is called “HP Service Manager advanced tailoring concepts and best practices” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/trainingandcert.html#5) and takes place Tuesday morning 8am – 12pm.

2) HP Roundtable session on Service Management (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/roundtables.html#6)

3) Track Sessions – HP Service Manager falls under the umbrellas of both “HP Lifecycle Management” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/tracks.html#2) and “Pragmatic IT Service Management” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/tracks.html#15)

Aside from HP Universe there are several other Vivit events coming up with a focus on Service Manager:

1) The Chicago chapter is hosting an ITSM User Group (https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=4&chaptereventid=538), taking place at the DoubleTree, Downers Grove, IL, on 10th March from 10am – 3pm

2) The Colorado chapter’s winter meeting (https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=117&chaptereventid=536) includes sessions on HP’s ITSM roadmap for 2010 and reducing the cost and improving service levels of your help desk. The meeting takes place on March 5th, from 9am to 3pm at Denver Water on 12th Avenue in Denver.

3) The Greater Toronto chapter’s 8th Vivit GTA meeting on 9th March (8:30am to 12pm at HP Canada in Mississauga) will include a presentation by Robert Lee of Achievo on migrating to SM7, and a session on responding more quickly to incidents, by HP’s John Moore.

In other news:

1) Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk report (https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_content.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-85^12473_4000_100__) pits Service Manager against its competitors

2) HP has released a new video focusing on ITSM: http://h30423.www3.hp.com/index.jsp?fr_story=6d59bb1b1c901defc095321a2717b0b9a87189d6&rf=bm

Other resources:

The HP Service Management SIG pages on the Vivit site (http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=content&contentid=1094&chapterid=186) includes a list of forums (or fora for those of you who had the benefit of a classical education) where you can discuss, ask and answer anything about HP Service Manager.

See you at HP Universe 2010!

Floris

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Self Service Reporting training at HP Universe

March 3rd, 2010

If you are thinking about attending the HP Universe 2010 in Washington DC, please find below an other reason why you should!

Westbury will perform a hands-on training for all HP ServiceCenter or HP Service Manager people working on reporting, regardless of the BI tool you are using.

Please register for the event and training at:

https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/index.html

A practical approach to operational reporting from HP Service Manager and HP Service Center
(Monday afternoon) 1pm – 5pm

Attend this class and hear from Richard Verburg and David Van Heusden about the HP Service Manager reporting options. You’ll also gain practical insight into how you can access data from HP Service Manager. Specific topics will include:

  • The importance of ITSM reporting from HP Service Manager, and the need for an iterative approach
  • Steps involved in the reporting process, from requirements gathering to the distribution of completed reports
  • HP Service Manager reporting options, from dashboards to generic reporting technologies to point solutions
  • Data storage and access
  • HP Service Manager data challenges such as array fields (e.g. clocks, journals), CLOBS and BLOBS
  • Hands-on exercises for defining, building, and running reports
  • Tips on how and where to zoom into reports for added value

Floris

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Rubik solutions and Westbury join forces

January 22nd, 2010

It’s only once in a while we issue a press release, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share it with you in all its glory:

Rubik solutions and Westbury join forces in delivering high quality IT Service Management solutions in the Benelux and Nordics region.
Rubik Solutions and Westbury have signed an agreement to further strengthen their partnership in delivering high quality IT Service Management solutions and services in the Benelux and Nordic Region.

As part of the agreement , Rubik will offer its broad portfolio of services based on the HP Software solutions, including the migration to HP Service Manager, to the Westbury customers running HP Service Desk software.


Over the past years, Rubik solutions and Westbury have cooperated on many occasions, sharing both knowledge and experience. In addition to offering its proven expertise to Westbury’s customers, Rubik Solutions will actively promote and sell Westbury’s Service Management Intelligence Suite (SMI Suite).


“Rubik Solutions is a highly skilled and knowledgeable partner with years of IT Service Management expertise. We have full confidence that they will perform the migrations to the complete satisfaction of our customers. In addition, this partnership enables us to exploit the market for SMI Suite to its full potential in both the Benelux and Nordics region ”, says Floris Verschoor, CEO of Westbury.

“I am happy both Rubik and Westbury can continue to focus and build our core businesses, and this agreement helps us both in doing just that. It is a clear win-win situation”, says Erik Larsen, CEO of Rubik Solutions. “By including the operational reporting capabilities of Westbury SMI Suite we are able to complement our end to end Service Management solution and help our customers in maximizing the efficiency of their Service Management processes.”
About Rubik
Rubik Solutions is a leading provider of solutions for enterprise architecture and IT management in the Nordics and Benelux. Rubik has a solid background in delivering solutions to large and medium enterprises in different industries. The company offers solutions for IT management, project and portfolio management tools and solutions for enterprise architecture and strategic IT planning.

Additionally Rubik develops and markets its own Information Consolidation Manager software, an application that collects and combines data from various data sources and tailors this data for HP Service Manager and for the uCMDB (universal configuration management database). Rubik Solutions is headquartered in Oslo, and has 12 branch offices in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and Belgium. The company has 130 employees.
About Westbury
The Westbury advantage.
Westbury Service Management Intelligence empowers organizations to prove IT’s value to the business.

Our Service Management Intelligence Suite helps you gain Insight, Improve quality of delivered services and Impress your customers. Established in 1998, Westbury has offices near Amsterdam (NL) and in Cambridge (MA,USA) servicing mid & enterprise size customers. The global team of highly professional Service Management Intelligence experts combines over a decade of ITSM and Business Intelligence expertise. Westbury is an HP Software Platinum Business Partner, honored with multiple achievement awards. Westbury is founder of Service Management Intelligence.

Press contact:
Rubik Solutions, Erik Larsen
CEO +47 91 75 52 63
Rubik Solutions, Pieter Spilling
Corporate Marketing Manager +47 93 05 57 31, psp@rubiksolutions.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.


Westbury, Suzanne Glorie
Marketing Manager +31-646217033, suzanne.glorie@westbury-it.com

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Taking a special interest

December 10th, 2009

Usually when someone tells you they’re involved with a “special interest group”, all sorts of horrific possibilities spring to mind and you may begin to fear your special interest friend is involved with some shady goings on. At the very least you assume they’ve become a model railway enthusiast.

It is therefore with some trepidation that I announce that Westbury has started its very own special interest group… and hastily clarify that it’s the HP Service Manage Special Interest Group (SIG) in conjunction with Vivit, the HP user group. Not a single narrow-gauge hopper wagon in sight.

vivitlogoVivit (http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/) is a  non-profit corporation founded in 1993 (as OpenView Forum) by customers of Hewlett-Packard’s Software products to represent the interests of HP Software customers, developers, and partners world-wide. It operates through a network of local chapters that bring together users of HP’s wide variety of products into regional groups, and through Special Interest Groups, which are for Vivit members worldwide, but which focus on specific areas of interest.

The HP Service Manager SIG  is a new group set up, by Westbury, to act as an information hub for all users of HP Service Manager, partners involved with Service Manager and anyone thinking about migrating to Service Manager. Although the SIG it is not home to experts on Service Manager, it is a place where you can be connected to those experts in just one click.

The website for the SIG is here: http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?action=chapter&chapterid=186 and new members are welcomed with open arms.

We put together a little video to show everyone what the SIG is all about:

Tom

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More details about Hamburg emerge

December 2nd, 2009

A few weeks ago we confirmed that Westbury will have a presence at the HP Software Universe event in Hamburg on 16th- 18th December, and I can now flesh out a few details for interested parties.

Westbury’s booth will be number C1:

exhibition_floorplan

(that we’ve been put at a point on the floor pretty much diametrically opposite the beer bar is surely no mistake on the part of the organizers.)

The exhibition floor will be open from 11:00am on Wednesday 16th, and from 9:30am on Thursday and Friday (17th & 18th).

This year there are also some pretty interesting sessions going on. Our highlights are:

Thursday

09:00-09:45 – The secrets behind change, config and release management
10:00-10:45 – Global Service Management featuring Electrolux and Steria
11:45-12:30 – ICM – Information Consolidation ManagerAutomated CMDB management
16:30-17:15 – Achieving IT Operational Excellence with HP Service Manager 7!

Friday

09:00-09:45 – End-to-End virtual service management: the key to maximizing
virtualization ROI
10:00-10:45 – Service Manager Tailoring Tips and Tricks
11:45-12:30 – Integrated approach to monitoring and the challenges encountered
and overcome

See you there!
Tom

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Identifying good design

November 30th, 2009

I can’t remember if I’ve already mentioned it, but we’re doing somewhat of an overhaul of our marketing strategy here at Westbury, and at some point in the not too distant future we’ll be making some changes to the look and feel of our website.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at other people’s websites and trying to figure out what makes for good design. How do you tread the line between style and substance? Usability and aesthetics?

I thought I’d use the blog to share some of the sites that I’ve been most impressed with, and I’m hoping you’ll chip in with some comments and new suggestions.

General sites

thebestdesignsdotcomthebestdesigns.com is a great site all about great sites. Not only does it look great, but it’s functional and brings together examples of the best in web design currently out there.

I like the chocolate / blue color scheme for obvious reasons, but I also like the simplicity of their nav and the three column layout.

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thepostfamilydotcomthepostfamily.com is the website for some sort of creative agency (unsurprisingly, most of the sites listed on thebestdesigns.com belong to web design companies) and demonstrates two hot trends in web design right now; magazine layout and use of white space.

Some colleagues I polled hated the magazine layout, mainly – I think – because it seemed inappropriate for a B2B website to want to look like a magazine. So what about the best looking, but still very B2B sites?

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B2B Sites

fourfatherdotcomfourfather.com is a pleasure to look at. Clean, straightforward, uncluttered, pretty. Fourfather is a digital marketing agency, and this site is the perfect advertisement for their abilities.

But Westbury isn’t an agency, so we should probably be trying to achieve something different with our website. What about other companies operating in similar areas to Westbury? What do their sites look like?

-

ITSM Sites

numarasoftwaredotcomnumarasoftware.com is nice to look at, but has some interesting functionality going on, all revolving around the flash-esque central panel which displays different pieces of information based on either what you say you’re interested in, or what you say your role is.

Unlike a lot of the other sites I’ve mentioned, Numara uses a lot of darker colors – and stands out as a result.

-

So the question remains, which – if any – of these websites should be the inspiration for a future westbury-it.com makeover?

Tom

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Zadok The Priest… or is it Zorba The Greek?

November 18th, 2009

Whenever anyone talks about blowing their own trumpet, little is mentioned of the tune that they play. I’d like to think that if I owned a trumpet and were, myself, to blow it, I’d play Zadok The Priest – one of the four Coronation Anthems that Handel composed for the coronation of George II in 1727, and that I only know about because they used it as the theme music for the Champions League. Blowing one’s own trumpet should be all pomp and circumstance, with a rousing, anthemic soundtrack.

As it happens, this entry is all about Westbury blowing our own trumpet, so head on over to youtube for a spot of Zadok The Priest. Or Zorba The Greek if you’d prefer. And if either of those don’t do it for you, how’s about the theme from Super Mario Bros on an 11-string bass?

The reason that we’re blowing our own trumpet is this very blog. We realized it had been six months since we launched the blog, and wanted to send an email around the Westbury campus updating everyone on how we’d done.

Trouble is that it turns out we’d done rather better than expected and so we decided we should show off even more – hence this entry.

In fact, since May Westblog has had:

  • 11 contributing bloggers, 2 of whom don’t even work for Westbury
  • 30 entries, across 6 categories, with 143 different tags

Actually that’s 31 if you count this one.

Also since August (when we started doing some Google Analytics on the site), Westblog has had:

  • 646 unique visitors, with a peak of 25 in one day – on two separate occasions
  • 1,576 page views, with a high of 58 on October 5th

All of which ignores those of you who never visit the site but still read the posts from the RSS feed.

I think the stats speak for themselves and hopefully it means that we’re continuing to fill this blog with interesting, enlightening material (apart from this entry which is just shameless self-promotion with some youtube links thrown in to distract you) that you genuinely want to read.

We hope you spread the word to your friends, colleagues and competitors and I hope I can write another entry in May 2010 with even better numbers

Tom

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“Take it Russ….. Fa-la-la-la-laaaa…la-la-la-la!”

November 9th, 2009

Decorating the tree… crying like a girl at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life… deciding that drinking brandy, port or sherry is a good idea… installing this year’s
Westbury Happy Holidays screensaver…

These things are all that make up a traditional holiday season and have done for more years than you care to remember. Except the
Westbury screensaver thing which has only been going for two years now, but traditions must start somewhere, must they not?

You can DOWNLOAD THE SCREENSAVER HERE and it’s an easy self-installing executable. And it looks pretty. In fact, our CEO was so taken with last year’s version that he refused to take it down after Christmas was over, and was only prompted to change it when he saw this year’s version last week.

And I know it’s only mid-November, but if we waited until closer to Christmas to release it you’d have already installed someone else’s holiday screensaver and we’d have missed the boat. If you need any help getting into festive spirit, I suggest you watch this:

Tom

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Ich bin ein Hamburger

October 27th, 2009

su2009_teaser_mainI hear Hamburg is lovely in December (although I personally prefer Munich in September), so we’ve decided to sponsor the HP Software Universe event taking place in that very city – at the Congress Centre Hamburg, no less – December 16th to 18th of this year.

Details aren’t yet finalized – and we’ll have plenty more to say on the subject between now and then – but suffice to say we’ll be sending a few of our best people in that direction to man a booth and network their little socks off. We’re particularly looking forward to another chance to meet up with customers past and present, partners, HP folk and anyone else who might be interested in talking to us.

Post a comment if you’re planning to attend the event and stayed tuned for more details as and when they become available. In the meantime, watch this introductory video from Steen Lomholt-Thomsen, VP of HP Software & Solutions, EMEA:

Tom

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