Posts Tagged ‘HP’

A practical approach to reporting from HP Service Manager

December 15th, 2010

In case you missed out on HP Software Universe 2010 in Barcelona earlier this month, we took the liberty of filming our very own DvH’s presentation entitled “A practical approach to reporting from HP Service Manager.”

The actual session was 45 minutes long, including the demo of SMI Suite, so in this first video you get just the presentation of the slides – David explains the challenges in reporting from Service Manager, and introduces how SMI Suite works and how it addresses those challenges.

Tom

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Video: Marc & Floris on the week ahead

November 30th, 2010

I sat Marc and Floris down during a brief lull in the proceedings at HP Software Universe 2010 to talk about their plans, hopes and expectations for the show.

Here’s what they had to say:

Tom

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First look at the HP Software Universe 2010 event in Barcelona

November 30th, 2010

If you’re on your way to Barcelona, but aren’t quite here yet, you might like to take a look at this, our first look at the event, the conference center and the surrounding city.

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Countdown to Barcelona begins

November 1st, 2010

We’re now approaching the final run-in to HP Software Universe 2010 in Barcelona (November 30th to December 2nd), and we’d like to hear from you about your plans.

- What tracks or events are you most excited about?

- With so much social media available these days, do you plan in advance which sessions to attend, or do you listen to what other attendees are excited about before making up your mind?

- What’s more important; the things you learn at the track sessions or the things you learn by networking at the event?

- Which exhibition vendor is going to have the best giveaways?

Comment below or tweet at us (@westbury_it).

Tom

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Human-centric BI & The Wall

October 28th, 2010

For information to be useful, we must explore it, analyze it, communicate it, monitor it, and use it to predict the future, but the BI industry’s attempts to support these activities with few exceptions have been tragically comical.

The technology-centric, engineering-oriented perspective and skill set that has allowed the industry to build an information infrastructure is not what’s needed to support data sense-making. To use the data that we’ve amassed, a human-centric, design-oriented perspective and skill set is needed. All of the traditional BI software vendors and most of the industry’s thought leaders are stuck on the left side of the wall.

The software vendors that are providing effective data sense-making solutions—those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall—have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace. Highlights from http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=820

And at the same time we enable effective data sense-making by providing choices of data being cleaned, transformed and integrated when that’s absolutely necessary to increase the possibilities of exploring and analyzing.

With Westbury there’s no wall!

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HP Service Manager 9.20

June 30th, 2010

With the release of HP Service Manager 9.20, HP not only released an update for Service Manager but also an alignment in version numbering with the BTO Suite. So it is release 7.20 renumbered. They did a tremendous job in improving the user interface by releasing an updated web user interface. They improved quality and performance on both the client and server side. HP improved the integration capabilities with the BTO suite on CLIP & CCRM, KM and change. Now they support the BTO incident data model.

Service Manager offers dashboards that can give you a real time overview of possible SLA breaches, open incidents by service, priority or location. This gives management a clear overview on how it is doing right now.

SMI Suite offers you a service management reporting solution that extends this dashboard feature in such a way that reports can be shared with others with a user friendly intuitive interface with drag and drop functionality. They can be incorporated in documents, PowerPoint presentations and even can be refreshed on the fly. Additionally one can drill down to the details of the underlying records a report is based on. To avoid heavy queries on the database during working hours, SMI Suite offers automatic scheduling and distribution of reports.

Luc

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HP Software Universe has – like the World Cup – kicked off

June 14th, 2010

HP Software Universe is kicking off, and six of us from Westbury are currently in Washington DC for the show.

As I type, David vH, Richard and David dSA are hosting a training session (in association with Vivit, the official HP user group) around reporting for HP Service Manager and HP ServiceCenter.

Tomorrow the show proper kicks off and we’ll be manning booth 409 in the exhibition hall – make sure you stop by and say hello.

Throughout this week I’ll be blogging – including some video blogging if I can get my laptop to play nice  – and we’ll be tweeting more than than Ashton Kutcher, Diddy and Stephen Fry put together. Watch this space!

Tom

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The brains behind HP Service Manager

May 4th, 2010

While studying massage I thought of some comparisons with my work at Westbury [bear with him, this is going somewhere interesting - Westblog Ed].

In the world of massage, anatomy is a very important part. Anatomy is the biological science concerned with the structure of the human body, including the human bones, muscles, ligaments and other structures. The most common functions are to hold the body together and to make it possible to move the body. The processes of how every structure of the body works together are very complex. Luckily we have a brain that’s taking care of all the complexity and a nervous system that’s taking care of all kind of communication between all structures. This saves us a lot of energy.

When I look at the HP ServiceCenter / Service Manager (SC/SM) database I see a similarity in the complexity. Maybe not that complex but when you think of reporting on the SC/SM database you need high skilled people (sort of like surgeons) to make reports and even then it’s not always possible to report on the subject you want to report on.

Westbury has created the ‘brain’ of SC/SM. This ‘brain’ is taking care of organizing the data from the SC/SM database into a relational database with a standard structure so you can easily report on it. Furthermore the ‘brain’ is doing all kind off calculations to enhance the ease of reporting. The ‘brain’ also contains a universe layer on top of the structured database. Next to the ‘brain’ Westbury created a nervous system. This nervous system is taking care of informing the right people at the right time by scheduling and publishing the reports.

And like the real brain, Westbury’s ‘brain’ and ‘nervous system’ can save companies that want to report on SC/SM a lot of energy, along with time and money.

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Around the interwebs: the HP IT Service Management blog

April 22nd, 2010

You’d maybe think we’d have cottoned on to this one a little earlier, what with our relationship to HP and all, but…. we didn’t.

Anyway, the news is that HP has a great blog all about IT Service Management, which features a few different contributors and a nice mix of news items, opinion pieces, tips and tricks and so forth.

The blog seems pretty active – three entries on Tuesday alone. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

On a vaguely related note; we’re increasingly using Twitter (I know, I know… sooo 2009!) as a means of opening up communication channels with partners, ITSM experts, potential customers and other interested parties. So please follow us @westbury_it and retweet anything we mention that piques your interest.

Tom

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Self Service Reporting!

April 20th, 2010

Working on our new web site really triggered me to focus hard on the benefits of SMI Suite, our reporting solution for HP Service Manager/ServiceCenter.

Our main goal with the new site is to make sure that the home page immediately makes clear what SMI Suite does and how it will help our customers. Result of three months of brainstorming and editing is the following intro block that will be prominent on our home page:

Westbury’s SMI suite is the self service reporting solution for HP Service Manager

Do you like it? Is it unambiguous?

The main benefit to extract from this sentence is “self service reporting”. SMI Suite will put the power of reporting in the hands of the power users, the ones really in need of the reports. With SMI suite there is no dependency on internal or external BI specialists, no need for technical, scripting knowledge or endless sessions explaining the reporting requirements to whoever will create them for you. SMI suite will do all the heavy lifting of extracting the data from the HP SM database for you and load it into our own SMI database. The Business Objects layer we created on top of our SMI DB will allow you  – by just dragging and dropping the objects  – to build your reports and distribute them to those who requested them.

Check out our Test Drive to experience the ease of use of SMI suite yourselves: http://westbury-it.com/solutions/service-management-intelligence-suite/smi-suite-test-drive

The new web site will be up before the HP Universe in Washington DC this June. This means that we will have several more brainstorm and editing sessions over the content and the layout of the web site. Although it will probably never be perfect, the main objective is to be absolutely clear about what we are doing and how it will help our customers. Once the web site has been launched I will definitely check with you all if we have accomplished this goal.

Floris

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