HP held it's annual HP Software Universe tradeshow at the wonderful Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. It was well attended and HP did a spot-on job organizing it. They showcased their entire business and change/process management product suite, and some exciting new releases. They had their partners showcasing their capabilities, and guess what? Solidcore was the "talk of the town" (Verbatim from HP employees and HP customers). Here's the longer version… HP showcased all of their products, but two of them stole the limelight: The Univeral CMDB was positioned as the lifeline of any other HP product. It's a crystal ball which is touted to have all the answers (Well… at least with a little help from their super-partner Solidcore). Anyone from a CIO to a system admin can query the Universal CMDB to understand the state of their IT infrastructure. All the other HP products have been aligned to rely on the information the CMDB supplies to make them deliver increased value. The flagship consumer of information from the Universal CMDB is the HP Release Control product. Release Control is a tool which simplifies the life of the CAB. What's a CAB? CAB stands for "Change Approval Board." These are people who spend tons of time, money, and other resources deciding whether a change request should be approved or not. These are also the people who are accountable if the change they approved brings down a mission-critical business application. SOX auditors often give them a hard time too, demanding proof the exact change was implemented the way it was supposed to. With Release Control, the CAB gets to make an informed decision on risk of a change, thanks to the info from the uCMDB. They also get to reconcile actual changes with their respective change requests, again thanks to the info from the uCMDB. Voila! You are now SOX compliant. So all this is great, but there's got to be a catch, right? Kinda… Release Control will be a panacea for the CAB only as long as the uCMDB always has comprehensive, up-to-date information. Today the uCMDB is populated with information which is updated in periodic intervals, and at any given time, the information is not guaranteed to be the latest. Release Control, which relies on this info, functions to a good extent but does not deliver the true value it is capable of. That’s where Solidcore swoops in to the rescue! Solidcore specializes in tracking change in real-time, especially unwanted change. Whenever unreliable Mr. John Doe doesn't follow the change policy and sneaks in a change to a critical server without filing a change ticket, Solidcore knows about it the very instant and sounds the alarm. Solidcore also points the finger at Mr.Doe and gets him into a lot of trouble. The uCMDB has been designed with a great amount of flexibility to suck in info from external third party data repositories. They call this "federation." Solidcore designed a uCMDB federation adapter to look into its real-time, data-rich change history log. And now with this new info, the uCMDB packs a good punch. This is what got a lot of people excited, because with a combination of HP and Solidcore you've got a silver bullet (Well… my metaphors tend to exaggerate, but you get the picture). HP customers are saying things like… “You fill a niche and provide real tight closed loop on change filling all the gaps that CMDB and RC have.” “This is the missing piece in Release Control risk calculation”. “This is the best news I have got this week.” The HP product team was saying things like… “All these other booths have products which are good-to-have, but you guys are a MUST.” “Lets figure out how to leverage your info for the other HP products” The flamboyance of Vegas coupled with kudos from customers made Solidcore a happy camper :) More info at http://www.solidcore.com/hp/. Swaroop Sayeram
Product Manager
swaroop@solidcore.com
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