HP Revamps Information Management Offerings

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard updated both its products/service package and its marketing message April 5 in the category of information-management software and services.

Actually, there is more news at this time in the way the company is presenting its software and services to potential buyers than the launch of any new products themselves. But the positioning of existing products to new and emerging markets is as important as anything else in this business.

HP—aiming first at connecting those hard-to-move, siloed data containers that are prevalent in so many IT systems—is unifying its data center management products in a holistic approach to information management. The initiative now sits under the company’s new Instant-On Enterprise marketing umbrella.

HPO defines an Instant-On Enterprise as one that embeds business intelligence into everything it does to bring a transparent, real-time view of information across the organization. This information is then made available to everybody in the value chain—to service customers, employees, partners, distributors and contractors—to get them what they need instantly.

Getting the silos, and the people who run them, to cooperate is the ideal, of course, but it’s much all easier said than done.

Not Exactly Master Data Management

HP is stopping short of calling this a new way to do master data management. It turns out the company doesn’t want that image—one that has long been misunderstood—clouding its own initiative.

Master data management, or MDM, is a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data entities of an organization—some of which may be reference data). MDM has the objective of providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information.

For more, read the eWEEK article: HP Fine-Tunes Its Information Management Products, Services.