HP Universe

Tuesday - June 17, 2008

6:30 a.m. -  Updated the site and wanted to throw this out before I got started today.  I hope you all are enjoying the coverage. I would love to hear comments, questions, or concerns. No law suits, please....

07:30 a.m. - Tim Chase, myself, and our buddy SHARK71 hit a buffet that we found INSIDE the Palazzo. Not as big as the one at the Mirage, but will keep me going for a couple of hours. Where are the snack tables located at the conference?

08:30 a.m. - Attended the session on "Riding the SaaS Wave..." by Tim Van Ash (HP). Software as a Service is gaining momentum and getting a lot of mention at the conference already. About half of the partners surveyed yesterday said they either have or plan to have SaaS as part of their service offerings in the near future. My old boss David Torrisi is heading up this for the US, having just moved back from handling the UK side for the last several years. This is his department and I want to know more about it. For those of you who do not know David, he is a great guy. I have not seen him in over 4 years, and I have pictures of us as a conference in 1999. He looks like he has spent the last 9 years in a cryogenic chamber because he has not aged one minute. He looks exactly the same. While I have turned in an older, bigger, cream puff who can't walk across the street to the Mirage without being winded. When you get tired walking to the buffet, it's time to be concerned.

HP is now launching the first set of SaaS offerings that are available for partners to resell. I call this "pay as you go", and this model has been available in a slightly different way in the past from Mercury. I have personally seen this work successfully with Business Availability Center, where the customer does not need to install all of the software and purchase additional server hardware. The goal that HP is shooting for with their SaaS software offerings is to help businesses get what they need when there is not a flexible or predictable budget, but they want to get a quick 24X7 access to things like Operations Center when they do get the budget. Some great questions were raised in the presentation, especially around how this applies to partners tapping into and reselling it. Just so we're on the same page, we're talking about using HP's back end infrastructure for doing this, not a Partner creating a back end for it themselves. HP provides the software "by the drink", but the services are still in the domain of the Partner. HP is announcing the availability of SaaS for Quality Center, Performance Center, and Business Availability Center beginning today. In Q4 of 2008, the plan is to add Service Manager, Change Control Manager, Project & Portfolio Management Center, and DDM & Universal CMDB. There will be a webinar in the next few weeks about it all. Obviously, there will be a lot of questions around how this is being implemented (Virtual Machines or dedicated hardware, what about security, how is maintenance and support handled, etc), so look for some answers over the next several days.

10:30 a.m - Tim and I decided not to attend the next set of presentations and talk with Tamara Cowan (AVNET) and Deanne Phillips (Applimation). Applimation have an interesting product that is used to scramble/obfuscate data in test environments and their latest version will integrate with Quality Center and work well with the Business Process Testing module throught API in QC (OTA).  I know several clients who could really use thia dn could see this being used in SAP and packaged applications like that. After this, Tim and I spent a few minutes determining which tracks we want to attend later today. We are going to split up and each take notes on the sessions individually. The main stage presentations begin at 1:00 p.m. so we'l l need to hit another place to eat to hold us over through that.

Tamara Cowan (Mike Smidt in the background with his back to the camera - he is so shy)


Deanne Phillips

01:00 p.m. - The mainstage is on! As we entered the area we noticed several "actors" dressed up like business people and painted faces. They played out a metaphor as things that hamper businnesses from succeeding. As the music built to a climax, the actors turned into acrobats and they acted out the metaphor with a man trying to go across a tight rope while blindfolded. Half way through, some new people jumped out of the bottom of the stage with orange shirts and took down the original guys dressed in black and white (I guess the "evil" ones). A choreagraphed "fight" ensured and the good guys won (of course).

 I have a small except on a poor video quality thing I uploaded to Youtube available below:

David Gee welcomed the audience and gave us a run down of todays mainstage presentation. He introduced Thomas Hogan.  Tom gave us a lot of statistics that describes a shift to a different way of thinking about IT and t new generation of people who are "hip" to technology. At the same time, applications are getting more complex, there is more information out there than ever and it is all being captured. He said, "Who cares? If there is one message i could leave you with today...it is that we do, HP does."  The most important metric for IT is how much value it is bringing. HP chose to measure value by innovation. 40% of IT spend is on new applications and projects, 60% is on keeping the lights on. As our "professional summarizer" at the partner summit said, "these companies need some better lightbulbs". One of the things I really appreciated from Tom was the open admission that HP dropped the ball on support for Mercury customers. He got a round of applause. He aknowledged the issue and promised better things out of them from this point on.

David Gee and Thomas Hogan

Next up was Mark Hurd (HP CEO), who had an interactive chat session with the group through the HP Software chat line. He answered the questions sent to him from the crowd.

Jeffrey Ma (the guy who the movie "21" was based) discussed how numbers don't lie. He even gave a short demonstration on how he and his team used strategy and teamwork to win at blackjack. He played a few clips from the movies. I'm not a gambler, but I think of of the attendees were taking notes so they could practice it out in the casinos later.

Mark Hurd


Jeffrey Ma

I realize that this is an extreme summary of what went on, but most of this was not central to performance testing and was very high level. I am sure all the standard IT web sites will report on all this stuff. If it ain't LoadRunner or Performance Center, or some cool picture of the receptions ... :) we probably won't report on it. Main stage is done now. Time to get into the nitty gritty in the products....

Tim was ready to move it along

03:30 p.m. - I attended the SAP track session titled, "Overcoming HP LoadRunner/VUGen scripting challenges with SAP Web Dynpro client" by Tom Pearson (Intel Corp. Performance Analyst). I met Christian Paulus (HP Director of Marketing for SAP Direct and SAP Software).

This was intended to be a more technical session.  It was very to the point and went over exactly what the title had described. Tom introduced me to a product called HTTP Watch that you can check out here:

http://httpwatch.com/

Although I have not had the pleasure of scripting with this specific protocol, it seems the correlation studio in VUGen to build rules as you define specific correlated values is the key to keeping your projects on time. I will definitely be saving that soft copy of the presentation in my back pocket in case I ever need it. Thanks Tom. On a side note, I could not get a good photo from the back of the room and I approached Tom about taking a closer picture (lighting not all that great for pictures). He thought I was a recruiter. HAH! No offense taken, Tom, but that's not how we roll. :)

While I was at the presentation, I got to hang out with Howard Jessee (CHEP) who worked with me at CommerceQuest back in the day (1999). I believe I taught my very first LoadRunner class to Howard and some of the other new employees of the company at that time. I hope I have gotten better over the years. Also sitting in front of me was Jeremie Dowdrick (Convergys Performance Engineer). I have not seen him since we hosted a Mercury User Group in Jacksonville, Florida back in 2005. It was good to see both of the guys again.

Tim is attending "Quality Management and Process Standardization". I will add his notes in an update later.

04:45 p.m. - I attended the session titled, "HP Quality Center: Center of Excellence" by Robert Goldstein (Wachovia, VP of Quality). This was a very well done presentation and I see a familiar trend in establishing a good CoE around Quality Center:

1. An Enterprise level Template - which is the starting point for ALL projects
2. Special fields that need modifications goes through a formal process.
3. Changes, standards, and process around defects, test cases, etc... is centrally controlled.

Customization of workflow is only done by an authorized person, but they are flexible enough to make changes when needed. This flexibility is key to a CoE. You don't want to make process the stumbling block for getting work done.

Another interesting thing about Wachovia and their QC CoE is that they have successfully moved over to a charge back model and have detailed information to use for billing back to their Domains (think line of business). They just got this in place in the last year or so. They took their license agreement and the finance group advised them what they should charge back to the business. Most groups were not happy with it at first but they had support from management and the finance group.

With 650 projects and 11 domains, they have scaled up to four different environments to support them . There are three full time people in the CoE to support all of those projcets, from a customization standpoint, and have 3-day service level agreements with the business to turn around changes and address any support issues internally around Quality Center. Each domain has their own administrator as well. This was an excellent presentation, and it sounds like Wachovia is firing on all cyclinders with Quality Center!!

07:00 p.m. - It's time for the reception. I've seen everything now. Hundreds of people anxious to walk out into 100 degree weather. The entertainment tonight were three blonde ladies who played the violin. Back in Tennessee, we call this the fiddle, but I degress.  The music was a bit ethereal, but they mixed in some pop elements. Not sure if it was europop or what you call it, but this is vegas and it could very well be a new genre.... :)

As they continued to play, a crowd of HP geek men gathered around to oogle at the beautiful girls playing the music. Let me just tell you guys, I know you well. You are the same ones that hold cell conversations while at the URINAL at HP Universe. You have about as much chance with them as a female showing up at the Lord of the Rings convention. Sheesh! :) OK I know you want a closer look, so here ya go:



There were lamb chops on the buffet tables tonight and they were really good. They also had fresh strawberries with the dipping chocolate and they were great. I tried to hit all the food first thing because I thought the salmonella might might grow pretty rapidly after about 30 minutes in 100-degree heat. At first, Tim and I just hung out ot one of the tables (the one in the shade with the best breeze blowing on us).

Eric Shumacher from TDForums.com showed up. If you have not been to his site and you work with Quality Center, you are missing out. Eric is a cool guy. Earlier this year, Eric caused a bit of a ruckus buying the domain "www.hpsupportsucks.com". As Tom Hogan admitted earlier today, the support for the Mercury products took a wrong turn somewhere in the transition to HP for several months and there were a lot of customers upset. Eric said, "it was the best $8 I ever spent" because HP took notice and he was able to show in a public forum the sentiment from the customer base. Althought the domain name might be considered negative, the way it was used by having a special forum (expertly moderated by Eric I might add). The bottom line: HP responded and I think it was one of the tipping points for a new a better direction. Over the last six weeks or so I can honestly say I have seen it get much better with quicker turn-around time to get issues cleared and faster escalation to the right person.

Satyapal Chhabra (HP) also stopped by to say hello. I worked with Satyapal at a client a couple of years ago. He has moved into a new role with HP and has been helping a lot of customers move over from WinRunner to QuickTest for their functional automation. It is a program called "WinQuick". He'll be at the booths tomorrow, so make sure you stop by and say "hi" to him.

Once Tim and I were stuffed, we waddled around the pool in search for a few of my friends I have not yet had a chance to hang out with. I got to catch up with Tim Vidal (SKYIT Group) and Scott HySmith (Compucom Excell Data). I finally tracked down my HP Partner Business Manager, Kati Ray (HP). As a bonus, she introduced me to the guys at ISM (Integrated Solutions Management), including William Banks, and Robert Cribben. ISM will be at booth #222. Make sure to ask them about FRITZ!

 

And with that, I ascended to the hotel room, drank about 48 ounces of water to rehydrate myself and called it a night. More coverage from the mainstage and additional sessions tomorrow. 

Scott