HP OpenView AssetCenter softwareComply. Optimize. Secure.

Companies build value through the delivery of high-quality and cost-effective services. IT organizations are at the forefront of makingcertain these goals are met. IT is challengedto reduce costs, mitigate security and compliance risks, and provide information to drive business decisions. IT Asset Management plays a major role in addressing these challenges.

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Caught between cost and compliance, service level andoutsourcers, IT organizations struggle to fully explain thevalue they provide to the business, at almost all majorlevels. In order to solve this problem, your IT group musttake a step back and fully evaluate your asset manage-ment practices, and make a deliberate effort to evolvethose practices to deliver a predictable and valued levelof service.

At HP, we can help you achieve these objectives. The HP OpenView AssetCenter solution helps your IT teamdeliver high-quality, cost-effective services. For nearly twodecades, organizations around the world have usedAssetCenter to enhance service and asset costs, mitigatesecurity and compliance risks, and align IT with businessobjectives. Today, with so much to do and so little time,AssetCenter provides your IT team with one of the mostcomprehensive solutions for automating and maintainingtight control over your company’s capital investments.

A foundation forbusiness-based ITHP OpenView AssetCenter serves as the foundation foryour IT organization to measure and communicate thevalue it provides to the businesses it supports. In today’scompetitive and ever-changing environment, IT demandsa thorough understanding of the financial, operationaland contractual relationships of assets to allow theorganization to increase return on its IT investment.

AssetCenter drives IT operations and decision making by:

Aligning IT with business objectives•Measure total cost of ownership

•Directly tie IT cost to business unit consumption

•Align business services to their supporting assets and contracts

•Gain a common vehicle to communicate IT value to the business

•Prepare for and adapt to constant change

Enhancing service and reducing asset costs •Effectively manage contracts, leases, license

agreements and warranties

•Avoid potential penalties by using licensemanagement automation

•Extend hardware lifecycles

•Complete asset and project expense audit tracking

•Enable fixed asset and invoice reconciliation

Mitigating security and compliance risks•Quantify and measure financial compliance risks

of IT infrastructure

•Prepare for software audits by using standards andautomated processes

•Enforce software and hardware standards to enablesystem security and continuity

•Build a baseline for physical security

HP OpenViewAssetCenterExtensive, integrated application suiteHP OpenView AssetCenter is a lifecycle asset manage-ment solution with best practices designed to simplifyyour use of the tool and creation of supporting processes.Years of experience with customers allows us to provideyour organization with a system that is scalable, adapt-able to your needs and easy to use.

Managing IT asset lifecycles effectively is no longer optional—it is critical.

Modular componentsPortfolio ManagementAssetCenter Portfolio simplifies asset tracking by consoli-dating assets and each configuration item into a centralrepository. This repository allows users of all AssetCenterapplications to view and utilize the information and seerelationships to other assets. As servers and applicationsare consolidated, your business units can share utiliza-tion and allocate costs correctly by using Portfolio’spowerful configuration options.

Portfolio is at the heart of every AssetCenter implementa-tion. It defines and manages the complex relationshipsbetween assets, contracts and costs, providingconsistent and accurate inventory information.

Key benefits•Enables management of complex business services

•Provides a powerful and customizable workflowengine

•Enhances management of the asset lifecycle

•Administers and prioritizes IT projects and associated costs

•Provides a strong repository with the ability to modelthe assets and their management rules

•Allows multi-source, multi-level reconciliation

Software Asset ManagementAssetCenter Software Asset Management provides asimple, standardized and proactive way to manage software license compliance. Using a central repositoryof existing contracts, Software Asset Management asso-ciates software purchase invoices with each softwarelicense agreement. Contractual and expense data arealso collected to provide reconciliation reports from the

physical inventory stored in the AssetCenter PortfolioManagement module. Software Asset Management alsomanages entitlement to help control your software usagecosts and promote internal compliance. This level of control allows for greater software optimization, as theusage of assets can be attributed and tracked to enforcestandard rules and policies.

Key benefits•Increases software utilization with a powerful

reconciliation engine

•Enables software compliance

•Manages entitlement and usage

•Facilitates complex software license type management

•Provides usage tracking and reconciliation to allow forgreater cost savings

Procurement ManagementAssetCenter Procurement automates and streamlines theentire request lifecycle. It verifies each request againstcorporate approval standards by checking against acatalog of approved assets. It monitors existing stocksand budgets so that requests are filled through availableinventory whenever possible. Users generate and recon-cile purchase orders against assets received from thevendor.

Key benefits•Controls all procurement processes and enforces

company standards

•Reconciles assets against purchase orders

•Streamlines the fulfillment lifecycle

• Integrates with asset, service and supplier catalogs

•Enables out-of-the-box ERP integration

•Provides comprehensive control over processes throughvisualization of approval workflow

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Figure 1. Show detailed information on each configuration item. Figure 2. Determine your current license compliance status using AssetCenter.

Financial ManagementAlign asset investments for maximum business value. The Financial Management module captures, monitorsand manages all costs associated with an asset, fromacquisition through retirement.

AssetCenter Financial Management makes it easy totrack costs associated with every asset at every stagein its lifecycle, including expenses related to capitaland operations. Your IT organization can easily reporton these costs by budget, cost center or total cost ofownership. Financial Management also associates and reconciles fixed assets with assets in the Portfoliomodule, so your management can fully understand the financial impact of asset service and disposition.

Key benefits•Enables comprehensive budget management

•Defines tax rates and calculates tax liability

•Tracks and attributes cost per business unit

•Calculates depreciation on fixed asset

•Calculates total cost of ownership at multiple levels (i.e. asset, business service and asset model by category)

AssetCenter ChargebacksAssetCenter Chargebacks institutes invoicing andchargeback programs to specific business units. Thisautomated cost-allocation process enables charges to be made consistently and in accordance with businessrules. AssetCenter Chargebacks provides maximum visibility into the financial impact of IT support and services. Your business units are empowered—and

encouraged—to make informed decisions about theservice and availability levels they request. AssetCenterChargeback’s flexible design allows your IT organizationto issue chargebacks based on multiple events, such asa move, service or asset. Calculations can be based onfixed cost, a percentage of the total cost or usage, andcan be easily applied to any entity (i.e. business unit,asset or employee).

Key benefits•Helps you to manage expense against individual

business units

•Provides visibility of expense per cost center

•Enables cost recovery through chargebacks of various types of expenses to business units

•Allows calculations to be based on fixed cost, a percentage of the total cost or usage, and can be applied to any entity (i.e. business unit, asset or employee)

Contract ManagementAssetCenter Contracts simplifies, automates andimproves the business processes related to contractmanagement. It tracks contract terms and conditionsand sends automatic notifications of important dates,such as contract expirations. AssetCenter Contractsalso provides critical data that helps your organizationmanage vendor relationships, and it forms the basisfor future planning and negotiations. The result: lowertotal cost of asset ownership.

Key benefits•Manages the asset lifecycle from request and

procurement through to retirement

•Uses a powerful, centralized configurationmanagement database (CMDB) to consolidate assetinformation and drive service support and deliveryprocesses

•Works in conjunction with accounting and ERP systemsto enable governmental compliance and reduce audit-ing costs and penalties and over-purchasing

Cable ManagementThe AssetCenter Cable and Circuit module managesphysical network connectivity inside and outside yourorganization’s infrastructure, including your local areanetwork (LAN), wide area network (WAN), and technology for voice and data services.

The Cable and Circuit module extends the repository inAssetCenter by collecting, managing and reporting oninformation obtained about cable and circuit datathroughout the IT asset lifecycle.

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Figure 3. Use AssetCenter to measure overall IT expenditures.

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Key benefits•Works to reduce contract costs

•Allows IT to manage and understand the physical rela-tionship between assets and various cross-connections

•Helps IT manage work orders more effectively

AssetCenter Web ServicesHP OpenView AssetCenter Web Services providesinteroperability between software applications runningon disparate platforms. Using SOAP technology toestablish a standard messaging framework, AssetCenterWeb Services makes it easy for developers to naturallyaccess objects within multiple and customized datafields. The open architecture allows for real-time inte-gration and the simple exposure of objects to externalapplications. AssetCenter Web Services introducesenterprise applications as modular business servicesthat can be easily integrated from different locationsand reused. This helps your company establish trulyflexible applications for an adaptable IT infrastructure.

Key benefits•Uses open standards and protocols and allows reuse

of services and components

•Can combine multiple web services

•Uses HTTP/HTTPS to work through common firewallsecurity measures without requiring changes to the firewall filtering rules

•Reuses services and components

•Facilitates open integration to other systems

•Provides a standard framework with a consistent anddynamic API architecture for process-based integration

AssetCenter and beyondAdvanced, scalable architectureHP OpenView AssetCenter is designed for enterprise-class organizations and can scale to meet the mostdemanding requirements. Supporting a service-orientedarchitecture, HP OpenView AssetCenter extends itscapabilities through direct integrations, out-of-boxconnectors and web services.

Global enterprise organizations also benefit fromUnicode, multi-client support, and distributed systemcapabilities that enable 24x7, “follow-the-sun” assetmanagement practices.

An intuitive user interface provides charts, graphs andcustomizable windows for both Microsoft® Windows®

and web client users.

Powerful customization and administrative toolsAssetCenter provides broad, out-of-the-box functionality,as well as extensive tailoring flexibility to adapt to yourcompany’s unique processes and requirements, withoutthe need to customize source code. AssetCenter providescustomization and administrative tools for complete system management, including:

•A full-featured tailoring toolkit that uses both Basic and AssetCenter Advanced Query Languages

•A broad suite of system administrative tools thatincludes archiving and purge of data managementand all the benefits of a J2EE application server hosted application (failover)

•A high level of customization of the user interface

•A powerful customizable workflow and wizard engine

Multiple levels of users map to license levelAssetCenter provides specific licensed user types basedon a user’s skill level and needs. At the very basiclicense level, a user can perform simple activities, suchas requesting a catalog item. More advanced users,such as an administrator, can be licensed for greaterusage and deeper access to the modular components.As a result, your administrators can perform moreadvanced tasks. The different license levels help meeteach user’s unique needs and are more cost effective to your business.

Multiple languages supported for the global enterpriseAssetCenter is available in English, Japanese, French,Italian, German, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese and is Korean enabled.

Figure 4. Measure and communicate the total cost of ownership of business services.

ComplementaryproductsHP OpenView asset management solutions include the following supporting products.

ServiceCenter and Service DeskOut-of-the-box integrations to both ServiceCenter andService Desk provide customers end-to-end AdaptiveManagement capabilities to streamline operations andlower costs. The asset base can be easily reconciledwith other CI’s to track the total costs of goods and services. This provides a greater understanding of totalcost of ownership.

DecisionCenter AnalyticsDecisionCenter Analytics is a business intelligence toolfor advanced analytics and data mining that transformsdetailed operational data from AssetCenter into mean-ingful, business-focused intelligence. Leveraging HPOpenView Reporting Data Store as a foundation, DecisionCenter Analytics provides a predefined set ofmetrics, giving your users a consolidated view of theirbusiness variables and dimensions, enabling them toanalyze standardized business data from any numberof perspectives.

Enterprise DiscoveryEnterprise Discovery automatically discovers and inven-tories software, hardware and networked devices acrossthe infrastructure and supplies detailed configurationinformation for effective CMDB management.

Configuration Management AssetCenter’s out-of-the-box integration to HP OpenViewConfiguration Management reconciles newly discoveredinventory against the expect state. License checks areperformed to verify the available license rights. Groupswho are entitled to software usage are allowed receipt.

Integration connectorsConnect-It creates, tests and administers integration scenarios between AssetCenter and a wide variety ofother external applications. Connect-It leverages indus-try-standard protocols and connects with third-partyinformation systems, including SAP, BMC, CA and IBM.

A complete solutionGet the most from your software investmentHP provides high-quality software services that addressall aspects of your software application lifecycleneeds. With HP, you have access to standards-based,modular, multi-platform software coupled with globalservices and support. The wide range of HP serviceofferings—from online self-solve support to proactivemission-critical services—enables you to choose theservices that best match your business needs.

For an overview of HP software services, visit:www.managementsoftware.hp.com/service

To access technical interactive support, visit SoftwareSupport Online at:www.hp.com/managementsoftware/services

To learn more about HP Software CustomerConnection, a one-stop information and learning portal for software products and services, visit:www.hp.com/go/swcustomerconnection

Comprehensive trainingHP provides a comprehensive curriculum of HP OpenViewand IT Service Management courses. These offerings provide the training you need to realize the full potentialof your HP solutions, increase your network optimizationand responsiveness, and achieve better return on your IT investments.

With more than 30 years experience meeting complexeducation challenges worldwide, HP knows training.This experience, coupled with unique insights into HP OpenView software, positions HP to deliver theoptimum training experience. For more informationabout these and other educational courses, visit:www.hp.com/learn

The smartest way to invest in ITHP Financial Services provides innovative financingand financial asset management programs to help you cost-effectively acquire, manage and ultimatelyretire your HP solutions. For more information on theseservices, contact your HP sales representative or visit:www.hp.com/go/hpfinancialservices

Contact informationTo find an HP OpenView sales office or reseller nearyou, visit: www.managementsoftware.hp.com/buy

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For more information, visit www.managementsoftware.hp.com

Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

© Copyright 2006 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject tochange without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warrantystatements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting anadditional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

4AA0-5584ENW Rev. 2, November 2006