HPSW - Part 3 - The Software Announcements

HP had three main announcements they were using Wednesday's mainstage session to make:

1. Application Lifecycle: The enhanced integration and development in the Portfolio, Requirements, and Quality products, providing for the ability to manage the application lifecycle from start through to go-live. Maybe I missed a memo, but I didn't think that this was so new to HP Software?
2. The Release Control product, and the claim that it helps with automating operations, and ties into that federated configuration management system; uCMDB. More detail around these includes that the tools have been revisited to accord with ITIL v3 in the sense of federating a Configuration Management System instead of gathering & replicating the config items across several barely linked data-stores. This is far more interesting of an announcement to me (as is the third one discussed subsequently) particularly with the time I have been putting into investigating vendor-based federated CMDBs and the mechanisms used to populate them.
3. Virtualization: HP announced that they have been working tightly with vmware to create better management & operation of virtual environments. This was interestingly reflected on the show floor later . An increasing number of software partners are flogging integrated or at least somewhat coupled virtualization-oriented offerings that connect one way or another to the HP Software Suite. Most offerings are around the management of your virtualized infrastructure or the leveraging of virtualization for the development and quality processes.