Cloud Assure

HP Unveils “Cloud Assure” to Drive Business Adoption of Cloud Services
Also expands HP Software-as-a-Service partner program to help resellers better service customers

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 31, 2009 – HP today announced HP Cloud Assure, a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering designed to help businesses safely and effectively adopt cloud-based services.
HP also introduced updates to its HP SaaS reseller program that allow partners to provide added services and value to customers.
Cloud computing is a term used to describe services that can be delivered and used over the Internet through an “as-needed, pay-per-use” business model.
The promise of cloud computing is appealing because it can reduce business costs and provide greater flexibility and scalability of services throughout the enterprise. However, IT organizations unable to ensure the security, performance and availability of the cloud services they provide or consume may be putting their businesses at risk. This uncertainty can be an impediment to wider adoption of cloud services by enterprises.
“Whether providing or consuming cloud services, enterprises should be as ready to manage the risks as they are to reap the significant rewards of the cloud model,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst, IDC. “HP’s new offering is aimed at addressing what IDC has identified as the top three concerns of cloud computing among enterprises – security, performance and availability.”

HP Cloud Assure consists of HP services and software, including HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center and HP Business Availability Center, and is delivered to customers via HP SaaS. HP also provides customers with a team of expert engineers that performs security scans, executes performance tests and deploys availability monitoring.
HP Cloud Assure helps customers validate:
· Security – by scanning networks, operating systems, middleware layers and web applications. It also performs automated penetration testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. This provides customers with an accurate security-risk picture of cloud services to ensure that provider and consumer data are safe from unauthorized access.
· Performance – by making sure cloud services meet end-user bandwidth and connectivity requirements and provide insight into end-user experiences. This helps validate that service-level agreements are being met and can improve service quality, end-user satisfaction and loyalty with the cloud service.
· Availability – by monitoring cloud-based applications to isolate potential problems and identify root causes with end-user environments and business processes and to analyze performance issues. This allows for increased visibility, service uptime and performance.

“HP helps Akamai validate to our enterprise prospects and customers the performance and availability improvements we provide in the cloud,” said Willie M. Tejada, vice president, Application and Site Acceleration for Akamai Technologies, a Massachusetts-based service provider for accelerating content and applications online. “HP SaaS confirms the benefits of our dynamic Web acceleration services and will be important to us as we continue to introduce additional functionality that helps businesses effectively optimize the cloud.”
HP Cloud Assure provides control over the three types of cloud service environments:
· For Infrastructure as a Service, it helps ensure sufficient bandwidth ability and validates appropriate levels of network, operating system and middleware security to prevent intrusion and denial-of-service attacks.
· For Platform as a Service, it helps ensure customers who build applications using a cloud platform are able to test and verify that they have securely and effectively built applications that can scale and meet the business needs.
· For Software as a Service, it monitors end-user service levels on the cloud applications, loads tests from a business process perspective and tests for security penetration.

“There is no question that cloud computing is providing a new set of opportunities for businesses, but it presents new risks as well,” said Scott Kupor, vice president, Software as a Service, HP. “With over nine years of SaaS experience and a leading portfolio of solutions in security, performance and availability, HP is uniquely positioned to help assure our customers can leverage the promise of cloud while removing risk from the equation.”

HP Cloud Assure is available today. More information about the offering is available at http://www.hp.com/go/cloudassure.
HP Software-as-a-Service partner program updates
Building on a reseller option introduced to partners last year, the expanded HP SaaS partner program now includes a partner-led delivery option.
The new option allows partners to provide specialized services, based on their areas of expertise, on top of the HP SaaS portfolio. The option helps partners:
· deliver services more quickly by leveraging the already-deployed HP SaaS solutions;
· focus on delivering high-value, high-margin consulting services for customers; and
· strengthen partnerships with customers through ongoing service.

“Our customers’ reduced IT resources have necessitated them to do more with less, but especially now, there is more strain to accelerate business value,” said Jeff Jamieson, co-founder and vice president of sales at Whitlock Infrastructure Solutions. “HP SaaS Partner-Led Delivery allows partners to leverage areas of expertise to deliver value-added consulting services.”
The partner-led delivery option is available currently for HP SaaS for Business Availability Center, HP SaaS for Performance Center and HP SaaS for Quality Center. Expansion to include the rest of the SaaS Business Technology Optimization software portfolio is under development.
Register to attend a live webcast
HP Cloud Assure Offering & HP SaaS Partner-Led Delivery Option
Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. PT
About HP
HP, the world’s largest technology company, simplifies the technology experience for consumers and businesses with a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/.
Note to editors: More news from HP, including links to RSS feeds, is available at http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management for future operations; any statements concerning expected development, performance or market share relating to products and services; any statements regarding anticipated operational and financial results; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include macroeconomic and geopolitical trends and events; the execution and performance of contracts by HP and its customers, suppliers and partners; the achievement of expected operational and financial results; and other risks that are described in HP’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2009 and HP’s other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to HP’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2008. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.


© 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

News releaseEditorial contacts: Scott Pace, HP+1 650 534 7439 scott.pace@hp.com Erin MuhlhanBurson-Marsteller for HP+1 312 596 3529 erin.muhlhan@bm.com HP Media Hotline+1 866 266 7272 pr@hp.comwww.hp.com/go/newsroomHewlett-Packard Company3000 Hanover StreetPalo Alto, CA 94304www.hp.com

Application Lifecycle Management Webcast

Next week Paul Ashwood and Bradd Hipps will be giving a webcast over on theserverside.com, presenting a whitepaper and case study Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). There will be some interesting details on how testing can be integrated into the lifecycle for application development and delivery to production. If your company or testing organization includes XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX as part of the SDLC or Lifecycle processes, this might be very useful information and I'm sure Brad would love to hear some questions from you.

Here's the official abstract:

"Effective companies are riding the latest waves in application modernization. These waves touch nearly all of IT from technology and staffing to application architectures and release strategies.

HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions help your IT organization make the most of these trends and avoid being swamped in the process. ALM from HP is an integrated suite of leading solutions that enables your IT leaders to answer comprehensively the key questions business stakeholders have regarding application modernization.

You are cordially invited to view HPs unique perspective on what ALM is and how our solution renders better business outcomes. All attendees will receive our new white paper, “Redefining the application lifecycle: Looking beyond the application to align with business goals.”

Click here to register

PC 9.5 Webinare March 16, 2009 with Nationwide

Webinar with Nationwide

HP Software recently released the 9.5 versions of HP LoadRunner software and HP Performance Center software. With these new releases, HP is addressing today's top of mind application challenges around rapid technology change and adoption of new processes. In this challenging economic environment, companies have to be as lean and agile as possible.



Please join HP and Nationwide for an informative Webinar where you will hear the highlights of the latest release as well as get a preview of an actual implementation of HP Performance Center 9.5 from John Seling of Nationwide.



You will hear:


-What new capabilities are included in the 9.5 release

-How Nationwide leveraged the new features in 9.5 to shorten their test timeframes and make their tests more realistic

-More about the new integration with Shunra Software


Join us to find out how HP's performance validation solutions can enable you to achieve legendary QA projects. All attendees will receive our new white paper, "Innovations in enterprise-scale requirements management, quality planning, and performance testing".


Register Now »


DATE: March 17, 2008

TIME: 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET

SPEAKERS:
John Seling, Performance & Data Engineering Manager, Nationwide

Priya Kothari, Product Marketing Manager (LoadRunner & Performance Center), HP Software


DURATION: 60 minutes with Q&A

REGISTER: Click here to register for the webinar

Offshoring / Outsourcing Performance Testing

There are 2 main reasons why companies utilize offshoring (outsourcing) for performance testing.

The main reason is cost savings. Obviously companies will try to choose locations where there is a lower cost of doing business. The 2nd reason is to be able to ramp up new testers quickly. If there is a greater demand for testing than what the current set of testers can handle then offshoring or outsourcing can be utilized to quickly gain more testers to help with the excess demand.

In an ideal world all performance testers are the same. If you can find cheaper testers elsewhere, then you will get immediate cost savings. But as we know we do not live in an ideal world. There are different levels of knowledge, skill and motivation. We have seen time and time again offshoring fail because companies do not have that correct expectations, they do not set up the proper training, and they do not have the correct set of tools.

You cannot assume (we all know what that does) that just contracting with a secondary company to provide all or partial performance testing will automatically start showing benefits.

There is no reason why offshoring cannot be a successful venture for companies. They must research the offshoring options and find ones that have a good fit with skill sets, low "turn over", and a proven record.

Once an outsourcing company has been chosen then there has to be training. They must understand how your company is expecting the testing to be performed. They must know what types of tests you want them to do (stress,load,failover, etc...), the kind of reports that you want and the SLAs that you expect them to achieve.

After you have chosen the team, provided the appropriate training and expectations, what is left? What tools are they going to be using? The same set of tools that you used when the entire team was internal? At first this seems like the correct response. If it worked internally, why wouldn't it work for an outsourcer? Let's explore this for moment.

First let's just talk licenses. How is the outsourcing group going to gain licenses. Do they have their own licenses that they can use? Most do not and they rely on the company to provide that. So do you transfer the licenses that you have internally to the outsourcer? Do you want to keep some of the licenses in house so that you can perform tests internally when it is needed? More than likely you will be keeping at least some of your performance testing licenses in-house. So that means that you will have to buy more licenses for the outsourced team. Can your current testing tool help with this?

What about testing machines? Do you need to get more controllers and load generators? Can the outsourced team utilize the machines that you currently have? Can your current testing tool help with this?

What about management? How do you know that the outsourced team is doing what they are supposed to do? How do you know if the tests that they are creating are correct? How do you know if they are testing enough? In short how do you know that they are doing a good job? Lack of proper management and oversight is one of the biggest reasons why offshoring fails. Can your current testing tool help with this?

What if you would like "follow the sun testing" or better collaboration with testing. Let's say that you have an important project that needs to get tested quickly. And the only way to get this done is to keep handing off the test to different testers around the world. So when one location is done for the day, a new tester can pick up where the last left off and continue with the testing. This becomes a real possibility with offshoring. A test can begin in-house and then shift to an outsourcer off-hours, thus decreasing the time it takes to get the results to the line of business. Can your current testing tool help with this?

HP Performance Center (PC) is the enterprise performance testing platform that can help you with your offshoring/outsourcing needs. Let's start from the top. PC has shared licenses. Anyone around the world, that is given the proper permission, can access the PC web interface and run tests. There is no need for more licences unless there is a demand for more concurrent testing. And if your demand for more simultaneous tests is growing, then you are doing something right.

Now let's move on to machines. With Performance Center all the machines (controllers and load generators) are centrally managed. There is no need to have LGs placed throughout the world. Testers, worldwide, have access to tests and machines through PC. Again the only time that more machines are needed is if the demand increases. No need to buy more machines just because you have outsourced the job.

Performance Center was created for performance testing management. From a single location you can see what projects and tests have been created, how many tests have been executed and who ran them. There is no need to have scripts and reports emailed or copied. All testing assets are stored centrally and accessible through PC's web interface.

Not only can you view the projects, scripts, and results, you can also manage the testing environment itself. You can run reports to see what the demand for your testing environment is an then plan for increases accordingly.

How about "follow the sun" testing? With HP Performance Center anyone with proper access can take over testing. Since all scripts, scenarios, and profiles are completely separated from controllers can stored centrally, it is easy for a new tester to pick up where a previous tester left off. There is no need to upload scripts and scenarios to a separate location, or remember to email them to the next tester. It is all available 24x7 through Performance Center.

Collaboration on testing becomes much easier in PC than with almost any other tool. If you need different people at different locations to all watch a test as it is running, PC can accommodate that. Just log on to the running test and choose the graphs that you are interested in. Now all viewers are watching the test with the information that they are interested in, all through one tool.

HP Performance Center is your best performance testing platform choice when it comes to offshoring and outsourcing.

So after you pick the correct outsourcing company, and properly train them, make sure that you use HP Performance Center to ensure the highest cost savings and highest quality.

Performance Center of Excellence

What is a Center of Excellence (CoE)?
Definition:

• A centralized entity that drives standardization and processes across an organization in order improve quality, consistency, and efficiency
  
• A central group of experts providing shared services and leadership to ensure high quality

So what does this mean for performance testing? It means that a Performance CoE can improve the quality, consistency, and efficiency of performance testing and validation across an entire company.

Performance testing is a specialized skill set. It requires knowledge of the applications, the hardware and third party systems. Not all testers can have this knowledge, and it takes years to fully develop the proper skill set.

If performance testers stay in individual project testing groups, it is hard to ensure that all applications are being properly performance tested to the same standard. Also when new technologies appear, these disparate groups will not all have the same expertise of those new technologies.

A CoE centralizes the testing expertise. As the central team develops more knowledge, all the applications will benefit. It is also easier to ensure the same standard or consistency of testing across all projects. It facilitates higher quality of tests and improves the efficiency of running and analysing these tests.

With a CoE it becomes easier to reuse testing assets. Instead of keeping all the scripts, monitor profiles and scenarios on individual testing machines or with separate testing groups, you can centralize all of that data to make it easier to share and reuse. This cuts down the time it takes to create tests and makes the testing more efficient.

Don't just take my word on this. Voke, an analyst firm, conducted a study on performance Centers of Excellence and found that they...

• Increased productivity
• Increased quality
• Decreased costs

Hang on! Did I just say that I can increase quality and efficiency and at the same time reduce my costs? Yes.

You can reduce the number of testing machines and testing tool licenses through a central organization. Every project testing group would no longer need to have its own performance testing tools. And when the testing systems become centralized it becomes easier to utilize the systems more efficiently by having less down time per machine and by allowing 24x7 testing.

If there is a need to standardize performance testing, increase the efficiency and quality of the performance testing process or just need to reduce the overall cost of performance testing, then a Performance Center of Excellence is worth looking into.

Welcome to HPPerformanceCenter

Hello and welcome. I'm Stephen Feloney, the product manager for HP Performance Center.
You've been asking for it and so here it is.
This is a new blog focused on HP Performance Center (PC) and performance validation.

While my LoadRunner PM counterpart, Mark Tomlinson (http://loadrunnerathpdotcom.blogspot.com/) didn't want to give a quick rundown of who he is :), I thought I'd give a quick synopsis about myself.

I have been with Mercury/HP for almost 7 years (I know it amazes me also)! I started out in RnD (developer for 12 years) with Test Center, the predecessor to Performance Center. Then I moved to our Customer Oriented RnD (CORD) team where I worked with support, customers, and RnD to ensure problems around Performance Center got resolved. And now for the last one and a half years I've been product manager for HP Performance Center.

We will be talking performance testing with a flare towards the enterprise.
Centers of Excellence (CoE), global and 24x7 testing, and efficiently utilizing your testing assets are the types topics that will be discussed in future posts.

I would love to hear from you.
What you like about PC?
What problems are you having with it?
What types of testing are you doing?
What would you like to see in the product?
Where do you see performance validation moving in the future?
This is also an opportunity for you to help shape the future of performance validation. Your help and feedback is important. You can contact me at PerformanceCenter@hp.com

Thank you and once again welcome!