HP Middle East today announced enhancements to its entry-priced personal computer (PC) hardware and software configuration management solution.
Designed to significantly reduce the costs and complexity of managing PCs, the enhanced HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager 2.0 provides medium-sized organisations or departments within larger enterprises with a reliable, easy-to-use and cost-effective PC configuration management solution. The new version offers significant new manageability features across multi-vendor, Windows-based client products and supports HP thin clients.
In addition, HP announced that for the first time all commercial HP laptops, desktops, and workstations will begin shipping with a pre-loaded HP OpenView Configuration Management agent to help further drive down PC manageability costs.
Enhanced manageability with cost-effective upgrade path
HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager offers IT administrators a quick-to-deploy solution with maximum out-of-the-box functionality, including discovery and inventory, operating system deployment and migration, patch management, software deployment, software usage metering, remote control and HP hardware configuration management.
HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager supports Windows-based desktops, notebooks, workstations and HP thin clients. New and enhanced manageability features include:
• HP hardware management – integrated management capabilities for HP hardware, including BIOS (basic input/output system) settings management, automated BIOS and driver updates, alert monitoring and power management
• Operating system image deployment – for remotely deploying and migrating operating systems
• User setting migration – providing automated capture and deployment of operating system, applications and user settings between different PCs or operating systems
• Software usage metering – enabling IT to accurately track software usage across the enterprise to optimise software licensing costs
• Integration with HP ProtectTools -- for remotely initialising embedded Trusted Platform Module chips and remotely deploying and managing the HP ProtectTools software application
• Increased scalability – offering twice the scalability of the previous version
In addition, a free add-on to HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager provides support for Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), enabling customers to take advantage of powerful new remote management and diagnostics capabilities built into PCs with Intel vPro technology. Since the new capabilities offered by Intel’s AMT technology are based in hardware and firmware, HP OpenView can offer technicians this functionality even if a PC is powered off, its OS is down, or its software agents are missing. These capabilities enable IT administrators to improve the efficiency of help desk services, shift more workload off-hours when it won’t interfere with users productivity, and deliver overall greater service-level quality.
HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager also helps to lower the barriers of entry for customers to begin the journey towards becoming an adaptive enterprise by providing an easy migration path to other, more fully featured and highly automated and scalable solutions in the HP OpenView Configuration Management portfolio. By providing a strong foundation for future requirements, the solution allows customers who place a premium on quick time-to-value and ease-of-use to invest in the entry-priced offering today and cost-effectively upgrade as their needs grow and evolve.
Pre-loaded agents accelerates time-to-value
HP also announced that an HP OpenView Configuration Management agent will now come pre-loaded on all commercial HP laptops, desktops and workstations. The pre-loaded agent reduces the costs associated with managing PCs by eliminating the time spent by IT administrators to deploy agents on machines prior to managing them.
The pre-loaded agent allows customers to quickly take advantage of the free-of-charge HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager Basic Edition to automatically detect HP devices and perform hardware management operations on HP client-based products. Basic Edition customers can seamlessly upgrade the software to HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager Premium Edition to take advantage of the full range of hardware and software management functionality offered by the solution.
More information about the HP OpenView Client Configuration Manager and HP OpenView management software is available at www.hp.com/go/openview.
About HP
HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Oct. 31, 2006, HP revenue totaled $91.7 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.
About HP Middle East
HP is the largest technology and solutions provider in the Middle East with 670 employees and subsidiaries in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah, Khobar, Cairo, Ramallah and Oman servicing the GCC, Egypt and the Levant. HP has been present in the Middle East since 1968 and opened its first regional office in 1994. HP Middle East is the market leader for enterprise, small and medium business and consumer technology products and offers a large portfolio of solutions and services in various business domains.
More information about HP in the Middle East is available at www.hp.com/me
