Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today launched containerized versions of its IT Operations Management (ITOM) suites, helping its customers to use containers.

“We’re building our stuff on top of container technology, making it easy for customers to install and use and manage with less risk,” said Roy Ritthaler, VP of product marketing for ITOM with HPE.

The ITOM suites include Hybrid Cloud Management, Data Center Automation, Operations Bridge, and IT Service Management Automation.

The ITOM suites have been around for about a year. “Prior to that we had a larger catalog of products,” said Ritthaler. “We picked the best of breed and rallied new packages around those. Customers like dealing with four products as opposed to a whole plethora of products.”

The containerized versions of the ITOM suites are delivered via Docker containers. The product suites feature native container lifecycle management functions that ease the introduction of container-based workloads into the customer production environment.

“It’s a huge simplification mechanism,” said Ritthaler. “It has the containerization of the products themselves all built in under the hood of our suite. The customer doesn’t have to worry about it.”

He said IT operations are under a lot of pressure to institute new technologies for speed and scale but to balance that with the risk of bringing down systems. “We think with the application container technology, they can manage risk and get faster in terms of speed and responsiveness.”

The HPE software container deployment foundation allows customers to deploy or upgrade the ITOM suites in a matter of minutes across virtual and physical environments. Previously the deployment might have taken a day or two.

HPE Update

Ritthaler provided an update on how HPE is organized, internally. He said there’s a hardware group that sells things such as networking and storage devices as well as servers. There’s also a software group, and within that group there are the following five sub-groups:

  • ITOM – HPE’s NFV work is included in this group.
  • Application delivery management
  • Security
  • Data management
  • Big data platform