HP targets CIOs with IT spend analysis tool

HP is aiming its new Financial Planning and Analysis offering at CIOs

HP has unveiled a business intelligence tool designed to help chief information officers (CIOs) manage department costs.

HP Financial Planning and Analysis is an out-of-the box dashboard that displays a real-time view of planned versus actual costs by service, application and project.

Robin Purohit, general manager of software products at HP, explained that the new application would be underpinned by the company's Configuration Management System, announced at last year's HP Software Universe event, and will "allow CIOs to run IT like a business".

Purohit said that CIOs have questions that take a great deal of work to answer, such as whether they have evaluated all sourcing options for a service, whether they could better align resources to the business, or whether they have too many software licences.

"With the stakes being so high at the moment, CIOs have to have accurate information that holds up to the diligence of the chief executive and the board of directors," he said.

HP drew on a survey of 200 senior IT directors conducted by PSB Research to justify the new product launch.

Some 70 per cent of respondents believed that business demands on IT will outpace budgets in the near future, while 43 per cent still have no portfolio management system in place for aligning IT investment decisions to business practices.

CIOs need tools that allow them to come to the table with detailed analysis on department spend, suggested Purohit. These tools should not require a lot of manual work, but should portray a high level of granularity, he said.

HP Financial Planning and Analysis will present CIOs with integrated data in graphs, such as how planned and actual spend for top business services vary, the particular customers that drive up the cost of a service, how IT costs differ over time and the breakdown of labour and non-labour costs.

The vendor also announced improved financial and resource management capabilities for Portfolio and Project Management Center 8.0 that it claims will help customers more effectively manage IT projects and resources.

HP will also release a best practice use model for customers to accelerate deployment of the Configuration Management System.

The system includes a range of HP products, such as Universal Configuration Management Database 7.5, Discovery and Dependency Mapping 7.5, a federation software development kit, and web services-based adaptors that connect relevant information to common third-party repositories.