Peter van der Fluit, vice president, software sales and marketing and Tan Yen Yen, director, South East Asia of HP's software Global Business Unit were in Bangalore recently. In an interview with Prashant L Rao they talk about HP's software unit and its flagship software products, OpenView and OpenCall

How are you positioning OpenView against the competition—Unicenter and Tivoli?
We are positioning ourselves as the services management leader. OpenView is the No1 enterprise management solution implemented by service providers. The OpenView value proposition is that it gives a company an end-to-end view of its IT infrastructure. We support an open architecture vs. the framework approach used by our competitors. Unlike a framework where you have to put the foundation in place and then roll out solutions based on that, our approach offers an immediate RoI. It also integrates easily with legacy systems. In services management you need to focus on business aspects. The OpenView service desk, it is our fastest growing area and offers a unique feature. It's interesting that we got OpenView service desk as a result of acquiring PROLIN in 1997. PROLIN was an Amsterdam-based company and ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a standard supported by HP OpenView) was born in Amsterdam.

These are still the early days for enterprise services management. Gartner estimates that only 30 percent of companies have gone in for ESM. We think that even that estimate is on the higher side. Perhaps only 20-30 percent of potential users have been tapped. We have a couple of implementations in retail, eight or nine projects in financial services, one major oil company, some forward-looking US government agencies, packaged goods companies, automotive vendors and some manufacturers including HP itself and Avaya. We are also working with Management Service Providers (MSPs).

In the service provider market we hardly compete with Tivoli or CA. Occasionally we run up against BMC. A rough estimate would be that we have 3-4 times the market share of the next competitor in this segment.

Is OpenView still a network management product or has it evolved?
OpenView has changed substantially, having evolved into a full-blown infrastructure management solution. People are implementing fault, performance, storage and service desk management. On the application side we have our SPIs (Smart PlugIns) that let us manage application environments such as SAP and Siebel. We are working with Webmethods on a standards-based (XML/SOAP/HTTP) management interface called OMI (open management interface). ISVs like i2, Siebel and JD Edwards have adopted OMI. We strengthened OpenView by acquiring TeMIP from Compaq, the market leader in telecom network and service management, used by 80 percent of the world's largest long distance international carriers.

What are the opportunities you see in India?
The service provider segment is getting charged up in India with a lot of incumbents who have worked with us outside India. Their Indian headquarters want to learn from us. Today you have eight million mobile phone users in India. China has 180 million. There is considerable scope for growth in this market. Long distance and fixed line markets are also a huge opportunity for us. OpenCall helps generate revenues for service providers by helping them offer value-added services such as SMS, prepaid phone cards and 1-800 numbers.

What are your plans for India this year?
South-East Asia is the fastest growing region in the Asia-Pacific region growing at 50 percent year-on-year. India is the fastest growing market in South-East Asia, growing at 100 percent year-on-year. Network Node Manager is the most popular part of OpenView. It is often bundled along with hardware sales. In many ways it is synonymous with OpenView though there is a lot more to the suite than network management. Windows management is a key focus area for us in this region. Our business is split 50:50 across channels and direct sales. This year we are going to work on scaling up the channel. We will be rolling out incentive programmes too. HP is also exploring the possibility of working with Compaq's channel partners.

We don't see much competition in India for our OpenCall product. The big names are not present. We have OEM agreements with Nokia and Logica. HP is the number one provider of management software for SMS services in India.