Shell and HP are working on an ‘enterprise IT capability of the future.’ The companies are currently qualifying the innovation effort and are to kick off a consortium to jointly develop new intellectual property that will be productized and marketed by HP under the ‘ERPforIT’ umbrella. Emily Orton from HP’s Autonomy unit told Oil IT Journal, ‘ERPforIT will let companies integrate, provision and manage IT services from diverse suppliers with different delivery models under a single service management system. ERPforIT will enable new business models and form the basis for a new Enterprise IT automation as a service offering.’ The initiative builds on Shell’s existing relationship with HP which provides the oil and gas behemoth’s 100,000 employees with core service management automation services. HP’s Enterprise Services unit runs Shell’s Workplace Services and provides multi-supplier integration, supplemented by HP’s software as a service offering and Shell’s own enterprise IT expertise.
An earlier edition of HP’s ERPforIT framework was rolled out for Baltimore-based Constellation Energy last year when Constellation CIO and VP of operations and infrastructure Jeffrey Johnson observed that while the IT organization was making [ERP] ‘shoes’ for the business, it was itself running barefoot! ERPforIT has replaced Constellation’s ‘fragmented’ processes and tools and ‘heroic’ IT management with a structured process comprising a configuration management database, HP’s discovery and dependency mapping software and leveraging the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3.0.
Shell likewise uses HP’s Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) to manage software and infrastructure components and relationships providing control in the face of evolving hardware and software configurations and helping avoid downtime. Orton intimated that ERPforIT also embeds HP’s TRIM enterprise records management and compliance solution. Following HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, TRIM has seen major changes with the replacement of its Oracle Inso filtering technology and open source Lucene search engine with Autonomy’s ‘Intelligent Data Operating Layer’ (IDOL). IDOL automatically indexes and ‘understands’ related content across structured and unstructured sources. More from HP.
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