HP helps tidy up for compliance

Two Hewlett-Packard products introduced on Monday aim to simplify IT management tasks and help companies comply with new accounting regulations.

The software is part of HP's OpenView product line, a set of programs designed to keep business systems tuned and primed for optimum performance.

HP OpenView Compliance Manager promises to aid companies with the business monitoring and reporting tasks required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The tool helps IT managers assess whether their business systems comply with the law and pinpoint possible gaps, the company said.

Publicly traded companies are pouring money into Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, with total spending set to reach $6.1 billion this year, according to figures from AMR Research. About 28 percent of that has been allocated to compliance technology, the research firm said.

The other new product is called HP OpenView SOA Manager, and it aims to take advantage of technology advances related to "service-oriented architecture," a new approach to software development. Systems built with a service-oriented architecture are supposed to be more compatible with one another, making them cheaper to run and maintain.

SOA Manager brings tools for security, version control and monitoring to the service-oriented architecture model, further reducing IT costs and increasing IT staff productivity, HP said.

HP's competitors in the systems management field include BMC, Peregrine, IBM and Computer Associates International.