Novell Operations Center can now be configured to integrate with the SAP IT Service Management (SAP ITSM) application. The value-added Novell product is part of the Novell business service management solution.

This integration with SAP ITSM and Novell Operations Center provides configurable service views into deployments of SAP ITSM. As a result, customers benefit from a near real-time view of the relationships and interdependencies of business services, workloads and IT infrastructures.

This solution leverages the SAP-certified Novell CMDB360 4.6 configuration management database product announced in October 2009, which is part of Novell Operations Center.

Novell Operations Center enhances the SAP ITSM solution by delivering views that are configured in a user's environment through services for a standard deployment. Customers can leverage this solution to add a more complete view of their SAP infrastructure and align service management to the business without re-implementation.

"Monitoring and mapping are some of the key drivers in the systems management market," said Dr. Thorsten Wewers, CEO at ecenta, an SAP services partner and Novell channel partner. "Novell Operations Center for use with SAP IT Service Management provides an opportunity for customers and partners to initiate a fixed business service alignment project quickly and grow it at their pace."

The Novell Operations Center product for use with SAP IT Service Management delivers three standard views to be configured as part of a customer's implementation:

IT Service Desk Agent View: Delivers the ability to view relationships of configuration items as services, allowing users to navigate the infrastructure views and pinpoint the root cause of an incident quickly. It provides a live view of the environment from a single dashboard and enables users to drill down and determine activity in order to gather accurate information about how to most efficiently restore service.

IT Service Professional View: Provides a view of the infrastructure (during the planning process) that enables an understanding of services, change calendars and other planned changes. Understanding these events allows the organization to assess the effects that could impact the environment and plan changes accordingly. It provides a single dashboard, offers everything needed to properly assess the effect of change, and delivers the insight to make those changes at the right time.

IT Service Manager View: Provides a global summary dashboard that gives viewers a broad overview of service performance. It can drill into the Service Desk Agent view to see exactly what is going on within the infrastructure and provides a summary of service health and basic statistics, which indicate both good and poor performance. These statistics show which mission-critical services and potential service-impacting events should be focused on to achieve the greatest benefits.

Novell Operations Center provides customers with the flexibility to begin with a very simple and limited, configurable implementation with SAP ITSM. They can later choose to build upon this initial implementation to a more complete business service management deployment. The pace and choice is up to the user without re-implementation of the solution needed.