With the release of its new LoadRunner in the Cloud application load testing solution, HP aims to provide the flexibility of software-as-a-service in tools that traditionally entailed substantial investments to implement.

LoadRunner in the Cloud will function similarly to the company’s legacy LoadRunner application performance validation tool, but will now be available in SaaS format and support as many as 250 simultaneous users. The cloud format provides the ability to submit application specifications via a web browser and quickly receive results.

RELATED: HP to let partners host LoadRunner

Using a partnership with reseller Orasi Software, risk mitigation firm Genilogix and application life-cycle management vendor J9 Technologies, HP developed LoadRunner in the Cloud to accommodate smaller organizations that needed to test newly developed applications but lack the financial freedom and manpower to implement a fully functional on-premise package.

Matt Morgan, global senior director of product and solution marketing for HP’s IP solution business unit, says the best way for HP to get involved with an evolving marketplace was to adapt its products to fit within its environment.

“The idea is that that area of the market needed a different way, and frankly there have been changes in how that area of the market likes to acquire tools and technologies,” Morgan says.

Essentially, LoadRunner in the Cloud customers “could be executing load tests against their applications the same day they decide to actually embark on a performance validation effort,” Morgan says.

The new venture brings HP into a market that is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 33.1% through 2015, according to IDC. Citing growing enterprise familiarity with cloud services and the increasing use of applications for mission-critical processes, as well as the advent of new services from HP, IDC forecasted the market to reach $1 billion in revenues by 2015.

Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management & Executive Strategies at IDC, does not believe Morgan was exaggerating when he claimed HP was entering a “hyper-growth market” for cloud-based load testing software, simply because she believes customers will be excited about the benefits of its SaaS format.

“Cloud testing is a hyper-growth market because it makes sense. Given the spikes in demand for load testing, why own it all?” Ballou says. “Having those capabilities on demand is key.”

This rapid rate of growth has long been developing, Morgan says. With the growing reliance on application-based mobile web use, the market hasn’t showed signs of slowing down.

After having seen enterprise application use evolve from the initial rise of enterprise-owned web-facing applications to mainstream consumer adoption of mobile apps, Morgan says the market is reaching a point at which development tools need to become as scalable and flexible as the organizations using them.

“It’s a completely different world, but at the same time all of these applications have the same issue – they have to perform when end users log into the website or download a mobile app or attempt to use these applications,” Morgan says.

Entering the cloud-based market for its application testing products is a step in the right direction for HP, Ballou says. Being the current leader with 39% of the market the release of LoadRunner in the Cloud broadens its stance in a new sector that appears set for consistent growth in the coming years.

HP’s success in this initiative, though, will rely on how well it plays with its new partners, Ballou says.

“This is a good move for HP to address an area of the market so far mostly untapped by them as an enterprise provider,” Ballou says. “The price points are attractive for the partners to enable them to build out offerings for their customer base. The key determining factors will be how well the partners execute in delivering the solutions, how they build out their augmented offerings, and the resulting benefits and expenses to the clients served by the partnership.”

Source:http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telecommunications/hp-moves-load-testing-software-to-the-cloud

A global provider of best-in-class learning and performance software solutions to more than half of the Fortune 100, today announced it is working with Hewlett-Packard Company (“HP”) to provide ANCILE uPerform™ Express software to HP clients. ANCILE’s innovative ANCILE uPerform™ Express software, a content creation and performance support tool, enhances the way clients learn to use HP products. ANCILE’s existing customer base has seen a decrease in content development costs of up to 50 percent through the use of ANCILE products.

“We are excited to work with HP to deliver innovative features and functionality, like our XML-based single-source approach, to benefit both ANCILE and HP clients,” said Frank Lonergan, Chief Executive Officer of ANCILE. “We look forward to adding HP software users to the 12 million users in 88 countries currently using ANCILE software.”

The ANCILE uPerform™ Express product, rebranded as the HP Adoption Readiness Tool (“ART”), provides customers who do not have any programming experience the ability to easily customize, create, and publish rich eLearning content. The product’s interactive courses, step-by-step procedures, and simulations help users to get the most out of their HP software. The first HP-built content products available for purchase will be HP Service Manager ART, HP Quality Center ART, HP Portfolio and Program Manager ART, HP Asset Manager ART, and HP Quick Test Professional ART.

Content is designed to be used throughout the application lifecycle, beginning with configuration decisions and extending into performance support for users on the job. Show Me, Try Me, and Test Me simulation modes allow for demo, practice, and knowledge checks. The simulation-based learning content can be used straight out of the box or clients can take advantage of the “single capture-multiple output” recording and content development tools to personalize the material to match their unique implementation of HP software. The ANCILE-developed software provides users the flexibility to record not only HP software, but virtually any Microsoft Windows- and web-based applications to create a single-source document and learning simulation that can be reused and rapidly deployed globally in over 30 languages.

“Strong user adoption is critical for realizing business value from software investments,” said Hans Peter-Klaey, Senior Vice President, Software HP. “The HP Adoption Readiness Tool allows clients to easily create and consume engaging and relevant custom content learning materials to drive adoption and reduce errors and costs.”

ANCILE uPerform™ Express allows organizations to rapidly and easily create, edit, and publish documents, simulations, and eLearning courses, and then quickly deploy the content directly into the hands of the entire workforce via the web. Using ANCILE uPerform™ Express’ unique combination of authoring, publishing, and performance support, organizations can reduce content development and maintenance costs while delivering targeted, high-quality learning content to improve overall user performance.

Source:http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120126005021/en/ANCILE-Helps-Clients-Increase-Return-Investment-HP

HP on Monday announced that Symphony Services has selected its software solutions to help customers of the R&D services company to reduce software development times by up to 30 per cent.

To sustain competitive advantage, organisations in India are looking to speed innovation while driving growth and profitability. High quality business applications that embrace areas like cloud and mobility are key to achieving this.

Symphony provides testing services to independent software vendors (ISVs) seeking the latest technology to deliver high quality applications to businesses and government agencies. However, the manual testing processes used by some of Symphony Services’ customers resulted in long development times and failed to ensure consistent quality for new software applications.

To address this, Symphony chose HP’s IT Performance Suite to automate its application testing services. With enhanced testing and quality control components, the suite will help Symphony improve the efficiency of its testing processes as well as the effectiveness of identifying application defects. These improvements are expected to increase quality assurance by up to 20 percent.

“Businesses are required to optimize product development cycles to stay ahead of competition and continue to deliver new products with required agility while providing a compelling end-user experience,” said, Sunil Gupta, SVP and head of Service Lines, Symphony. “With HP IT Performance Suite software, we aim to identify and reduce performance bottlenecks, improve resource utilization as well as accelerate the return on investment on new product releases for our clients.”

HP IT Performance Suite software suite includes the HP LoadRunner, HP QuickTest Professional (QTP) and HP Quality Center (QC) solutions. This software suite offers immediate access to testing templates, process models and industry benchmarking reports.

Source:http://www.ciol.com/Enterprise/News-Reports/HP-to-reduce-Symphonys-software-devp-time/159044/0/

Though HP announced two desktops today, the most interesting tidbit might not be the computers, but the software installed on them.

As the company releases new hardware, it’s also rolling out a revamped version of its TouchSmart UI.

Now called Magic Canvas, it’ll work even on PCs without touchscreens, and it’s going to ship on every HP tower and all-in-one, including already-announced models like this.

The most significant improvement is that you can now access the Start Menu and all your Windows apps, even when you’re immersed in this UI that frankly looks more like a mobile OS than Windows 7. (If all this reeks of bloatware, you can uninstall or choose not to launch it.) As for that mobile-inspired experience, we’re talking about those widgets and large, finger-friendly shortcuts, sure, but also the fact that you get an unlimited number of home screens for pinning notes and leaving documents open.

Forget where you left your 15-page term paper? You can right click to bring up a search screen (we’re not clear if there will be a keyboard shortcut for that).

As we said, you can expect this to become ubiquitous on HP’s desktops but if you want to see it in action now, you can head past the break for a short promo video.

Source:http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/04/hp-renames-its-touchsmart-software-magic-canvas-plans-to-instal/

The TouchPad tablet from Hewlett-Packard was one of the most closely watched new gadgets of 2011 — and quickly turned out to be the year’s biggest flop. The TouchPad, which was supposed to be a rival to Apple’s iPad, lasted just seven weeks on the market before H.P. killed it, citing weak sales.

Analysts point to a long list of factors behind the tablet’s quick demise. But some of the people involved in creating the tablet’s core software now say the product barely had a fighting chance.

That software is called WebOS, an operating system built on the same technology used by many Web browsers. It promised to be more flexible and open than Apple’s tightly controlled iOS software, and more beautiful than Google’s sometimes wonky Android system. H.P. acquired Palm, the maker of WebOS, for $1.2 billion in 2010 so it could use the software in products like the TouchPad.

WebOS turned out to be something of a toxic asset. Several former Palm and H.P. employees involved in WebOS say that there was little hope for the software from the beginning, because the way it was built was so deeply flawed.

“Palm was ahead of its time in trying to build a phone software platform using Web technology, and we just weren’t able to execute such an ambitious and breakthrough design,” said Paul Mercer, former senior director of software at Palm, who oversaw the interface design of WebOS and recruited crucial members of the team. “Perhaps it never could have been executed because the technology wasn’t there yet.”

The WebOS story also illustrates how hard it will be for anyone to mount a serious challenge to Apple and Google when it comes to mobile operating systems. Those two companies have won dominant market shares and the allegiance of thousands of app developers. Many other companies have chosen Android for their phones and tablets, but this ties them closely to Google and makes it hard to stand out in the crowd of Android products. By owning WebOS, H.P. could control both the hardware and software and gain a more direct relationship with customers.

And Palm’s sales pitch was that because the operating system was based on common Web technology, it would be easier to create software for it, which would attract programmers to make WebOS apps.

But WebOS had problems from the start, when Palm first created it for the Pre smartphone, former Palm employees say.

Mr. Mercer was well known in the design world for his contributions to several of Apple’s most important products, and Palm recruited him. After some internal debate, the company chose to have WebOS rely on WebKit, an open-source software engine used by browsers to display Web pages. Mr. Mercer said that this was a mistake because it prevented applications from running fast enough to be on par with the iPhone. But a former member of the WebOS app development team said the core issue with WebOS was actually Palm’s inability to turn it into a platform that could capture the enthusiasm and loyalty of outside programmers. There were neither the right leaders nor the right engineers to do the job, said this person, who declined to be named because he still had some ties to H.P.

From concept to creation, WebOS was developed in about nine months, this person said, and the company took some shortcuts. With a project like this, programmers typically start by creating the equivalent of building blocks that can be reused and combined to create different applications. But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.

Another issue was recruiting. In 2009, it was hard to find programmers who had a keen understanding of WebKit, Mr. Mercer said, and Apple and Google had already snatched up most of the top talent.

Some former employees pointed fingers at Jon Rubinstein, then Palm’s chief executive, saying he failed to steer WebOS in the right direction. The former employees said that because of his hardware background, he did not understand the logistics of creating a powerful new operating system, and he was ultimately responsible for the decision to rely on WebKit. Mr. Rubinstein is still at H.P., which declined to make him available for comment.

The Pre went on sale in June 2009 and received generally glowing reviews from critics, who called it a solid device with innovative design elements that rivaled the iPhone. Sprint said it was its fastest-selling phone ever.

But customers immediately recognized that the phone was too slow, said the former Palm employee who worked on apps, and “this led to extremely high return rates.” There were also complaints about the phone spontaneously restarting itself or freezing up.

The company had enough staff to get the Pre out the door, but it underestimated how many people it would need to make improvements, the former employee said.

Just six months after the Pre’s introduction, a Northeast Securities analyst said that its sales were in “substantial decline.”

Palm put itself up for sale in April 2010. It soon attracted H.P., which hoped to use WebOS to accelerate its smartphone and tablet efforts.

Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/technology/hewlett-packards-touchpad-was-built-on-flawed-software-some-say.html