Mercury IT Governance Center ( Kintana )

Kintana ( ITG ) Details

Note: The IT Governance Name has been changed to PPM ( projects and porrtfolio Management Centre ). Please check www.hp.com for more detials .

Architecture Over View

Mercury IT Governance Center employs a three-tier architecture consisting of:

Client Tier

The client tier consists of:

• The Mercury IT Governance Center standard interface, which is rendered using JSP (Java Server Pages) and is accessed using a Web browser.


• The Mercury IT Governance Workbench interface, executed using a Java applet installed on the client machine, and launched using the Sun Java plug-in to a Web browser

Communication between the client and application server tiers is accomplished as follows:

• For the standard interface, HTTP or HTTPS, with no code required on end user's smachines. The client accesses information from the database through the J2EE application server using a shared database session pool.


• For the Workbench interface, RMI (Remote Method Invocation) or SRMI (Secure Remote Method Invocation), which has been optimized by Mercury for use in Mercury IT Governance Center.

The architecture and communication protocols have been created to minimize the number of round trips between the applet and server, and the volume of data transferred.

Application Server Tier

The application server:

• Runs on the Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Red Hat Linux platforms


• Uses the JBoss Application Server, which has full J2EE 1.3 (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) support


• Houses workflow, scheduling, notification, and execution engines that drive automated tasks like code deployment to remote systems, dynamic routing, and email notifications


• Can run on one or more machines as a cluster to improve performance and scale hardware as usage increases


• Can optionally integrate with external Web servers like Sun Java System Web Server (formerly Sun ONE Web Server and iPlanet), Microsoft IIS, and Apache


• Maintains a database connection pool that caches connections to the database, which eliminates the need to restart the application server if the database shuts down for scheduled maintenance or system failure


• The protocol used for communication between Mercury IT Governance Server
  and Mercury IT Governance Web server is AJP13—a protocol similar to HTTP that has been optimized for performance.
  

Communication between the application server and database tiers is achieved
using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity).

Database Tier

The database tier consists of an Oracle database containing the tables,
procedures, PL/SQL packages, and other components used by the Mercury IT
Governance Center products. All transaction, setup, and auditing data is stored
in the database. Mercury IT Governance Center can run on a single database
instance, or can leverage Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) configuration
for load balancing, redundancy, and failover.
Mercury IT Governance Center supports the following Oracle database
features:

• A relational data model


• Use of Oracle stored procedures to implement business logic (for example,workflow processing)


• Use of a database pool to eliminate creation of a separate database session for each user or transaction


• Database caching of frequently used data, programs, and procedures to improve performance

Business Technology Optimization and the IT Governance Process :

Business technology optimization refers to the strategies and processes involved in aligning IT with business goals to maximize IT’s business value. Mercury IT Governance Center is used to digitize and automate IT business processes from demand through production to enable customers to optimize and align IT strategy and execution.


IT Governance Centre :

IT Governance Centre consist a set of products ( applications ) :

• Change management
• Demand Management
• Portfolio Management
• Program Management
• Project Management
• Resource Managemen
• Time Management
• Financial Management
  

Change Management:

Mercury Change Management enables you to plan, package, release, and deploy changes to your applications portfolio. It digitizes best practice software change management processes across platforms and environments (such as mainframe, UNIX, NT, and Linux), types of change (code,configurations, content), or applications (such as Oracle,PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel). By automating formerly manual tasks, Change Management lets you accomplish more with less and dramatically lessen the risk of “broken” deployments.

With Mercury Change Management, you can:

• You can automate code migration accorss the instances ( Ex. code like sql components , oracle forms , reports , discoverer reports , packages , procesedures , Oracle applications 11i AOL components etc )
• You can automate patch application of Oracle E-business suite instances.
• You can also automate the clonning of instances.

Demand Management:

Mercury Demand Management is a product of Mercury IT Governance Center that manages requests from creation to implementation. Each request is processed using a graphical workflow. Demand Management features tools and configurable processes for dealing with these requests. Data is captured by prompting for process-specific information. This ensures the required information is collected and validated at the appropriate time in the process.

Mercury Demand Management can follow complex business rules by using different approval methods. Email and pager notifications can be generated as the request passes through the various stages of the workflow. Prioritization and delegation features allow requests to efficiently advance through their specific workflow, routing them to the relevant department, group, orindividual.

Portfolio Management :

Mercury Portfolio Management provides a real-time governance setup that supports your strategic, financial, functional, and technical requirements. Ideal for new initiatives that grow and transform your business as well as existing applications that run your business, Mercury Portfolio Management can help you align your IT portfolio with your business strategy and maximize portfolio value.

Mercury Portfolio Management allows business and IT stakeholders to collaboratively govern your portfolio with proper levels of review and approval. Mercury Portfolio Management monitors the entire portfolio lifecycle (proposal justification and review, project initiation, execution, deployment, and benefits realization) and enables stakeholders to make better portfolio decisions and analyze what-if scenarios using easy-to-build scenario comparisons.

Program Management:

Mercury Program Management allows a program manager to deliver a new business capability or solve a problem using programs. Using programs, a program manager can do the following:

• Oversee related IT projects
• Coordinate inter-project deliverable and milestones
• Manage scope change
• Identify and mitigate risks
• Resolve inter-project issues
• Manage the allocation of resources
• Initiate program requests (by stakeholders)

Project Management:

Mercury Project Management enables organizations to streamline and standardize the management of project activities using a template-based,collaborative approach. Project plans are defined as a hierarchical structure of projects and subprojects that logically group and organize tasks or activities.

Project Management defines the step-by-step processes required to complete specific tasks and deliverables. Organizations can easily manage project plan activities within and across the technology chain because all project team members, whether internal or external, collaborate and interact through an intuitive interface. The underlying product framework guides users through a dynamic, self-documenting process to support activities such as the execution of standardized checklists or the collection of deliverables using document attachments.

Resource Management:

Mercury IT Governance Center provides an array of tools for managing personnel related to IT initiatives. Organizational modeling capabilities keep track of where resources are located and who they report to. Skill modeling capabilities unlock the potential of resources. As resources are assigned to tasks and requests, executives and managers have full visibility into the capacity of their teams and the load placed on them, in terms of both current operational use and capacity planning for the future.

Time Management:Talk about the time management of the resources and effective utilization of time.
Financial Management : it talks about the budget

Note : For more detials about the licence and complete documentation please contact HP ( www.hp.com ) . The reference for the above content are HP-Mercury Documents.