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HP today announced that it has been named a leader in the business service management (BSM) software market by Forrester Research, Inc., a leading analyst firm. In the Forrester Wave BSM report, HP Software earned the highest score for business service mapping and the second highest score for both its overall current product offering and end-to-end monitoring. Forrester defines BSM as software that dynamically links business-focused IT services to the underlying IT infrastructure. "The acquisition of Mercury Interactive provides HP with a strong BSM solution with a new and improved configuration management database (CMDB) strategy," wrote Peter O'Neill and Evelyn Hubbert, analysts at Forrester Research and authors of the BSM report. "The HP solution allows IT to either take a back-end approach by monitoring the processes supporting the business services via HP Business Process Insight software or by monitoring the front end - the end user experience." In a separate vendor summary specific to HP's offering, Forrester noted the strength of HP's modular implementation approach, which "allows quick time-to-value and a step-by-step approach to managing the business services of an organization." The vendor summary also noted that HP Universal CMDB is "a complete system that provides the key capabilities required to support today's business service management processes," and that HP Service Desk Customers "are able to receive a closed-loop service health view." "Key technologies acquired from Mercury have allowed HP to become a leader in the BSM market," said Deb Traub, vice president, products, Management Software, HP. "With the Mercury assets, HP can provide a comprehensive solution that enables customers to monitor the health of business services and applications from the points of view of the business, its customers and its partners." HP Business Availability Center software, a comprehensive business service management and application management solution, helps businesses manage the health of business services and applications and optimize their availability, performance and effectiveness. Using HP Business Availability Center along with HP Business Process Insight software further enables both bottom-up and top-down analysis. More information about the HP Software portfolio is available at its website.