HP today announced new customer wins and fourfold year-over-year growth for its Mission Critical Partnership service in fiscal year 2006, reaching a milestone of more than 150 customers using this flagship service.

An IT service management (ITSM) service first launched in 2004, the HP Mission Critical Partnership service helps IT organizations deliver on their most important service-level and performance commitments and is a key element of the HP Business Continuity and Availability solutions portfolio. The collaborative, proactive service also helps customers align IT service with the needs of the business and continuously increase IT availability by focusing on the ongoing improvement of ITSM processes and best practices.

"We've seen a sharp rise in demand for our Mission Critical Partnership service coinciding with market momentum for better IT service management and adoption of best practices and standards," said John Bennett, worldwide director, Business Continuity and Availability Solutions, HP. "Customers are increasingly realizing the value of investing in a lifecycle approach, including formal programs for continual service improvement, after initial implementations yield benefits such as significant improvements in operational availability. Some customers are even using ITSM to link IT operations and business continuity planning and recovery."

In 2006, new HP Mission Critical Partnership customer wins included Acxiom, Ceska Sporitelna, COSCO Container Lines Co., Ltd. (COSCON), GloBul (Cosmo Bulgaria Mobile), Hungarian Agriculture Office (Agricultural and Rural Development Agency, Hungary), Shanghai Stock Exchange, Vodacom and Yantian International Cargo Terminal (YICT).

Shanghai Stock Exchange, the largest exchange in mainland China and a long-time HP customer, needed to prepare its infrastructure for the 2007 launch of its Next Generation Trading system. With a consolidated data center built on a solid foundation of more than 200 HP UNIX and OpenVMS servers and backed with HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, the exchange expanded the scope of its HP Business Continuity and Availability solution by selecting the HP Mission Critical Partnership service. Shanghai Stock Exchange is leveraging this service to improve IT support management processes and overall IT management and complement its HP Software Configuration Management Solution - HP.