HP unveiled a raft of updates to its software portfolio at its annual Software Universe conference in Las Vegas yesterday, designed to make it easier for firms to undertake IT changes, test software apps and adhere to ITIL best practices.

The company extended its self-styled Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) portfolio with the launch of a new Change Control Management software suite, which it said would automate approval processes and "eliminate the need for time-consuming change advisory board meetings", and a new Quality Center software suite that integrates business requirement and quality management into the same testing suite.

Separately the company also announced an update to the LoadRunner performance testing suite that it acquired form Mercury, incorporating new functionality for testing Web 2.0-enabled service-oriented architectures and rich Internet applications, and a new set of automated best practices for its Service Center software including pre-defined ITIL processes.

The company's services portfolio was also extended with the addition of new application testing services and an enhancement to its service management framework, including support for the recently released version 3 of ITIL.

Roy Illsley of analyst Butler Group welcomed the move, claiming that the new service should leave HP well positioned to take advantage of the growing customer interest in version 3 of ITIL. "The stand out from these announcements is in the support for version 3," he said. "HP has been pretty quick to market with this and there is a lot of interest in the market for the new best practices."

However, he warned that despite the recent expansion in HP's software portfolio it could still struggle to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded IT governance, testing and management space. "HP is doing good stuff, but there is nothing particularly stand out," he argued.

Meanwhile, HP also continued its attempts to tighten integration between its various software products confirming that it has now developed more than 75 integration points across its BTO products, including new links between its various Service Center products designed to help "better align the change request, approval and deployment processes and accelerate delivery of IT services to business users".

For example, the company said it had now integrated its HP Change Control Management and HP Configuration Management suites with HP Service Center in order to provide firms with a complete change audit trail for compliance purposes.