Business Service Management Hub

Back in September, 2009 when Adobe laid out $1.9 billion to buy web analytics firm Omniture, there was a lot of speculation about just what Adobe would do with it.

At the time, Adobe’s enterprise business wasn’t as built out as it is now. Many speculated that they would use it to help web developers test and measure the popularity of different designs, which made sense in the context of their business at the time.

Turned out that Adobe had bigger plans than that and it began to come together when it purchased Web Content Management vendor, Day Software last July. That gave Adobe the tools to build the site (Creative Suite), manage the site content (Day CQ5) and measure and analyze the site traffic (Omniture).

More recently, Adobe held an entire summit devoted to Omniture where they announced  a series of products to help designers, developers and marketers better understand their sites and what works to attract and keep customers engaged. In addition, and perhaps more important, the new tools provide insight about what customers are saying about you in social channels.

This type of data analysis gives you insight across your delivery channels, and is important in its own way as the information you get from other business systems including your Business Service Management (BSM). While BSM might give you a different kind of view of your business, the data you get from your web site could prove just as valuable because it gives you insight into your customer behavior and how to get them to take action (buy).

Ultimately, buying and selling is what any business is all about and the more data you bring to the table, the greater your chances of finding success.

Photo by hardeep.singh on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Microsoft seems to be paying attention to the Business Service Management (BSM) space, at least in its own way.  At the recent CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, Microsoft unveiled a new PC monitoring tool called Windows Intune, and they also displayed the prototype of a new cloud monitoring system they are calling Microsoft Dynamic IT.

Designed in Microsoft Silverlight, the tool is visually appealing and they displayed it on a huge LCD screen giving it Mission Control feel. Instead of monitoring PCs as with the Windows Intune product, it gives you insight into the overall health of the servers running your cloud services.

If everything is running smoothly, a green check mark appears next to the server name, but if there is a problem a red X appears letting you know there could be an issue that requires your attention. The prototype was connected to three servers located somewhere in Microsoft’s vast booth. A picture of the main control panel is shown below:

As administrator, should you encounter a problem,  you can drill down into the server in question, as you can with Windows Intune, discover the nature of the problem and take action to fix it. In the example shown below, the Redmond server needed a patch installed.

Monitoring tools like BSM of course give you a much more comprehensive view of your systems, but this type of tool proves that monitoring in general is becoming a key task for IT, and that having these types of tools in place will become increasingly important moving forward.

This week at the CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany;  Microsoft was showing off Windows Intune, a cloud-based PC monitoring tool that lets IT pros monitor the health of all the Window PCs in their charge from a simple Web-based interface. What’s interesting about it from a BSM standpoint, is that it brings monitoring of this sort into the mainstream.

The system has a series of tools to enable administrators to see problems at glance, whether it’s a malware infestation or a PC that needs a patch. The administrator can troubleshoot problems by drilling down to the PC in question and going so far as seeing all the software installed, whether it’s from Microsoft or another vendor.

The system uses the same anti-virus engine found in Microsoft Security Essentials, the free anti-virus program available from Microsoft for consumers.

If you’re an administrator, once you see a problem, you can fix it on a single machine, a group of machines (which you can define by type, department or any organization you wish). You can even apply a patch to a test bed if you have defined one to test it before deploying.

Because it’s cloud-based, users don’t need to be attached to the network to receive a patch or remove a virus. If your CEO runs into a problem on the road, you can fix it from the Console and any patches or fixes are downloaded to the monitored machine.

While Microsoft hasn’t developed a mobile application to work in conjunction with Intune, you can configure it to receive an email whenever a crisis happens, and you can define what constitutes a crisis, so that you don’t receive email for every little problem reported by the system.

From the email  notification, you can view the console in your mobile phone’s browser.

The product will be available starting on March 23rd and cost $11 per PC per month with volume discounts, depending on the number of PCs you are monitoring.

While this tool doesn’t have the sophistication of a full-scale Business Service Management console, it shows that there is a desire for this type of monitoring on a broad level, and it puts monitoring within reach of even small businesses (although Microsoft doesn’t see this as being limited to the SMB market by any means).