Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

This is a nice synopsis of the challenges of moving to the cloud and virtualization into production.  I enjoy the start of the article regarding when we lost our switchboard operators and the shift we’ve made with the telephone.  Just a year ago, the east coast was hammered with 3 – 3 foot snow storms leaving me to telecommute from my home, built 30 years prior.  I learned far more about the telephone than I wanted and my favorite acronym was POTS (plain old telephone system).  Yes, it is true. Long story short, I went through a full upgrade to fiber, digital phone service and a full duplex digital phone to better enable my communication capabilities from the home office.  There were multiple components to consider and upgrade to gain the full performance I was expecting.

What this article subtly uncovers is the usual cycle of management following new technology adoption.  The short term bang for the buck with new technology is generally the removal of short term hardware and software costs with physical components and licenses.  This time the challenge is further aggravated within the organization through competition with the service providers that are going directly to the business and bypassing IT knowing they can make IT as the bad guy and obstacle.

The article uncovers the flexibility cloud and virtualization bring to an environment, but also the requirement for an integration platform to make sense of the configurations and the monitoring alerts at the component level into business services as they are consumed.  This is the driving force behind the business service management imperative this year that the author also notes.

Operations is holding the business back from the promise of cloud computing because operations is struggling to manage the infrastructure and have no visibility across the infrastructure to insure availability and use the cloud for the agility of improved availability.  Business is demanding the intelligence and communication of service performance, not components, and are seeking to leverage the cloud strategically in their organization as a growth enabler and it is imperative that IT seek to support and make the initiative successful.

If IT continues as the obstacle, the competition is knocking on the business door to take that business.  It is not a single management technology that will solve this challenge, it is the integration platform that provides the end-to-end view and enables building in intelligence to set thresholds to monitor service performance aligned to objectives.  I like to call  it, “the glue and a view” that will make sense of the environment that is the imperative to successful IT operations management in this coming year.

What’s your strategy for Glue and a View?

Michele

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It’s been nearly 50 years since the telephone switchboard, staffed by an “operator,” was phased out as automated phone-switching technologies were introduced. In automating the process of making a call, phone companies removed a burdensome manual hindrance from what was soon to become a much more convenient and ubiquitous part of modern life.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I read this post by a friend of mine and I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly.  Cloud computing by the nature of it screams heterogeneous environment versus a single vendor framework homogeneous environment.  I also screams requirements for an integration platform and business service management practice to manage the services consuming the technology.

I suppose my first question to someone would be “why consider the agility of cloud computing if you are seeking a single vendor framework?”  The speed at which the market is exploding with varying as-a-Service offerings, whether it be infrastructure, applications, storage, etc. indicates that you must consider and determine how best you will monitor and manage these threads of technology as a service fabric holistically.  The requirement for an end-to-end view of the service is possible in real-time with the right approach to integrating the metrics from the various sources of monitoring whether they be in your data center or provided by the service provider.

Finally as this pains me to mention again and will have to be the last time this year, there is taking advantage of the technology for business growth and opportunity, as was done this past Sunday for 5 hours in Texas Stadium.  During opportunities of promotional selling, the ability to dial up/down services, reposition capacity to insure the greatest opportunity to reap the benefit of the customer interaction will be the key to agile computing and business growth in the future.

Michele

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Larry Ellison let it be known at the recent Oracle OpenWorld (an ironic name if I ever heard one) that he saw nothing wrong with companies using just Oracle solutions across the entire enterprise. Of course, he would think that given that he runs Oracle. But these days, more often than not, you are going to find multiple solutions from a variety of vendors, and you need a cloud solution that is going to support them all.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Today is the topic of integration in Business Service Management land.  The nature of taking advantage of cloud and dynamic resources will require open connectivity.  The subscriber maintains the responsibility for overall management of services to their customers.  This in and of itself screams of open systems and integration platforms.

The role of the data center is changing and will continue to rapidly evolve as the service provider, stitching together the best services to drive the growth of it’s business and operate the business efficiently.  This will require integration of subscribed to software services and the sharing of corporate data, integration of management technologies and feeds from the infrastructure running the workloads the subscriber pushes off premise.  The workloads themselves will need to be intelligent and service enabled providing a view of risk of failure as an early warning system just as organizations have today.

In my opinion, this is the reason IaaS is so popular as a first stab at the cloud.  Providing hardware is a bit less complex, but still requires feeds of data for management and monitoring.

Are you considering your integration strategy as you go ‘To The Cloud’?

Michele

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Few people would argue against the efficacy of open, interoperable systems. And yet market forces being what they are, a fully open IT universe has forever been hopelessly out of reach.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I feel like changing things up here in Business Service Management land today.  This blog caught my attention as it describes the leap of going from an independent software vendor (ISV) to a SaaS offering.  It has challenges in how the software is architected so that it can then later be hosted and ultimately used by many customers in a single, multi-tenant environment to take full advantage of the economies of scale.  The fact is most are run in dedicated environments to short cut this challenge.

The piece I find curious and would debate is why should an ISV turn into the service provider?  I would be highly speculative of these situations as most lack the experience to make that leap to manage a data center.  Best to partner with a hosting provider with th expertise in managing and running software and stick to what you know best – the application.

Now relating this back to the topic of Business Service Management, the application needs to be instrumented or as I call it, service enabled.  Data needs to be sent to the monitoring and management technology to provide basic health and availability and thus the need for that middleware testing the performance of the hosting provider as well as application performance data.  The cloud and service provider models bring great agility, but all point to the requirement for an integration platform to provide that end-to-end service view.

How are you measuring your service providers?

Michele

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Sinclair’s recent post Cloud Middleware: The Language Shared by Network Engineers and Developers posits that the cloud space has seemingly maintained a bias towards infrastructure offerings (IaaS) and is now at an “inflection point” where a common layer – the cloud middleware layer – will be required by developers and network managers alike to, as Jeff Kaplan puts it: Bridge the Great Divide in Cloud Computing.  I’d like to expand on this theme.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The theme of integration still rings true.  The key to efficiency remains in the ability to get the most out of what you have and pull it all together for that end-to-end view to avoid impact, proactively manage change and take full advantage of agile technologies.  A key to Business Service Management is fundamentally just this integration capability and the end-to-end live view and if you don’t have it, you are no doubt behind the 8 ball.

2011 is the year of Business Service Management and communicating service performance in terms of service and not technology and that will require integration of all the data points you already have in your data center.

Michele

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Improvements and simplification of data center management software, standardization and virtualization of IT hardware and software assets, and improved integration of new technology into existing systems are all proving to contribute mightily to a company’s bottom-line profit.   (Read Full Article…)

As an end user within an organization, I require a dashboard that I can log into from time to time to see the Services that are offered to me and the health of the services that I currently am using.   There are pieces of this that fall into the Service Catalog arena, but in the end, these services need managed.

The Service Management console needs to be able to slice and dice the infrastructure into the components of the individual services being provided to the end customers.  It should provide a view based on the role the person plays within the organization.  As an end user, I should see the services I can sign up for and the services I am already signed up for.  As a manager, I should be able to see the services that my team is using and the availability of those services.

End Users do not and should not be required to know the servers, routers, NAS, etc supporting a particular service.  To them, it is EMail, CRM, Timesheet and a slew of other Service offerings.  The IT group needs to manage the services in the same way.   When users open tickets, it’s on the service, not the technologies supporting the service.  Business Service Management makes the focus of the management on the Service and the technologies supported them.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary_

Interesting we swing to virtual stall over management tools and the year ahead holds data centers being designed with integration, systems management, hardware, end-to-end views in the planning and implementing.  Good summation of trends in the market and keys to success.

Michele

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What will be the big trends in data center design and operations in 2011? We surveyed some of the leading thinkers in the field, and got their thoughts about the trends that will make news this year. Their predictions cover a lot of ground. But a key theme was the emergence of a holistic approach to the data center, that integrates the many technologies, departments and processes that historically have created challenges for the industry.   (Read Full Article…)

In order to understand the overall health of a service, it requires several management tools such as network monitoring (device up/down, switches, etc), device (CPU, Memory, disk) monitoring, application (logs, SNMP, etc) monitoring, etc.  The common approach is to use more than one tool such as EMC SMARTS, IBM Netcool, BMC Patrol, home grown monitoring tools, etc.   Since there are now multiple tools and multiple consoles with health and availability information, the next common approach is to set up some type of cross product integration like forwarding SNMP events out of SMARTS and Patrol into Netcool.   This is a great approach for integrating management tools into a single console, but the problem is, not everything fits (IE: Network Maps in SMARTS, Knowledge Modules from Patrol).

SMARTS does a great job discovering the network, it provides more than up/down events, but most of that information is not sharable to Netcool via an SNMP forwarding mechanism.  Patrol has the same challenge, not everything is going to fit inside of Netcool.  This is not a negative against Netcool, this is the common challenge with all event managers.  Netcool is providing a lot of value around things it is monitoring directly as well as event correlation, de-duplication, etc.

Forwarding events from one management system into another tool provides value, it should not stop there.   A single unified console with a Service Catalog type of view into the infrastructure with direct and indirect feeds from the management tools is the approach for end to end management.   In the end it places all of the important details at the tips of the Operators fingers and in turn reduces the complexity, knowledge required, multiple tools, etc and in turn you should be able to reduce downtime.

Forwarding events from one system to another is not integrated.  Bi-directional interaction (IE: able to receive alarms/events and perform actions such as Ack and Close on them) between the tools as well as an ability to leverage more than just the alarms/events is important.  Don’t settle on event forwarding, leverage the investment you made with the other tools.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary_

Tobin and I had the opportunity to speak with a new friend, Bojan Simic, yesterday of TRAC Research.  We shared thoughts on what is required to deliver Business Service Management (BSM) and help organizations communicate Service Performance thus Value to their organizations.

As Bojan writes in his last BSM post, there are many management tools, each has a strength and in all likelihood you have many in your environment.  In fact, we shared there are those with a half dozen, those with a dozen and those with >2 dozen.  Yes, I said 2 dozen and greater.  Each of these contributes a piece to the story, but what is really required is the integration platform that brings it all together in a single view representing Service Performance.  By Service Performance we mean, it’s availability, performance, volume of business transactions, etc.

The environment is becoming ever more complex and agile requiring the integration and automation that will bring all the data together that allows your IT organization to take full advantage of the best in breed monitoring tools.  With this end-to-end visibility in real-time you can then make sense of what you have, consolidate where necessary and potentially take advantage of lower cost open source options potentially.

The investment is in the integration and intelligent view of the infrastructure.  Where are you investing today?

Michele

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Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. Many of the organizations surveyed are reporting that, even though they made significant investments in new IT monitoring and management tools and increased the amount of performance data that they have on hand, they are still not seeing any significant improvements in key performance indicators (KPI).  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary __

New technology that removes hardware and thus tangible cost savings is always a short term win.  Managing it long term is generally the afterthought.  Not that I’m against the virtualization and more efficient use of hardware resources, I’m for it.  I am encouraging of planning for the upfront service enablement of it with proper management, however.

Management technologies will be the secondary market, more specifically the integration platform and strategy that brings an end-to-end view of the physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure delivering services.  Many articles are about IT organizations seeing virtualization and cloud as a problem where I see it as just another technology to embrace, deploy and and manage.

Client virtualization is an even more complex environment that will dictate integration, management and the end-to-end visibility of the infrastucture.  The cost savings are great and with a bit of planning to implement the right visibility, those savings can be realized without pain.  Remember the customer calls in because they cannot access something or something is slow, they have no idea how they connect, what runs where, that their desktop image is really a virtual machine running on some server, etc.  The job of the service desk to pinpoint and restore service is impossible without the proper visibility.  So thus, management/integration platforms will become the secondary market of the virtualization explosion.

Regarding the midmarket, I find this curious as they have minimal IT staff and have been in the cloud far longer than most.  Remember the Intuit crash last summer (2010) for several days, that was all about the Quick Books subscribers in the midmarket.  Enterprise organizations could take a queue from the midmarket on embracing the cloud and virtualization.

2011 is going to be an interesting year for us in the data center without a doubt!

Michele

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The new year is starting off well for VMware, which saw its stock jump to a new 52-week high of $94.19 Monday. It then dipped a bit to close at $92.97, which is approximately 4.6 percent higher than its previous closing price, Investors.com reported.

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary ___

In a previous post (Accidental Cloud Leaders – Stealth Cloud Followers – Which Cloud is your IT On?) I wrote about these practices and cited a couple of industry articles.   My advice has always been that you outsource the commodity, why do in-house what everyone else has to do as well?  Why re-invent the wheel, accept a process and tool set that works for the rest of the world.

Focus on that which is unique to your business and is the value add to drive growth.  Unique and custom are seldom good candidates for outsourcing unless you are outsourcing the whole of your IT function and have a service provider also developing your value add innovations in the market.

This will bring a shift in the roles and skill sets in the data center as we know it today.  Service providers managing services with business savvy.  There will be requirements to focus on monitoring and managing the vendors and the requirement for an integration platform that brings the picture together as an end-to-end service regardless of where it is operating.

By all means, embrace the Cloud and as-a-Service providers for the commodity.  Learn how you will monitor and manage it on the commodity.  Apply those learning for the move to the more dynamic IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) to provide agility and on-demand capacity to your mission critical services.

Michele

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Companies looking to go down the SaaS route will find that IT service management is a good starting point says Ovum.  (read full article…)

Being that we’re at the start of a new year and all, I thought I’d launch the 2011 newsletter by sharing predictions from a variety of network and systems management vendor executives.  (read more…)

Many mergers don’t live up to expectations, because they stumble on the integration of technology and operations. But a well-planned strategy for IT integration can help mergers succeed.  (read more…)

I find this article interesting as it hits the core of IT aligning to business, integration and a sound integration platform and strategy.  The link to the Credit Suisse article also discussing integration enabling distribution and regional agility with company level views.

Tom Sanzone, CIO of Credit Suisse, says he was attracted to his position by senior management’s commitment to technology—a commitment demonstrated by his seat on the executive board of Credit Suisse. In that role, Sanzone helps shape the bank’s overall strategy, which is based on the opportunities that his technology organization has created.  (read more …)

In BSMdigest’s exclusive interview, Michele Hudnall, Novell Solution Marketing Manager – BSM discusses the move from IT performance management to Business Service Management, and where integration fits in.  (Read Full Article ….)