Business Service Management Hub

Cloud computing is clearly having a huge impact on the technology industry. Recent reports have US CIO Vivek Kundra putting pressure on departments to get involved in cloud computing and to do it quickly. Just the other day news reports surfaced that Microsoft is intending to devote 90 percent of its R&D budget to the cloud. If these major players are in, what’s holding you back?

Now, just because the other kids are doing is not necessarily a good reason to shift your entire IT focus to the cloud. Think about what your mom said: If all the kids jumped off a bridge, would you? Peer pressure is a powerful force, but it shouldn’t be the driving force behind your IT decisions. It should be about how it maps to your particular business requirements.

But when Microsoft announces that it’s devoting $9 of every $10 to cloud development, you have to at least wonder what the heck is going on. This isn’t some small amount of money we are talking here. As Kevin Jackson points out on the Forbes Cloud Musings blog, “Since Microsoft’s annual R&D budget this year is $9.6 billion, this investment translates to a massive $8.6 billion.” That’s some serious dough.

What’s more, Microsoft’s bread and butter is on the desktop where mainstays Windows and Office continue to generate the majority of the profits. But perhaps Microsoft sees the future in the cloud and realizes that the money from these sources could dry up at some point as companies move away from expensive licensing and toward cloud-based solutions (like Office 365).

I’m not sure what Microsoft’s long-term strategy is or how much you can believe the hype about their foray into the Cloud, but the company is clearly spending money there and hope to at least have a stake. Windows Azure, the company’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), is certainly getting some attention.

But regardless of what Microsoft really does, the fact they are making this noise about the cloud is a bell weather, and as such you need to at least be paying attention. It doesn’t mean you have to put that kind of percentage of your budget in the cloud today, but you have to at least begin looking at it and the pieces you will need in place to help build and monitor that cloud when the day comes to flip the switch. All the kids are doing it may not be any better a reason now than when you are kid, but in this case, maybe there’s a good reason they’re all doing it, besides being slaves to fashion.

Photo by Web_Anna on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

While attending the CeBIT technology trade fair in Hannover, Germany, I saw a presentation by Paul Strong, CTO at VMware for Europe, Middle East and Africa, where he spoke about the relationship between cloud services and IT.  One thing he said really struck me: “When you pull apart software, you’re pulling out business processes.”

It’s a notion that really makes sense, but he took it even further. He said that 80-85 percent of your business costs are related to software. If I had been asked that before seeing this presentation, I think I would have said hardware was more costly, but Strong pointed out that this is because it’s very difficult for most enterprises to achieve the kinds of economies of scale to bring cost down. What’s more, he said that complexity drives cost.

That brings to mind the Dawn of a New Day farewell email that Ray Ozzie sent to Microsoft employees to announce his departure last fall in which he said, “complexity kills.” Specifically he said:

Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security challenges.  Complexity causes administrator frustration. And as time goes on and as software products mature – even with the best of intent – complexity is inescapable.

Software complexity is not only bad from a design standpoint, it also has a profound impact on IT and how they deal with patch management and upgrades and the myriad of problems and challenges associated with maintaining software in the enterprise.

That’s why Strong says moving non-critical processes to the cloud makes so much sense because cloud software vendors remove a lot of the complexity associated with enterprise software maintenance. They reduce the processes to a smaller, more manageable number of patterns, and they deal with upgrades and server maintenance for you.

From  your perspective, it changes the role of IT. As Strong said, it enables IT to return to its core purpose to map technology to business needs and to make smarter choices. Your job is no longer babysitting the software, but watching the entire system and making sure those systems work as they should and meet the needs of your organization.

Photo by Jimmie, Jackie, Tom and Asha on Flickr. Used under the 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).