Business Service Management Hub

At the recent Microsoft Management Summit, Microsoft released details of an upcoming upgrade to its System Center product that will let IT pros monitor private clouds from the System Center console. It’s significant because it increases Microsoft’s presence in the cloud monitoring space.

System Center currently is a made up of a series of products that let IT pros monitor the server infrastructure inside their organizations including a configuration manager, a virtual machine manager, data protection manager and so forth. There are two key pieces in the upgrade.

The first piece is called Advisor and according to Infoweek,  it monitors the system and collects data in Microsoft Azure. As the system builds a knowledge base of configuration information, it sends out alerts of potential trouble spots.

It’s important to note that this product is focused on a Windows Server environment, but for Microsoft shops, the new Advisor piece provides a way to monitor your server configuration in the private cloud and find trouble before it affects a large number of users.

The other piece is software for managing and deploying a self-service portal. If this sounds familiar, it should because recently we wrote about the Cisco purchase of newScale, a product that provides Cisco customers with the same ability to build a self-service portal.

It’s clear that the big players are getting into monitoring and private cloud provisioning in a big way, and that’s because there is a developing market for these tools as organizations look for ways to understand and build private clouds in-house and take advantage of the economies of scale that private cloud services can bring. Vendors like Microsoft and Cisco are clearly looking to build or purchase tools that meet these customer requirements.

Monitoring is a key provision of private cloud computing because it’s essential to have a big picture view across the entire organization’s infrastructure. While Microsoft’s solution is typically Microsoft-centric, it is interesting from a BSM perspective because it is about monitoring, deploying and understanding the IT infrastructure.

While many organizations will need more than a Microsoft-only approach, the fact that Microsoft is in the space, should be proof positive that it’s something every IT pro needs to be paying attention to, whether yours is a Microsoft shop or a more heterogeneous environment.

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

Cisco today announced they had grabbed newScale, a service catalogue and service portal software developer. The purchase gives Cisco a valuable piece in the emerging private cloud business, one which makes it easier for customers to create an in-house service center.

A private cloud operates in the same fashion as a public one, offering web-based services, but instead of venturing outside the firewall, you get all your services in-house. This offers a number of advantages from a service and security standpoint, and provides a way to charge back customers for exactly  what they use. Your users like it because they only pay for services they use and you can plan resource requirements better from an IT perspective. As I wrote in a blog post earlier this month, Cost Transparency is a Two-way Street, “when your users understand the relationship between cost and consumption, everybody wins.”

What that means essentially is that by placing a set of clearly defined services inside a delivery mechanism like the one that Cisco bought with newScale, you can provide a clear set of costs associated with usage. That’s because, a service portal gives you the means to create a “store” where your users come for standard services offerings. For instance, you might set up a SharePoint collaboration site and a SharePoint file storage site. It provides a way to get in-house services as easily as going online to get services from say Google or Yahoo!.

Parvesh Sethi, senior vice president of Cisco Services said in a statement that they bought newScale because they were seeing a need in the market for this type of service. “Cloud computing represents a major shift in the evolution of the Internet, and as more customers migrate from traditional IT infrastructures, the need for rapid self-provisioning and efficient management becomes increasingly critical,” he explained.  This purchase does precisely that by providing Cisco with a tool the enables customers to create self-service portals quickly.

It’s a smart play because more companies are looking in this direction and looking for tools to help them set up service portals for their private cloud offerings. The deal is expected to close some time in the second half of the year.