Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

I’m not so sure I agree with this latest in the cloud development, Desktop-as-a-Service.   How many times do you rent this session before it would have been cheaper to just supply the device with software or deploy a VDI in your environment?  Renting is never cheaper.

However, it does insure a standard configuration and provides the most current version of the operating systems and productivity tools.

The other component I’m not sure I buy into is why the business should incur additional charges to accommodate employees bringing their own devices.  This will require both the rental and subscriptions to air time where wi-fi is not readily accessible.  We all use our devices for both personal and professional reason, so when does the cost of the subscriptions roll from the business to the person?

I haven’t been able to find the pricing to run the numbers, but enabling employees to access files and applications from their personal devices and from any location is part of doing business these days.  Paying by the drink and buying the air time for both personal and professional use smells like a pricey proposition.  If there were not revenue in it, the hosters would not be in business.

I do see having access for emergency situations useful.  Management must also be baked into the service as well to insure quality and availability.

Just because it can be in the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean it must be in the cloud.  Where is your VDI, in the cloud, sourced or on premise?

Michele

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Desktop-as-a-Service is an interesting way for IT execs to provide cloud-based Windows desktop sessions, as well as shared resources such as storage. DaaS can help companies roll out new desktops and support Bring Your Own Device policies.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The pay-as-you-go model counts on customers over using without regard to usage thresholds, much like company provided mobile phones.  Cloud providers make it easy to get started and even easier to over use.  I commend Amazon for putting some basic thresholds and emails in place, but the responsibility to monitor and manage services resides with the customer.

The monitoring, management and security of services and workloads in the cloud are the responsibility of the customer to instrument.  These are the hidden and unaccounted for costs of the cloud.  That which sounds cheaper on the surface is rarely cheaper.  Frustration levels are high and the race to the cloud is fast, beware of hidden costs.

It is the responsibility of the customer to manage the service provider, monitor and manage service quality, security and usage.

How are you managing your service provider?

Michele

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Amazon Web Services users can now start receiving billing alerts that help them continuously monitor their cloud costs, the company said on Thursday.

10 most powerful cloud computing companies

One of the basic tenants of cloud services like those offered by Amazon is the pay-as-you-go model, where the eventual monthly bill will reflect actual usage. But when usage varies from hour to hour, it is always a good idea to log in to the AWS portal and check account activity on a regular basis, according to an Amazon blog post.

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

BYOD makes the headlines, it takes just one to spoil the party.  Mobility whether internally issued or personal devices all carry management and security management concerns and challenges.

After 20+ years from the days of mainframe, to distributed networks, now to highly mobile device du jour IT organizations must break the cycle of new technology first, management later.  Headlines are always an eyeopener for a wake up call.

IT is being outsourced rapidly and must develop the discipline to manage new technology and manage it accordance to business priorities.  For instance, many engineering firms are arming their field engineers with mobile devices.  Managing that mobile infrastructure is driving the business and must be managed as such as all services are not created equal.

This is a light offense and an article worth a grin, but should be an eyeopener too.  The worst is yet to come in the headlines.

Are you managing or hoping no one spoils the technology party?

Michele

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Mimecast CEO Peter Bauer recently found himself at the intersection of consumerization and IT management, falling victim to personal data loss as the result of the internal management policy he himself helped establish.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The first question should really be “Do you know the value in managing consumer devices on your network.” Good Business Service Management practices would start with an evaluation of the cost to manage a new device and the value it provides to the business over doing something else that would drive revenue growth.  This goes to a post from last week on the very same topic.

There is no doubt that as data centers and services advance the first devices evaluated will be mobile, however, just because it is there and is someones new gadget doesn’t mean that it is a must to support.  Does it drive revenue?  Will it aid in customer retention? How does it make the environment more productive and efficient?

Practices of good service value evaluations are a must have these days with the exponential growth and proliferation of new devices and technologies.

How do you evaluate Service Value before signing up for support and management?

Michele

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Smartphones and other devices such as the Apple iPad have clearly reached critical mass. The iPad alone is expected to reach sales of 65 million units this year. While we call them consumer devices, a hefty percentage are owned by people who want to use their phone or tablet computer to access corporate e-mail and other applications. Chances are good that you are already dealing with workers at your organization wanting to connect their devices to your network.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The lack of clarity and transparency of IT services as consumed by the business is a catalyst for many of the service providers and as-a-Service offerings.  The service providers are in business to grow and drive revenue as should IT organizations.  Business Service Management practices and knowing your services is first step in achieving this transparency in measuring services both for quality and cost.

For many years IT has pushed back against such transparency and as the article ends, it could work in their favor to provide this visibility to costs.  It’s like cell phone minutes, as long as I’m not paying the bill I just use the phone without regard.  As soon as I had to assess my own usage and purchase my own phone, I had an eye opening experience.  You mean when I was in Europe it was like $2.00/minute and then there was roaming too!  Yikes!  Why didn’t someone just tell me and I would have planned accordingly and may not have used the phone as much or as often.

As long as all services are created equal and there is cool mobile and remote technology to use, the business will continue to ask for the highest levels of service and support for 24×7, where ever I am and on whatever device I choose to use.  If the costs were exposed and the tables turned to ask the questions “what is the value”, we might find the value isn’t really there and the business would say turn that off.  Currently, IT doesn’t have the right to ask the business value question until they can answer the cost question.

Do you know what your services cost and what the value is they deliver?

Michele

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For years, enterprise IT departments could be fuzzy about the costs of individual IT services and applications, but tight budgets and the relative clarity of cloud computing costs have forced CIOs into sharp focus.  (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_

“Visionaries have an innovative and disruptive approach to the market, but their services are new to the market and are unproven,” Gartner  Yes, this does describe Amazon and EC2, but does that mean it is 2 steps behind the Leaders?  Not often are there times to truly innovate and redefine a market.  Amazon and EC2 are redefining an industry regardless of internal enterprise IT or the consumer market.  Their customers are a mixture now over the traditional IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IT service providers.

To the innovator go the initial spoils, revenue in the market.  Will or can they sustain that leadership will play out over time.  Given where we are in the life cycle of this disruptive technology (mostly development and test) in Enterprise IT shops, EC2 brings just the agility required for businesses to drive agile development of new products and services and move to market faster than ever before mimicking the consumer market.

In order to take these early development projects to production, yes, more formalized monitoring and management will no doubt need to be baked in.  Now the question becomes, who bakes that in and supplies that information?  Isn’t that agent part of the workload that is packaged and shipped out to the cloud to run on the subscribed to infrastructure?  I call this service enabling your workload and injecting intelligence into it for purposes of monitoring, securing and communicating the performance of the workload the subscribers responsibility.  Right?  The provider is responsible for the infrastructure your workload runs on, not what’s going on in the workload, that remains the responsibility of the subscriber.

I applaud Amazon and say keep challenging the status quo.  IT and the traditional proven providers need to think a little out of the box to meet the demands of market dynamics in market time! What do you think?

Michele

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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report has placed Amazon’s cloud computing service in one of its lower tiers, saying that for all of Amazon’s commercial success it is “visionary” but “unproven.”  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary__

Absolutely the jobs are shifting.  Technology and the monitoring, configuring and management of it is commodity.  Much of it could be run in the cloud, by a service provider, managed by SaaS offerings and open source – the choices are endless today in configuring the right sized and right sourced data center.

As in my previous commentary on the post regarding business performance and the requirements in 2011 for IT to transform itself, this is the transformation.  IT is no longer about technology monitoring and managing, it is about communicating business performance and using technology to drive business growth and performance.  This is and will shift the traditional technologist jobs to the service providers and the analytical and service management roles inside the data center.

Is your IT and data center tranforming yet?

Michele

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The U.S. Labor Dept. said that the economy added 103,000 jobs overall, and led to an unemployment rate reduction from 9.8% to 9.4%, a broader trend that also appeared in tech hiring.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary __

Beth’s opening statement regarding the Aberdeen findings sums it up, mid size organizations are under performing larger organizations.  Pick up the Fortune 500 list as I do each year and look at the top 5 in each industry.  There are 3 things that always standout:

1. Those that lead, know how to harness the commodity of technology to not only power, but drive business.
2. Those that lead, lead by magnitudes greater than their followers.
3. Those that innovate, change how a market functions, don’t always stay on top.  Check out where eBay is for example.  The innovator often gets leapfrogged.

Beth references a previous article my good friend Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester is quoted offering the following 5 pieces of advice:

1. Consolidate management tools
2. Invest in Network Change and Config Mgmt
3. Application awareness
4. Pay for analysis, not monitoring
5. Get more from existing tools

2011 will be the year IT transforms to measure business performance and ties the analytics to the data to drive business performance, not IT or technology performance.  Use technology for the mundane and routine, measure performance, reduce costs, do more with less and measuring the network and application performance regardless of where it resides will be key to having that complete view of business performance to use technology to improve that performance in clever ways.

Michele

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If you’re overseeing performance management initiatives at a midsized organization — one with annual revenue between $50 million and $500 million — then you probably have a thing or two to learn from your counterparts at larger enterprises.  (Read Full Article …)

The Hub Commentary     __

I tend to agree with the increased focus on performance and end-user monitoring and believe it will be driven by the requirement to monitor the service providers as cloud services are incorporated.  Controlled change management with an end-to-end view of the complex infrastructure will work to mitigate risk and both will rely on an integration platform and strategy.

Open Source monitoring for the commodity will also rise in popularity and implementation, but I don’t agree with building more into the monitoring tools or waiting for one vendor to build a single framework.  A single vendor framework is and has never been built ground up to monitor and manage the data center.  The big four all grow through acquisition of many technologies and cobble them together through data layer integrations.  No offense to my vendor friends, I’ve been a product manager for one of them and did exactly the same thing after an acquisition was made – it’s the quickest way to claim integration victory.

I believe we will see data centers leveraging Open Source, Cloud services for both Services (commodity management – ala ITSM tools) and Infrastructure (to test out excess capacity and demand flexibility options); rise in both availability and performance monitoring for new technology and delivery methods; and end-to-end visibility requirements to mitigate risk and speed restoration time.  All of this is solved and future proofs the data center by considering a  sound integration platform and strategy pulling together the physical, virtual, cloud environment into a single view for monitoring, managing and measuring.

Push your suppliers to build the best monitoring/management tools possible and leverage an integration platform to bring the best of your investments together to transform your data center into a service provider.  Oh yeah, 2011 will be the tipping for data center transformation into a service provider – not technology manager.

Michele

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Depending on where they stand in the overall environment, network and systems management companies hear different concerns from their enterprise IT clientele. Here’s a look at how the year will shake out in a number of different areas … (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…)

The indisputable economic benefits of cloud computing for certain applications drive businesses to consider building clouds of their own, but they need to make sure they are prepared before jumping into the cloud.  (read more…)

Unisys on Tuesday introduced a dedicated, hosted computing service that lets customers quickly add extra capacity for short-term use, a feature Unisys says is unique among what it calls “hosted private clouds.”  (read more …)

It’s been an incredibly interesting, exciting, and tumultuous year for cloud computing. But, as the saying goes, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Next year will be one in which the pedal hits the metal, resulting in enormous acceleration for cloud computing.  (read more …)

Some enterprise IT executives struggling with their service management initiatives are finding hope in the cloud.
That’s the upshot of 1,000 senior enterprise IT decision-makers surveyed independently by Vanson Bourne on HP’s behalf. In a survey report issued last week, “IT State of the Nation 2010,” Vanson Bourne notes that 41% of … (read more…)

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is designed to help cut costs and streamline IT operations, and is finding converts seeking to maintain regulatory compliance as well. Initially popular overseas, ITIL is growing in use in the U.S., where four out of 10 organizations will adopt it by 2007, according to Meta Group (now part of Gartner). Former Meta analyst Michele Hudnall, now director of service management at software vendor Managed Objects, recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie about the realities of ITIL and how corporate IT shops can make the most of their implementations.  (Read Full Article…)

This week, Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie chats with Michele Hudnall, director of service management at software vendor Managed Objects, about the realities of ITIL.  (Listen to the Podcast….)

Gartner says 80% of downtime is due to human error and problems created by process, such as inadequate testing and unauthorized changes. And research from Managed Objects, a provider of business service management tools, shows many of these failures come from custom or home-grown applications. Network World’s Jason Meserve talks about the issue of application outages and what can be done to prevent them with Michele Hudnall (12:34)  (Listen to this Podcast…)