Let's face it, the concept of bringing together all of your IT infrastructure monitoring into a single "NOC" or Operations Bridge has been around for years. Mainframe folks will tell you they were doing this stuff 30 years ago.

Unfortunately, in the distributed computer systems world, a lot of organizations have still not managed to successfully consolidate all of their IT infrastructure operations. I see a lot of companies who believe that they have made good progress, often they've managed to pull together most of the server and application operations activities, maybe minimized the number of monitoring tools that they use.

But when you dig below the surface, often there will be a separate network operations team, and maybe an application support team that owns a 'special' application. And of course the admins who are responsible for the roll out of the new virtualization technology - that just "cannot" be monitored by the normal operations tools and processes.

And that's the problem... Often there is resistance from a number of different angles to initiatives which try to pull end-to-end infrastructure monitoring into a single place. Legacy organizational resistance is probably the biggest challenge - silos have a tendency to be very difficult to 'flatten'.

Another common theme is that the technical influencers (architects, consultants, application specialists etc.) in the organization create FUD that the toolset used by the operations teams is not suitable for monitoring the new technology that they are rolling out. They need to use their own special monitoring solution or the project will fail. Because it's a new technology and everyone is scared of a failed rollout, management acquiesces and another little fragmented set of monitoring technology, organization and processes is born. Every new technology has potential for this - I've seen it happen with MS Windows, Linux, Active Directory, Citrix, VMware - the list is endless.

So what? I hear you say, what's your point? Well I'm seeing a lot of organizations revisiting the whole topic of consolidating their IT operations and establishing a single Operations Bridge - and making some significant changes.

Why now? Simple - to reduce the Operational Expenditures associated with keeping the lights on. In the current economic climate organizations are motivated 'top down' to drive cost out wherever they can. Initiatives that deliver cost reductions in the short term get executive sponsors. There is also a lot lower tolerance for the kinds of hurdles that used to be raised as objections - organizational silos get flattened, tool portfolios are rationalized.

It's not just about cutting cost of course. Simply reducing headcount would achieve that goal, but the chances are that the quality of IT service delivered to the business would suffer, and there would be direct impacts on the ability of the business to function.

Of course, the trick is to consolidate into an Operations Bridge, and be able to deliver the same or higher quality IT services to the business but with reduced cost. Often the economies of scale and streamlined, consistent processes that are enabled by an Operations Bridge will deliver significant benefits - and reduce OpEx.

This is where HP's Operation Center solutions have focussed for the last 12 or 15 years. In my next post I'll talk about where HP see the next significant gains being made - where are we focusing so we can help our customers to take their existing Operations Bridge and significantly increase efficiency and effectiveness.

In the meantime, if you want to read a little more about the case for consolidated operations, take a look at this white paper "Working Smart in IT Operations - the case for consolidated operations".

For HP Operations Center, Jon Haworth.