Today was the first day of Software Universe. I attended the parts of the Customer Advisory Board meeting that pertained to Operations Manager.

Some common issues emerged from the discussions:
Customers still face challenges regarding integrating information from disparate IT silos. They are looking for a manager of managers to consolidate events into a single console. One customer from the health care industry said in his presentation “a single pane of glass does not mean the same pane of glass”. The implication is that front-line operator need an event console, second tier subject matter experts need advanced diagnostic tools, and executives need a dashboard that just shows what is running.

In jest, someone from the financial services industry suggested that business executives could use the event console, just on a 30 minute delay, analogous to a stock ticker that runs on a delay. This would give the operators time to fix problems before the execs panicked and started calling people in the middle of the night. Eliminating these calls was a high priority of the IT executives in the room.

What got people excited:

• OMU 9.0, especially the new Web-based admin GUI that allows multiple operators to work in parallel in different roles.
• OMi, especially the ability to connect BAC end-user events to business services and more quickly identify the root cause of problems.

More from the show floor during the week. 

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel