Infrastructure Management Software Blog : BSM

BSM incognito (Software Universe - Day 1)

pspielvogel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:37:00 GMT

What a great start to Software Universe. The keynotes were great, and the speech by Dick Hoyt on “Yes you can!” was inspirational.

I had the pleasure of moderating one of the customer roundtable discussions. The topic was Consolidated Event and Performance Management. Ten customers joined three HP product experts for a guided discussion about their concerns. The goal of these discussions is to provide a forum for customers to share best practices about how they are using HP products.

We started the session by listing all the topics that people wanted to discuss. My expectation was that we would spend our time discussing Operations Manager, given the track. To my surprise, we spend less than half the time on Operations Manager. The majority of the time we discussed uCMDB and discovery, monitoring applications with Business Availability Center, agentless monitoring with SiteScope, integrating events from Network Node Manager, and of course managing virtualization.

Interestingly, not once did anyone mention Business Service Management or BSM. What does this mean? My interpretation is that customers don’t buy BSM, they buy solutions for monitoring events, applications, or networks. But, vendors of these types of solutions better have ways to integrate all these events together and provide a unified view of the entire infrastructure and how they impact business services. Fortunately, HP provides such solutions, and based on the demos I observed, people are very impressed.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel

Rip and Replace - Never (Operations Manager has 15 years of stability)

pspielvogel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:00:00 GMT

There has been some FUD thrown around by one of our competitors about HP’s commitment to our Operations management products. This nameless competitor is calling for HP customers to migrate to this competing suite of BSM products. They even have specific plays for HP OpenView Operations (now called Operations Center), SiteScope, and several other HP Software products.

Let me be very clear about one thing:
HP Operations Center has NEVER required a rip and replace upgrade!

HP understands the production nature of it IT infrastructure monitoring products and is very sensitive about forcing its customers to migrate. The same cannot be said about our unmentioned competitor. Their migrations are neither easy nor free.

A good example of our commitment to stability is OMi. It introduces significant new functionality such as Topology-Based Event Correlation (TBEC) as an overlay to our existing Operations Manager products that fits seamlessly into existing deployments. This allows customers to leverage their existing investment in management servers, agents, and Smart Plug-Ins - with no rip and replace.

If you have any questions about this or want to discuss our competitors false claims, please let me know.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel

EMA’s Top IT Trends for 2009 - Connecting the Dots

pspielvogel — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:51:00 GMT

Enterprise Management Associates, an IT research company (that HP engages occasionally), published their list of 12 Hot IT Management Trends to Watch for 2009.

Not surprisingly they highlight:

IT management initiatives that deliver measurable cost savings in a tight economy
Continued deployment of technologies that enable IT to be managed as a business
New management challenges introduced by the growth of emerging technologies

While the list of 12 hot trends is interesting at face value, my opinion is that successful companies will be those that can connect the dots and implement several of these ideas in parallel with tight connections among them.

For example, EMA lists CMDB, virtualization, managing IT as a business (BSM or business service management), and service desk as the first four items. Most customers I speak to also mention these as their top priorities.

Fortunately, in these situations, I can point them to HP solutions that cover these areas, complete with integrations among all the functions. In fact, companies that are willing (and financially strong enough) to update their IT operations during the current downturn will be very well positioned to grow during the next upturn if they build an adaptive IT infrastructure now.

What do you think will be the hot IT trends in 2009?

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel

ROI for IT Infrastructure Monitoring - Measuring what Matters

pspielvogel — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:30:00 GMT

I read an interesting post and related ebook by David Meerman Scott on why traditional marketing ROI measures lead to failure. His premise is that measuring marketing metrics such as number of sales leads captured and press mentions lead to the wrong behaviors and in some ways undermine one of the primary goals of marketing, which is to increase sales and market share. So, why is everyone in both marketing and IT so focused on ROI?

The answer is that focusing on the return of your investments in different parts of the business allows you to allocate scare resources and drive the best returns for the shareholders. They key is tracking the metrics that matter. Here are two examples, one from marketing and one from IT.

In previous positions, I have created marketing dashboards that charted many the items that Mr. Scott slammed. Why would I or other seasoned marketing professionals do this? One reason is that some metrics are relatively easy to track (such as leads captured at a trade show or the number of responses to a marketing campaign). Correlating these to the real goal of increasing sales is much trickier and requires much heavier monitoring infrastructure including obtaining accurate input from sales and customers about the number of touches and how individual marketing campaigns or programs influenced each stage of the sales process. Few companies have the will or discipline to do this.

On the IT side, there are also easily-trackable metrics. Server utilization, power consumption, and application uptime appear on many IT dashboards. While these are certainly important, what really matters is how the IT infrastructure supports the business goals. Business owners care about:

Availability - can my users access the applications they need?
Performance - does the application deliver an acceptable response time?
Data accuracy - does the application maintain data integrity?

Again, tracking these business-focused metrics is harder than focusing on ones that are easy to gather from element managers that often accompany systems. But, the right management software and some automated processes make it straight forward to create IT dashboards with mean. This is what the field of business service management is all about. BSM links the underlying infrastructure and applications to business outcomes such as those listed above.

To learn more about BSM, please visit my colleague Mike Shaw’s BSM blog or download a white paper about HP’s approach to BSM.

In future posts, I and my fellow bloggers will address how robust IT infrastructure monitoring contributes to delivering availability, performance, and accurate data

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.