Application Management : recession

HP Software Universe – Mainstage Andy Isherwood

Michael_Procopio — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:57:00 GMT

Andy Isherwood VP, Support & Services kicked off Mainstage.

There are four key areas shown in the picture above. HP announced this week its IT Financial Management offering. Andy likened ITFM to an ERP system for IT. Information Management magazine wrote an article on HP ITFM.

HP has had offerings in IT Performance Analytics and IT Resource Optimization for awhile. HP Cloud Assure was announced was announced in May 2009, HP Unveils “Cloud Assure” to Drive Business Adoption of Cloud Services

Some key points from his opening remarks:

Prepare for coming out of the recession when cutting costs and innovating.
Best in class means being good at all four - aligning to the business, taking out costs, increasing efficiency and consolidation.
Jetblue, Altec and T-Mobile were the winners of the HP Software Award of Excellence.
As an example of the quick ROI companies can get, Altec produced 10% application downtime reduction, 20% faster response time, 15% increase in customer satisfaction and a 300% improve application transaction time in 6 months.
Last year we were HP Software, this year HP Software and Solutions. This was the combining HP Software with HP Consulting and Integration. The net result increased our delivery options. In addition to offering software for in-house use, HP now has EDS, SaaS and continues with it Partners
HP SaaS business is seven years old this year and has 650 customers.

You can read other coverage of HP Software Universe in the ITOpsBlog. There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow:

HPITOps – Covers BSM, ITFM, ITSM, Operations and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

as well as the Twitter hashtag #HPSU09

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio

HP Software Universe - day 1

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:11:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Today was the first day of Software Universe. I had customer meetings all day today. Here are some interesting items from my conversations.

Most said budgets were down in 2009 and will be flat to down in 2010. But a few who were related to government stimulus said theirs will be up.
Co-sourcing and outsourcing continue as ways to reduce costs
A few were focusing on asset management with the express purpose of getting rid of things in the environment they don’t need anymore. They know they are out there but they need to find them first.
Most customers I spoke to said they keep aggregated performance data for 2 years the range was 18 months to 5 years.
There was an interesting discussion about the definition of a business service versus an IT service. The point being made was a business service by definition involves more than IT. While I agree this is a good point, I think the IT industry has focused on business service as a way to say - “I’m thinking about this IT service in the context the business thinks about it not just from my own IT based perspective”
A number of customers have or are about to implement NNMi. If this is something you are interested in check out the NNMi Portal
Many customers are moving to virtualized environment highest percentage I heard was 70%. Another customer forces all internal developers to deliver software as a virtual image.
Another topic was how to monitor out tasked items. For example, some part of what you offer is delivered by a third party - how do you make sure they are living up to your standards. Two methods I heard were 1/ use HP Business Process Monitor 2/ get the 3rd party to send you alerts from their monitoring system.
On the question does your manager of managers send back data to sync the original tools 1 did, 1 didn’t. For the one who did it was part of a closed loop process.
- Monitor tool finds problem send alert to MOM (Manager of managers).
- MOM send event ID to monitoring tool
- Subject matter expert uses monitoring tools to diagnose problem
- Once diagnosed updates monitoring tool which updates MOM

A very productive day for me. I hope some of this is useful information to you.

For additional coverage my blogger buddy Pete Spielvogel is also here and beat me to the first post. You can read his posts at the ITOps Blog.

There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow as well as the hashtag #HPSU09

HPITOps – Covers BSM, Operations and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio

Fuel Efficient IT Operations

adsey007 — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:16:00 GMT

Mike Shaw, BSM Product Marketing.

My wife just bought a BMW 118D. The 118D won the "Green Car of the Year" award in 2008 at the New York Auto Show. It does an amazing number of miles to the gallon (km to the litre / miles to the US gallon). Her old car (also a BMW) did about 26 miles per gallon. The 118D does 63 miles per gallon. Now, the new car is slightly smaller, so we're not comparing apples to apples. However, you get the point -- car manufacturers are pushing fuel economy to new limits. At the cost of acceleration? Not that I've noticed - when you put to the floor in the 118D, it most certainly accelerates.

I think there are parallels between fuel economy and IT operations. During a down-turn, because there is less activity, there is less pressure on IT operations (fewer events, fewer system overloads, etc). This is like a car that is only required to go at 30 miles per hour and accelerate slowly because that's what everyone else on the road is doing. In an attempt to cut the costs of motoring, one might be tempted to adjust the fuel injector so that a smaller amount of fuel is available. This will cut fuel costs during this recessionary period.

BUT, when we come out of recession (some time in 2010??), acceleration will be required. Actually, our competitors will be accelerating - it's up to us whether or not we match them. If we've chosen to create a fuel efficient car (like the BMW 118D), then we can match the required acceleration and have fuel efficiency. If we've decided to simply cut the fuel that goes into the car without any consideration for fuel efficiency, our competitors will accelerate away from us come the upturn.

During a down-turn, we are under pressure to cut IT operations costs. In fact, in a recent IDC study performed for HP Europe, 40% of customers surveyed said they were very likely to cut IT operating costs while 74% said it was likely they would cut IT ops costs.

We have two choices in how we behave in response to this pressure to cut costs. We can take a simple "let's cut people and that's it" path, or do we take the "fuel efficiency" path and create an IT operations to match the BMW 118D. If we just cut people, we'll drown in IT operations stuff when the upturn comes. If we create a fuel efficient IT ops engine, we'll be able to embrace the acceleration when the upturn comes.

This sentiment is echoed by recent comments make by HP's CEO, Mark Hurd (I'm sure Mark will be greatly comforted to know that he and I are in snych on this one). Mark said he didn't want to simply cut heads because when the upturn comes, he won't have the "people muscle" required to handle the upturn. HP's IT department is taking the BMW 118D approach - data centre consolidation, network operations efficiency, centralized event management, pro-active user experience management, constrained self-serve of IT product, etc.

So, how do we create a fuel efficient IT operations? I'm not an expert across the whole IT operations stack, so I'll talk to the area I know about - availability and performance management. And in the interests of keeping these blog posts to a manageable size, I'll do that in the next post.

(Footnote: I'm sure all car manufacturers are producing more fuel efficient cars. My wife just happens to like BMWs, and she only looked at BMW! I'll bet the average HP sales rep wished their customers were so loyal (naive ??))