February 2008 Archives

CMDB standards, do they exist or not? What about the CMDBf Consortium or CIM with the DMTF? The topic of CMDB is much like discussing religion or politics, volatile and dangerous territory and I find the topic of standards in this arena as annoying as NoVA traffic.

Every so often I run into this question and discussion and I view it as nothing more than fodder because while managing IT infrastructure principally does not change from organization to organization, I have never run into two organizations with exactly the same configurations and the drivers for their CMDB projects especially when an organization is mature enough to apply the CMDB to the services of the organization. So when I’m asked this question I often respond with some of the following questions:

    -- Tell me how you plan to use the standard?
    -- What value do you expect from the standard?
    -- Are you planning to implement their model?
    -- How did you come across this standard?
    -- Are you comfortable with the members of the board?
    -- Do you know who they are?
 
I am normally greeted with the classic “deer in the headlight” stare as most folks have Googled the term or have heard of CIM and CMDBf, but do not truly understand the objectives and the value these models, standards and organizations bring to the table. I do not mean to take the wind out of your sails, but when it comes to CMDB there is no silver bullet standard or model. There are methods, models and processes to leverage (a legal word for plagerism or stealing), but they must be applied to each individual environment.

Gartner has written on the topic of the CMDBf and recommends against waiting on the CMDBf specification for communication / integration to become a standard before implementing a CMDB.  This is a consortium of vendors, but not representative of the whole of the vendor market attempting to define a standard for communication and integration of CMDB’s. I hate to ask a highly controversial question, but wouldn’t you as a consumer like to see these vendors integrate their own software products first and keep them open and able to integrate to other solutions? Just an obvious question from this humble observer.

I find the DMTF as a much more credible standard to leverage as it is a consortium of more than 4,000 active participants, representing 44 countries and nearly 200 organizations. The organization has been around for 15 years and is more of a defacto standards body with participation by more than a select number of vendors and includes end user organizations. However, the CIM model is still not a silver bullet in the arena of CMDB’s either. The down side is the volume of classes and relationships in the CIM model being on the magnitude of a “boil the ocean” project.

In closing I’d like to say that there are no silver bullets in terms of standards, out of the box CMDB’s, however, there are sources that can be leveraged for ideas and starting points. The CIM model is one of those with class definitions with corresponding attributes and allowable relationships. Take what makes sense in your environment and define the base model of relationships as works in your environment starting with a key application or service with high impact to the organization.

-- Michele

This week is the 12th Annual Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference where record numbers of IT professionals (~2000 +) have descended on the town that never sleeps with the theme of “Another Brick in the Wall”.  This year’s conference is one for the record books in more ways than one, but this one cannot stay in Vegas. The Pinkers pulled off a first ever and all I can say is “only in Vegas”. The President of Pink Elephant, David Ratcliffe, opened the conference by riding in on an elephant draped in a Pinker blanket. The questions that picture brings boggles my mind, but the biggest one is, “what will the Pinkers do next year to beat this one”? Only in Vegas will you find a full size elephant available to be ridden into a hotel ballroom dressed in his finest pink outfit! Who says IT guys/gals are just geeks with no sense of humor.

The overriding theme of the conference is the topic and training for ITIL v3, thus many organizations are growing in maturity and seeking to advance their ITSM (IT Service Management) and BSM (Business Service Management) initiatives in order to better integrate to their businesses. Just a year ago, I spent more time explaining what ITSM / BSM are and then how technology might support those initiatives. This year the awareness is there and organizations are seeking solutions that will assist them in reaching higher levels of business integration via BSM technologies.

On the same theme of IT maturity, CMDB (configuration management database) still continues to be a hot topic, but more so in terms of what it provides for initiatives that: better manage service availability/performance, change control and service impact knowledge. Early CMDB initiatives revolved around “finding” and “tracking” things. ITIL v3 brings the focus to the service and while understanding “things” in the environment, it’s the impact these “things” have on a service that is driving more mature CMDB initiatives.

Service catalogs are also another hot topic also brought on by the evolution of the ITIL v3 documentation with the focus on the service. Many organizations are working on initiatives to identify and track their services. The key to this will not only be the initial provisioning of these services, but the ability to track it in the CMDB with the supporting technology infrastructure with service rules enabling the proactive management of the services. This is interesting because it isn’t the service level that is holding the relevance any longer, but the ability to proactively manage risk and impact insuring quality service availability and performance.

ITIL v3 introduces the notion of the 4 P’s:  People, Process, Products and Providers. Managing services is no doubt a complex undertaking if products (technologies) are not leveraged to assist in process efficiency and providing information for analysis versus previous adventures in manual data manipulation.

In my humble observation, this is the year of integrated CMDB’s layered with service catalog definitions and proactive management in terms that the support the business more than ever before.

-- Michele Hudnall

Anyone who has ever had to hike a long mile to the nearest gas station to call AAA will attest to the fact that the world can sometimes seem very large. These days it is almost unheard of for someone to have to walk anywhere to make a call. Last month I arrived at the scene of a car accident and my first action, after ensuring the occupants of the car were safe, was to dial 911 from my blackberry.  The mobile device also provided me with the altitude, latitude and longitude of the accident to better inform first responders.

The world has gone mobile. Nobody can dispute this fact.

The ramifications of a mobile world are broad. Motorola’s fad has turned into a cultural phenomenon with rural villages in developing countries now having mobile phone service, but no sewage. The steady buzz of the blackberry can be heard everywhere from ski lifts in Colorado to weddings in India. In major economies, the workforce is now steadily becoming more mobile, where just a few years ago – it was unheard of to work from home. These days I work out of my home full time, for a company based on another coast, and hook into client systems half a world away on a daily basis.

The advent of the mobile workforce has created a huge infrastructure that requires a somewhat high level of maintenance. If I work remotely in Denver our IT staff in Virginia need to be able to push patches to my laptop, maintain my blackberry and keep my VPN secure, all without affecting my ability to produce the work for which I was hired to do in the first place. Stuck on a client site with no access to the internet, but need to urgently send an email? No problem. Pull out the blackberry and the email has been securely forwarded in a matter of seconds.  Need to quickly get online and log into a clients system to fix an urgent production issue? No problem, the mobile broadband card that came with your laptop will get you on there in seconds.

But what happens when things break? What if security has been compromised or if the new patch that Microsoft just put out renders other work critical software inoperable? What then? I can no longer log into my network let alone my clients’ networks.

This drives the need for a high level of automation, exception based monitoring and what the medical field might call Preventative Care. IT is now a business service and must be treated as such.

Working for a company that pioneered BSM puts me in a unique situation, as I watch this transformation firsthand. In some cases the transformation has been dramatic, with entire workforces becoming mobile. The fact that this has made these workforces more productive is no surprise and to maintain this trend, it is essential that corporations move towards practices like exception based monitoring, Service Level Agreements and proactive interdiction. The future of the mobile workforce lies in managing the business of IT as a service to its customers.

Many years ago, when I was deployed as a soldier, my mother would write me a letter twice a week to help me keep up with what was happening back home. My replies were brief and didn’t do much to assuage the worry that most mothers feel in that situation. When I would finally come home, my mother didn’t always recognize my face – this was a time before digital photos – and it had been so long since she had seen me.

My how times change, because by contrast, I recently was able to follow my friends as they traveled around the globe for 12 months, receiving almost instantaneous updates on where they were and what they were doing that day, including photos, video and comments from several of our other friends. It’s perhaps an understatement to say we live in the world of Web 2.0, where the Web has become a tool that helps people stay in touch, collaborate or just post random thoughts that others may want to read. The network truly has become the computer.

In this new world of continuous information flow, software has become abstract, moving away from the computer in favor of Software as a Service (SaaS) based applications. SaaS applications have many advantages over traditional applications, in terms of mobility (you need never migrate your information when you move to a new computer) and very basic system resource requirements (they are designed to run on your browser, and are powered by a server that could potentially be on the other side of the globe), but most importantly, SaaS applications have a very broad market appeal due to the low overhead involved with not having to design, implement and maintain the system. It is this low overhead that lowers the entry bar for many small to medium sized businesses into realms that would otherwise be outside of their financial and technical capabilities.

Interestingly enough, for Business Service Management (BSM) vendors like Managed Objects, this opens up new opportunities to deliver SaaS-based BSM offerings that will have broad market mid-tier market appeal -- especially through its partner channel.

With so many businesses entrusting mission critical data and applications to remote service providers, SaaS based businesses, more than ever, need to examine their service management architectures in order to continually improve the service being provided to end users who are increasingly reliant on these services. Seeing as many SaaS based applications are still in their infancy, it remains to be seen whether this will indeed happen. - Jonathan Golan

When I joined Managed Objects as CEO in 1999 as the 9^th employee, few of us could see the future then:  the dot-com bubble, the recession and the long hard slog that led the technology community to where we are today:  the rise of Web 2.0.

Managed Objects just turned 10 and while we’ve accomplished much in the last decade – topped 100 employees, 300 customers and opened offices in a long list of countries to the extent it might rival tour stops on the back of a U2 t-shirt – today is special; I have the honor of posting our first entry to the Managed Objects blog.

In the coming, weeks, months and years, people from all departments in our firm will author entries.   As the first company to evangelize BSM, Managed Objects is no stranger to contrarian positions and therefore, some ideas you might find agreeable, while others you may not.  In either case, I can assure readers that all entries will be interesting.

Stay tuned... - Siki Giunta