BSM @ Gartner ITxpo 2008

There were a lot of acronyms and keywords being bandied about at Gartner ITxpo this year. A Google search on the minds of the attendees would have generated a lot of hits on SOA, Globalization, Sourcing, Enterprise [Web] 2.0, “Free” Software, SaaS, and Cloud Computing. Social Networking was also an interesting thread that passed through all the other topics that attendees were abuzz about.

A large majority of the exhibiting vendors of course tagged their displays, demonstrations, and 30 second pitches with these terms to ensure that they too garnered as much attention as possible. I had a number of discussions with existing Managed Objects customers as well as parties interested in BSM about these trends and how to incorporate them into a cohesive strategy.

The BSM approach to dealing with these varied (and sometimes opposing) technologies is to focus on the service as a whole vs. individual moving parts and silos. As a customer of the power company, I expect that a flip of a light switch produces a predictable outcome every time – the lights come on. If they don’t, I don’t expect to hear details from the power company about all the potential issues that they are looking into ranging from failures in relay stations, downed power lines, problems with grids in neighboring states, etc. I count on them knowing the scope and source of the problem very quickly and getting it resolved. Electricity is an essential service and that level of understanding of what’s going on in the various moving parts of the power business is crucial.

Translating this type of operational model to IT management is what produces an effective BSM strategy. With IT becoming more complex (SOA, Enterprise 2.0, open source) and diffuse (Globalized, xSourced, SaaS, Cloud Computing) simultaneously, it is crucial to provide the best-of-breed management solutions for SMEs in each of these areas. Stopping here, however, leads to the all too common trap of too many tools and not enough answers. The key ingredient is a federated system that combines KPIs from each of the specialized solutions and allows a business level view to be constructed from it, that is, a true Manager of Managers with customizable dashboards for all parties with a vested interest in service availability and performance.

Implementation of this BSM strategy requires access to data connectors that span multiple vendors’ management solutions, expansion opportunities for the next generation of platforms, and most importantly – an analysis engine that can handle the complexity of the combined data feeds and make it available to a flexible presentation layer for the users of the system.

Although there were many different solutions to these challenges presented at ITxpo, a successful BSM deployment should offer a simple and personalized iGoogle-like experience for managing and viewing content of underlying IT infrastructure and the applications that run on top of it, and that’s one thing that everyone agreed on.

-- Abbas