June 2008 Archives

We’re thrilled to see the buzz gathering around our newest announcement - analysts and media alike seem to agree that we’ve added something new and noteworthy to the market. We think this kind of innovation is especially welcome in a market that has little confidence in those larger competitors.

With myCMDB, we’ve really unleashed the power of the CMDB by adding the community features that should logically be part of any project that requires the input from so many different people within an organization. Heck, using email and voicemail for CMDB communication is like using a rotary dial for a smartphone.

Instead, we’ve brought CMDB communications and process into the 21st century, by adding a combination of Facebook interactivity, Wikipedia information quality management, and Google’s searching model. Basically, these features make it easier to get more users involved in its creation and maintenance, which means the CMDB quickly becomes a more accurate representation of the infrastructure, relationships, and services. This allows organizations to use the CMDB to better control the impact of change and move it into a decision support role.

Stay tuned as the buzz continues to build!

If I had a crystal ball, I’d look to see the IT of the future. The flow of data, streamlined communications and an accurate map of the relationships between applications, technology, and the business -- the IT future would be clear, in fact, so crystal clear even the line of business would enjoy the view into IT.

Current CMDB projects look more like information warehouses for IT – developed and maintained by small teams of IT technologists. Yet, the vision for the CMDB is much larger and broader than many current implementations would have us believe. In the coming months and years, the CMDB will evolve into the valuable corporate asset it was envisioned to be – providing critical decision support capabilities for both IT and business users alike.

Interestingly, realizing this vision for the CMDB is not beyond the realm of existing technology. In fact, it’s not a technology problem at all.

As I’ve stated in a previous post, 70% of the data needed for a CMDB already exists in the enterprise. What’s needed is the mechanism by which to tie this data together, and present it in a manner that can be easily updated by the enterprise and consumed by the business.

This mechanism is integration – and it exists today. The interface for consumption might be borrowed from social networking concepts, where the GUI reflects the community. Views would be based on organization role – for the business manager, the IT director and the service manager respectively – and derived from the same corporate asset: the CMDB.

-- Siki

The power and pitfalls of knowing every side of the story

As a manager, your company’s ability to execute effectively cannot and does not depend on your ability to scale your own execution across superhuman multiples.

Instead, it depends on two things – first, it requires a refined ability to assimilate data from a number of different sources to formulate an accurate and complete picture of the business as it stands today – and then, leveraging that picture to formulate a clear and concise blueprint and course of action for where the business needs to be in the future.

Secondly, it depends upon your ability to gain buy-in and participation across a number of different constituents – both within your team and across the company.

The challenge of building a blueprint, gaining buy-in, and then orchestrating work across a broad spectrum of resources, is what business management excellence is all about.

Interestingly, there are a number of similarities between effective business management and effective IT management – particularly, as it relates to the CMDB. From data assimilation, to blueprint, to plan of action – the CMDB provides a central focal point -- an accurate and complete view of the IT infrastructure.

And yet, CMDB data inaccuracy is the number one cause for CMDB project failures -- followed closely by a lack of broad adoption of the CMDB across a broad set of constituents within both IT and the business.

Going forward, the CMDB must be an absolutely accurate, trusted source of IT infrastructure information. In addition, the CMDB must be widely accepted and adopted across a broad set of IT and business users within the enterprise. IT organizations will each need to address both of these challenges for CMDB projects to be successful over the long-haul.

Don’t think Managed Objects hasn’t noticed.

-- Siki

The Economist recently tackled the trend around cloud computing and the issue of energy usage in datacentres. It's amazing to think that datacentres collectively now create more carbon emissions than Argentina or the Netherlands. The author of the article is slightly cynical about hardware makers who are hyping the issue and suggests that datacenter owners are burying their heads in the sand as far as their inherent inefficiency is concerned.

And rightly so, because the challenges within the datacentre go far deeper than simply the hardware and energy they use. We're likely to see a sea-change in the way datacentres are run. As the rate of growth in datacentre-usage keeps sky-rocketing, datacentres are not only going to have to learn to cope with growing energy consumption, but they're going to be challenged to optimise how services are run and maximise capacity. To that end, we've started thinking about how BSM can contribute to the datacentre environment.

The considerable disadvantage that datacentre administrators face, now (and particularly with the advent of technologies such as virtualisation) is that they don't know what applications use what servers. One huge problem that datacentres - and indeed the wider IT community faces - is that when it comes to the wide-scale management of software, companies fail to understand how software interrelates and crucially, the relationship between IT assets and the commercial value of the services they provide. Without the ability to understand this, datacentres have little chance of powering down components that are commercially not critical. They have even less chance of prioritising, from a business perspective, the usage of each component and correcting issues that arise.

Until datacentres develop to the point that they can understand the commercial value of services on both a macro and a granular level, they won't be able to control change within their systems, or pinpoint the impact of potential changes. They certainly won't be able to report to their customers that they are saving the planet.

Sean