Recently in service level management Category

As a follow up to my recent post titled “End User Experience Monitoring as lynchpin for BSM,” I spoke with Eden Shochat, CTO of Aternity, to learn more about their offerings in this space and discuss unique contributions they could make as part of a larger BSM strategy. For those who aren’t familiar with them, Aternity provides a new class of Application Performance Management software via its Frontline Performance Intelligence Platform.

An excerpt of our very interesting discussion is presented below:

Abbas: I’ve described the role that EUEM solutions like Aternity’s Frontline Performance Intelligence play in the context of BSM, but what is unique about your technology in this area?

Eden: Aternity’s Platform fuses application, desktop and user performance monitoring with real-time business intelligence. This approach generates the most accurate and comprehensive user experience information from multiple levels of the network and application stack on the end-user machines (physical or virtual). By combining this unique data with correlation, clustering and anomaly detection analysis algorithms, Aternity’s Platform is able to perform preemptive problem detection, usage & usability analysis, fact-based capacity planning and activity-oriented compliance. 

For example, in one session on CMDBs, in excess of 50% of the audience (by show of hands) said they were currently implementing a CMDB. Two-percent admitted they were on their second try having failed the first time around. No surprise integration was routinely cited as the main culprit and that’s an area Managed Objects has certainly mastered.

StackSafe has posted some notes from the show here – and we’d like to offer some bits and bytes – mostly paraphrases – as well:

>> Congratulations to Cindy from Hallmark (photo nearby) who won our Wii raffle.

>> IT is good at measuring performance, but poor at measuring quality.  A help desk that aims to solve 60% of incidents on the first call is really just encouraging staff to close a ticket with a poor answer and reopen a new one with another call. – Malcolm Fry, “CIO and the 366 Degree Circle”

>> Roughly 10% of the audience raised their hand when asked “do you know what BSM is?” – Lisa Erickson Harris, “BSM and Best Practices, Elevating the Role of the Service Desk”

>> IT investments will continue to grow, but they must either produce cost savings in the supply chain or improve the customer experience – Charlie Feld “Enabling 21st Century Business Model with IT”

>> A well run IT department is like air – it’s taken for granted. – Dennis Ravenelle, IT Service Continuity Management, Where do I start?

>> “An inaccurate CMDB is worse than no CMDB.” – Richard Peasley, Building Decision Support Systems that Work

- Abbas

For contemporary computer usage, the SaaS model has many attractive advantages that account for its growing popularity. For instance SaaS avoids the initial up front cost of purchasing software and the associated hardware; the ongoing maintenance, and salary costs for employees to maintain a new systems are all avoided.

At the expense of IT as competitive differentiation, these cost advantages are coupled with the fact that many types of software applications have been commoditized: networking speed and availability are trusted, centralised resources are shared across many users and afford higher levels of security, fault tolerance, disaster recovery and access greater expertise. Plus, SaaS examples like Salesforce.com demonstrate the credibility of the concept. So potentially you end up with less cost, less worries and higher quality of service – sounds good eh?

As the business model has matured the SaaS vendors are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to optimise their business, optimise client usage of resources, and deploy up selling techniques. All of this demonstrates the early maturity of a successful business concept.

Users have the right to expect SaaS providers will deploy best practices and the best technology in order to ensure security, high availability, good performance and continual improvement to ensure the quality of service (QoS) they require. Business Service Management (BSM) has an important role to play because of its unprecedented ability to provide service management the proven best practice way of managing IT systems.

SaaS systems, like all IT systems, will be subject to change, for example, upgrades, system expansion and maintenance – and incidents will also occur causing user-impacting problems. To ensure the viability of SaaS is maintained as these systems grow in size and complexity with their increasing popularity then SaaS providers need automated management solutions that can scale to cope with demand, size and complexity.

BSM components like Service Level Management (SLM) and Service Contract Management provide automated and proactive ability to ensure the QoS consumers expect. Since they provide automated root cause analysis of QoS threatening issues. Whereas, BSM’s Configuration Management System (CMS) ensures the risk of change is minimised by making change management aware of the potential impact of a proposed change.

We anticipate as SaaS becomes more popular, more complex and more competitive between SaaS providers. As such we predict that we will see the same rapid adoption of BSM as we have seen by service provision vendors.