Links that I have found interesting for October 20th:

• Nimsoft Provides Visibility into the Cloud – Nimsoftis launching a benchmarking service today for enterprise customers that will help them define and measure the actual costs of cloud computing and monitor the performance of IT infrastructure.

  The benchmarking service monitors the multiple systems of an enterprise and pulls them into a unified view. These include internal systems, managed service providers, cloud-based and Software-as-a-Service investments.

  The service offers visibility where to distribute workloads, identify problems in the infrastructure and look at performance metrics.

• Nimsoft takes another step forward in cloud monitoring – The initial release will cover the Amazon cloud and Rackspace, but Read said the company is taking measurements on Salesforce.com and has plans to expand to Microsoft and Google cloud offerings.

  Read insisted this is not like those “cloud weather reports” we wrote about last year.

  “You haven’t been able to monitor a single customer’s usage, and you haven’t been able to pull all the different threads, and combine that with an internal environment, into a single integrated view of the service delivery.

  That’s the big play. It’s not about one provider. It’s about pulling all the threads together, because everything then becomes part of the same fabric of service delivery.”

• IBM Announces New Software for Managing Data Centers – The introduction of IBM's new VMControl product for enterprises, combined with IBM Tivoli software, gives businesses for the first time a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. It spans UNIX/Linux, mainframe, x86 and storage systems and networks.

  VMControl helps companies that have turned to virtualization – the creation of multiple virtual servers or storage on a single physical system – to reduce infrastructure costs, but have encountered new struggles as they try to manage enterprises made up of disparate platforms, each with their own virtualization technology.

• New Relic Sets the Standard for IT Management Tools with Next-Generation On-Demand Solution RPM Version 2 – New Relic, Inc., the leading software-as-a-service provider of application performance management solutions, today announced the general availability of New Relic RPM Version 2, the next generation of its leading application performance management product. Used by IT operations and development teams around the world to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize web applications, RPM Version 2 offers the first cross-platform performance management solution and includes significant enhancements such as scenario-based workflows, long-term SLA reporting, intuitive interface, and support for Java applications.
• Oblicore Guarantee Positioned as a Market Leader in OVUM Butler Group Technology Audit – Oblicore Guarantee has received a positive Technology Audit from OVUM Butler Group. The Technology Audit is OVUM Butler Group's industry-leading technology evaluation report that delivers OVUM Butler Group's thought leadership, opinion, and best practice through in-depth technical analysis.

  Further, OVUM Butler Group identified Oblicore as one of the leaders in this marketspace and noted five key product strengths for Oblicore Guarantee:
  • Impressive pre-defined content supports and simplifies the formulation of contracts and SLAs.
  • Correlates the financial implications of performance against SLAs, such as service costs, and penalties and rewards.
  • Provides good reporting capabilities, including forecasting and alerts.
  • Provides out-of-the-box adapters to common business applications and infrastructure management solutions.
  • Graphically represents service dependency on infrastructure elements and other service interdependencies.

• Correlsense SharePath Adds Enhanced Application Domain Support as Part of Its Fall 2009 Release – as part of its SharePath Fall 2009 release it has added Application Domain Support. With this new capability, application owners, application performance and IT operations managers can analyze how application transactions perform across the different components of the data center. It will also provide information for how each application's transactions can be fine-tuned, in order to optimize performance and reduce costs.

Links that I have found interesting for October 19th:

• Remind me what we’re doing again? • The Register – While efficiency and effectiveness may be laudable goals for service management, they do require a handle on why the business needs certain services delivered in certain ways – and this information may not always be forthcoming particularly if the business has suffered poor service delivery in the past. There’s also that strange perception from customers, that IT can in some way second guess what the business needs – “Isn’t that IT’s job to know?” which can make it even harder to understand what the business is trying to achieve.
• BI’s next round: more conversational – Ted Cuzzillo’s BI. – But today, BI platforms make contributing difficult. "BI designers decide what reports are going to be out there, and that's the well you can drink from." Instead, people should be as free as in any conversation to make new syntheses, to comment, to recommend — "all the things you'd expect at a dinner party. BI doesn't feel like a dinner party, does it?"

  "I suspect," he said, "that even though we don't see it within formal tools, it really is happening, such as through email, spreadmarts, the water cooler and such."

  First comes culture. "If you don't have that culture that draws people into that practice [of collaboration]," said Scott, "you can have all the tools in the world and it isn't going to help."

  Next come tools. "There are technological things we can do to make contributing more routine." He mentioned two mashup tools he likes: JackBe and NetVibes.

  The entrenched players are going to change, he predicts. Either Cognos and BO and the others will become more like them

• Your Investment in BSM – Guidelines to CIOs – The BSM Review Blog – I offer the following rule-of-a-thumb guidelines to assessing whether the price quoted by a vendor for a BSM initiative is right:

  1. Standard maintenance costs: Insist on a 1:1 ratio between license and standard maintenance over a 5 year period. If standard maintenance costs over this period exceed the corresponding license costs, chances are the vendor's software accrued a non-negligible amount of technical debt.

  2. Premium customer support costs: Certain premium customer support services could be quite appropriate for your business parameters. However, various "premium services" could actually address deficits or defects in the BSM products you license.

  3. Professional services costs: Something is wrong if the costs of professional services exceed licensing cost. Either the BSM product suite you are considering is not a good fit for your business circumstance or your BSM initiative is overly ambitious.

• BMC Software to Acquire Tideway – BMC Software (NYSE:BMC) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited (Tideway), a leading provider of IT discovery solutions. The acquisition will enhance BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.
• Business Service Management: Insights and Next Practices :: BSMReview.com – BSMReview.com is dedicated to next practices in business service management. Our goal is engage the professional community, the analysts and the practitioners, to examine emerging practices; analyze the value, scope and nature of business service management deployments; and create a vendor-independent forum for open discussion. We believe that only through an exchange of ideas that is unfettered from the revenue and branding objectives of vendors and from the research agenda of any one analyst firm can BSM become a dynamic contributor to the evolution of IT as a welcomed business partner within the enterprise community.

I’ve stumbled across yet another community initiative for BSM today called BSM Review over at BSMReview.com. At first glance, this community effort appears to be heavily influenced by current/former analysts and BMC employees so the content focus may initially appear to be heavily in alignment with what their backgrounds are. If participation and true community evolves, hopefully this can become a long lived resource for “next practices” in BSM.

A quick search on LinkedIn shows many other BSM Community efforts. Heck, I even have mine structured but not released. Being able to span the “reality divide” and take solid concepts and get them into the hands of practitioners on the ground is the hard part and what’s really needed. I know I wasn’t asked to contribute/participate nor do I see any of the others who speak about BSM in the community regularly on board yet. Time will tell I suppose.

Emerging vendors in the BSM space are making this a reality by just taking the K.I.S.S. approach and incorporating the concepts, goals and objectives of BSM right into their technology. This is the right start approach for green field or brown field environments and maturing into the broader “process based” BSM over time is best. The Time to Value (TTV) barrier is what the BSM industry needs to smash through quickly so all the more communities, vendors, technologies, techniques or “next practices” are welcomed.

Welcome to the BSMReview.com gang and best of luck with your initiative!

Links that I have found interesting for October 14th:

• Software » Service Management • Workshop –
• Try these beans: Business Service Management – The thing is, tools exist out there which claim to be able to help IT shops do this. They might not all be marketed as ‘BSM’ but they are aimed at helping you ‘manage business services’. We have no axe to grind about which tools you find are any good, but what we do want to hear about is how you, or those more senior to you are going about trying to improve things in this area
• Alignment to the Core – Let’s start by being very clear. For any business everything must ultimately align to the success of that business, period. That being said we can now focus on how all of the various pieces that make up that business must align with each other. At a high level, it is obvious that all business activities must support each other for the business to be successful. However, what I have observed over the years is that alignment is easy to get lost in the multitude of daily pressing details that we must deal with.
• Internal IT must extend reach beyond ITSM – When I think about the various IT Service Management, or ITSM, frameworks I am concerned that they are very heavy on a contractual mindset and very light on a relationship mindset. I am not saying that we don’t need service level agreements or any form of commitment from IT to their customers. I am saying that if a contract is all you have for a relationship with a customer that relationship is destined to become adversarial very quickly. I am saying that IT must have an informed consultant relationship with all of their customers. To do that a number of things must happen.
• The Psychology of IT Service Management: Taylorism and ITSM’s Obsession With Process – ndeed in a large well known technology PLC, managers recently instigated a time-and-motion study of some of their ITSM procedures which felt a bit like being in a time warp. Also Taylor was an engineer. Like many of his IT antecedents he believed that applying epistemologies that have been successful in the sciences of the inanimate, to the animate (i.e. people) would yield great results for organisations. The flaws in Taylor’s approach signpost the failings of the obsession with process in the ITSM industry. Furthermore many companies in the post-modern era that have departed form the Tayloristic method have seen great success (e.g. Google, GoreTex, Semco). I am firmly of the belief that this is where differentiation and competitive advantage within the ITSM domain now lies. Companies that are brave enough to move beyond the accepted script and to implement a new paradigm may experience a quantum leap of progress over their rivals

These are my links for October 13th through October 14th:

• IBM – ESDA instances show up in the root of the tree – Question
  How to prevent the ESDA instances with parent rules from showing at the root of the tree?

  Answer
  The following property should prevent the ESDA instances with parent
  rules from showing at the root of the tree.

  This property below is not in the RAD_sla.props file by default but it internally defaults to true.

  impact.sla.showesdainstanceswithparentrules

  If this property above is set to false in RAD_sla.props the old
  behavior will execute. In other words, the ESDA instances with parent
  rules will NOT show at the root of the tree.

• Meru Networks Defines New Market Category With Industry-First Wireless Network Assurance Platform – Meru Networks, Inc., the pioneer in 802.11n enterprise networking, today announced it is creating a new category of wireless service assurance with the introduction of the Meru Networks Service Assurance Manager (SAM) platform. Meru Networks SAM is designed to rein in the increasing operational costs that come with operating business-critical applications on all-wireless networks and accelerate the transition of the $16 billion enterprise wired Ethernet switching market over to Meru Switched Wireless.
• IBM boosts business agility in WebSphere middleware upgrade – The WebSphere BPM suite is being fitted with a native container as part of the platform's SCA (Service Component Architecture) capabilities. With this container, users can take the definition of a business process and turn it into an executing system in one click, Hayman said. SCA, Shimmin said, enables IBM to make its software more modular.

  Also featured is "in-flight" change management for business processes. "You'll be able to modify that business process as it is executing," said Hayman.

  Integrated governance and policy management is featured in the BPM suite to better bridge the conversation between business and IT leaders, he said.

• Leading Network Sales Executive Joins Monolith Software – Monolith Software, a software provider with the industry's most flexible and versatile IT management solution, today announced that Bill Cannon has been appointed vice president of strategic sales

We’ve released two new Interim Fixes for TBSM v4.2 this week. Check out my blog posting over on the official Tivoli BSM blog here.

These are my links for October 9th through October 12th:

• IBM – Impact 5.1 Installation and Clustering – This STE will cover:
  - Impact Installation and Configuration
  - Impact Clustering
  - Working With Data (time permitting)
• IBM – Troubleshooting Webtop 2.2 installation issues – This STE will cover:
  - Setting up debug levels and log file locations
  - Known installation issues
• IBM – Installing and Using the TBSM 4.2 ISA V4 add-on – This STE will cover:
  - ISA V4.1 Overview
  - ISA V4.1 install
  - ISA V4.2 TBSM add-on install
  - Using TBSM 4.2 add-on
  - Driving a debug data collection
  - When different TBSM data collectors should be used
  - Interfacing with ESR
  - Searching on-line docs
• IBM – IBM Tivoli Netcool OMNIbus ODBC Gateway v5: Troubleshooting – This STE will cover:
  - Logging
  - Troubleshooting Steps
  - Sample Errors and Solutions
• Enterprise 2.0 meets ITIL: Building a social IT Service Management Practice, Part 1 « Oooh Shiny – So what is the use case for the Social SKMS?

  However, as stated before information technology is about more than processes. When it comes to collaborating around aspects of an IT infrastructure, most organizations are stuck in the 20th century and use email, fileshares, etc. Progressive organizations might have implemented wikis or Notes databases for collaboration.

  Still, all the negative aspects of this, information buried in emails, difficulties in finding information in a multitude of wikis, Sharepoint sites and fileshares, no communication across departs, geographies and hierarchies prevail in most IT organizations.

  The social SKMS is an example of bringing Enterprise 2.0 functionalities and concepts to the IT organization and merging them with existing solutions already in place in many organizations, such as helpdesk, operations monitoring, change management, even CMDBs.

These are my links for October 8th through October 9th:

• Why You Need BSM Now — CIOUpdate.com – You can use the principles of BSM to document customer needs in plain English, for example; measure existing service quality from a business point of view (avoiding technical jargon and operational metrics), analyze the results, and apply practical solutions that allocate your limited IT resources to overcome challenges, seize opportunities, and empower business success.
• New Service Management Tool Not Just for IT – According to BSM-NOW.COM spokesperson Tammy Marquis, "BSM-NOW.COM turns the traditional one way conversation between business and IT on its head. Traditionally there is a significant gap between IT and business
  . Business never knows what to expect from IT and IT doesn't know what the business expects. So, IT does what it thinks is right – which is usually not what the business wants or needs. The result of this one-way conversation is frustration. Those paying for IT services don't feel they're getting value, and service providers are frustrated at rapidly changing business requirements. BSM-NOW.COM aims to change that, by standing the current IT business relationship on its head."
• BSM-NOW.COM Business Service Management SaaS – Measure true IT service value, importance and quality then share your results with your peers, customers, providers or anyone else (why?)
• Systems and Network Monitoring Blog » Network Change Management Made Simple – Keeping up with new requirements and changes for networks can be a daunting task. But the process of network change and configuration management (NCCM), an organization-wide standardized method to implementing both self-motivated, internal change, such as upgrades and troubleshooting; as well as external change, such as government regulations on data, can greatly ease your burden (especially when you have to accomplish all this with no down time).

These are my links for October 7th through October 8th:

• Measuring End-to-End SLA Metrics – One of the discussions I have with clients is how to identify the right SLA metrics. My advice is that the best SLA metrics look at end-to-end services, and measure how they are delivered. The idea is to consider the service as a ‘black box’ – look at the business outcomes and then how the business outcomes should be measured. So instead of measuring components of the service – servers, applications, internal processes, we measure the service which the customer receives.
• ServiceFrame™ // Service Level Agreements, SLA Management Tool, Manage SLAs, SLA Templates – New SLA player
• The Great Business Divide – Much is made over the historic divide between IT and the business, but the great divide that nobody ever seems to want to acknowledge is the divisions within the business that conspire to make a holistic IT approach to the business almost impossible.
• Compuware buys Web application management vendor Gomez | Applications – InfoWorld – Compuware said Wednesday it has agreed to acquire Web application management vendor Gomez for $295 million. The transaction is expected to close in November.

  Gomez's technology will work in concert with Compuware's portfolio of tools for managing the performance of on-premises applications, providing coverage "from the datacenter to the customer," the companies said in a statement.

These are my links for October 5th through October 7th:

• Tech Horizons: OpTier, A Step Toward Business Service Management (BSM) 2.0 by Jean-Pierre Garbani – Forrester Research – BSM is firmly established now as a way to manage IT as a business tool rather than as a collection of fragile technologies.

  However, the problem of properly managing the technology to achieve the required quality of service is still important, if no longer visible. OpTier's fundamental proposition is to expand on the fundamental concept of managing services from the business perspective by providing visibility into the individual transactions that compose a service. This mapping of services to infrastructure technologies provides IT with the ability to not only understand the service level received by business users but also pinpoint accurately where problems are and communicate with the business, armed with clear and documented facts. This should make IT more efficient by improving the quality of service while reducing costs. As such, we believe that OpTier is a solution that represents the next step in the evolution toward the next generation of BSM tools.

• The Forrester Blog For Vendor Strategy Professionals – Compuware announces this morning their intention to purchase Gomez, one of the two major forces in web application monitoring services (the other one being Keynote). This is a very interesting and potentially game changing move in both the end user experience monitoring and the application performance management (APM) markets.
• CFOs: Questions to ask your CIO about Cloud Computing – Cloud Storage Strategy – • Is there a strategy to use cloud computing as part of the IT services mix? Companies need to take a "business service management" approach – only in reverse. That is to say, they map out their "mission critical business processes" and leave them alone! Instead, they look to outsource non-critical IT tasks to cloud computing service providers who are better equipped to execute them, which frees up the internal IT organization to focus on business critical processes.
• Free Real User Measurements | End-User Experience Monitoring – There are a large number of products on the market today that analyze end-user response time data in different ways, you may know these solutions as; Real User Monitoring (RUM), Customer Experience Monitoring (CEM), Real Experience Monitor, Quality of Experience (QoE) and End User Experience Monitoring. They all accomplish the goal of mesuring the end-user experience and total round trip time for a single transaction, they tell you that you have a problem… What they do not do is tell you WHERE the problem is.
• myDIALS Integrates Business Intelligence Application With NetSuite’s Cloud Computing Platform – "By delivering timely, relevant information and analysis suitable for all employees, myDIALS helps users to improve performance of critical business processes," says Wayne Morris, myDIALS CEO. "For example, myDIALS lets users drill into Key Performance Drivers (KPDs), as well as the more typical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), to determine the root cause of the problem. With the combined myDIALS and NetSuite solution, customers can now reap the benefits of an integrated SaaS delivery model." With myDIALS' highly visual, interactive dashboards and "every person analytics" tools, employees can constantly monitor performance, identify and characterize performance problems, make rapid decisions and take corrective action to fix issues. This includes a drilldown tree consistent with each user's role to show where the user is in the analytics process, as well as intuitive display of metrics as bar charts and other graphics, rather than cumbersome spreadsheets of statistics.
• A "Bird’s Eye View" of Your Business Transactions (For Free, Too) – Business IT Buzz Blog – The company is taking a new approach to application management (now usually called transaction management) with the SharePath RUM, its enterprise-class Real User Measurement (RUM) tool.

  And the best part is, whereas other RUM tools are typically priced at 100-150K, you can get this one for free.