I’ve been asked to contribute to the efforts shaping up over at BSM Review. Their vision is sound and the things they’d like to achieve for the community are desperately needed. They are lock step in tune with things that have been talked about on my blog and with many of you for years. While the appearance today may be slanted and lofty, their intentions are right for the long haul.

I’ll be helping BSM Review keep firmly grounded in helping real people succeed with Business Service Management (BSM) where others have struggled in the past. I’ll keep their focus on real world success, application, methodologies and value adds to get real people on their way towards BSM’s broader value proposition. I’ll help them focus on closing the gaps found in typical IT organizations today, building bridges between IT, IT Operations, Business, Business Operations, Finance and their unique languages, priorities, expectations and objectives.

I’ve spoken to many of you about my BSM Book, BSM Wiki, BSM Maturity Model, BSM Assessments (Vendor, Analyst, Deployment), BSM Executive Workshops, BSM Transformation for IT Operations amongst many other things. I’ll be taking advantage of this opportunity to collaborate and contribute via this partnership in addition to my normal blogosphere contributions here. I’ve had a few years head start, and BSM Review will pull from me to execute on their very similar vision.

I’ve submitted my first article “Getting Started With Business Service Manangement: An IT Operations Centric Approach” which has been published on the newly redesigned BSM Review portal. Take a look and let me know what you think. Your feedback, comments and guidance for the future are always welcome. I look forward to sharing my insights from where I sit here at IBM being uniquely involved with some of the largest BSM journeys in the world today.

Links that I have found interesting for January 12th:

• WSO2 launches new Business Activity monitoring – Application Development & SOA : News – Open source SOA firm WSO2 has launched Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM) that provides real-time visibility into service-oriented architecture (SOA) processes, transactions and workflows.

  The company claims that the new BAM system is designed to support the heterogeneous SOAs that dominate the enterprise landscape, providing a lightweight and easy-to-deploy alternative to traditionally large business activity monitoring offerings.

• What Do Business Transaction Monitoring And Twitter Have To Do With Each Other? « Application Performance Management Software – Why did Nastel® add Twitter to their software? Because it improves the ease with which communicated alerts reach a changing audience. Because it eliminates the need to know what technology is on the receiving end of an alert transmission. Now the IT team that is responsible for your company’s transaction management has the assurance that the messages that AutoPilot generates will get through to their destination.
• How End-User Monitoring “Graduated” from APM – So what does End-User Monitoring really mean? Once again, the answer is: it depends.

  -If you ask Web Monitoring vendors, End-User Monitoring means monitoring the performance of Web applications from outside the corporate firewall.

  -If you ask networking vendors, End-User Monitoring means capturing packet flow data and using this information to estimate the speed of applications as experienced by business-users.

  -If you ask vendors that provide desktop-based solutions for application monitoring, it would mean, first, identifying the number of users or applications impacted by performance issues, second, business processes that are suffering or, third, learning about problems with end-user experience before end-users call a help-desk.

  -If you ask BTM vendors, it means monitoring application speed and availability for each transaction.

  The bottom line is: the quality of end-user experience is not a metric, it’s a concept.

• New Relic .:. On-Demand Application Management – New Relic® RPM™ is the revolutionary on-demand tool used by more than 3,000 companies to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize their Java, Ruby, and JRuby applications. RPM works for apps in the cloud or in the datacenter. Get the power of expensive, complex IT tools – without the expense or the complexity! Simple. Powerful. On-Demand Application Performance Management

As I look back at how the BSM industry evolved in 2009, my thoughts focus around 2009 as the year of “Hybrid BSM” players coming into their place in the market. Another term I use here is “BSM for SMB” or even “BSM Lite” to some degree but I feel “Hybrid BSM” is best fitting as it describes what these solutions provide. I see a “Hybrid BSM” product as a single product that incorporates many aspects of fundamental infrastructure, application and service management and monitoring along with some fundamental and foundational BSM capability. These don’t fit into a stand alone “Pure Play BSM” product category nor do they need to have additional stand alone products playing together to achieve BSM value as a “Portfolio BSM” solution would.

So who were the players in 2009? Here’s my ten second highlights reel.

Nimsoft launched their initial BSM story with the release of their solution incorporating their Indicative Software acquisition. FireScope continued to dominate much of 2009 with new releases and solutions in “upline” areas such as compliance. Zyrion was launched and really came out as the one to plug into the “BSM for SMB” space. Manage Engine leveraged their heritage AdventNet portfolio with the IT360 offering and launched the first “BSM as a Service” with Manage Engine on Demand offering. AccelOps came out of stealth mode and launched their extensive hybrid solution with both a SaaS and Virtual Appliance delivery model for broad based IT management and BSM. Monolith Software picked up speed and clients with strong focus on IT operations needs and core BSM foundations. The second half of 2009 saw many of these companies jumping on the virtualization and cloud computing band wagon. This is a natural fit for the target markets many of these vendors play in as virtualization and cloud computing took off in 2009 and will grow exponentially in 2010+.

Apart from the typical vendor “we do that” announcements of doing BSM for X, Y or Z in 2009, I haven’t seen any real innovation from the typical “Big 4″ or “Other 6″ vendors who participate in the BSM space. Releases throughout 2009 focused on portfolio consolidation, integration and optimization as well as incorporating “new” capabilities or extending support for the 2009 buzzwords around cloud computing, virtualization, green IT, optimization, etc. I think there are a couple vendors who’ve made significant improvements across their portfolio in 2009, especially in capability consolidation, ease of use and licensing innovation as well as some key acquisitions that have the potential to be “break out moves” for their BSM capability in 2010+.

Regarding my virtualization and cloud computing band wagon comment, I still struggle to see this as anything but a natural evolution and application of a vendor’s standard IT management and monitoring fundamentals. Until we have innovative vendor solutions that can truly manage the “end-to-end”, “top to bottom”, “side to side”, “domain to domain”, “provider to provider” services, across any and all technologies, on premise or off, in the cloud or not, from a transactional flow, workload performance, user experience and ultimately with an understanding of the state of the business’ goals, objectives and outcomes, I’m just challenged to be impressed at this point. Yes my expectations are high. Yes I’m sure many are “working on it”. The industry must set the “bar high” and start addressing the broader based “death from a 1000 cuts” problem in IT operations environments today.

In addition to 2009 being the year of “Hybrid BSM”, I also consider 2009 to be a year filled with innovation and growth in many key BSM enabling technology and product areas. End user experience (EUE), real user monitoring (RUM), quality of experience (QoE) and business transaction management (BTM) vendors and solutions matured and improved in 2009. OpTier, Precise, Nastel, Correlsense, AmberPoint, Aternity, Symphoniq (Coradiant), Knoa, Keynote, Gomez (Compuware), Digital Fuel, Oblicore (CA) and newScale all kept my interests peeked with advances in their capabilities and techniques for providing visibility into some of the most critical areas of service delivery and the things that often have the most direct impact on business goals, objectives and outcomes.

My thoughts for 2010 swirl around the continued M&A potential in the space. As I type this today, the independent SLA player Oblicore looks to be snatched up by CA. I think that more consolidation will take place in the BTM area by folks in the “Hybrid BSM” camp, “Big4″ or “Other6″. These BTM vendors are rapidly evolving and addressing deep technology challenges within the constantly emerging technology and protocol landscape. The capability to have rich end user experience visibility is so valuable some vendors may want to extend beyond their synthetic or limited sampling approaches. My thoughts on any M&A activity in this new decade are that it must be around portfolio and product consolidation, addressing gaps and striving for a simpler, more efficient footprint for anyone desiring to achieve broad based coverage. Gone should be the days of “add ons” and more “stand alone” products. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If it’s not broke, think about it differently and you may see that it really is “broke”! Make the right decisions to fix or simplify it. The “Not Invented Here” (NIH) mentality often leaves you standing at the alter when others have acquired capability and made the right decisions to move their products and solutions forward.

Will there be any significant, game changing BSM innovation in 2010? Time will tell. I’ve seen some pretty interesting concepts being tossed around in the industry lately. It’s a matter of market timing and client maturity in most instances. Any mis-timing, things come across as “gimmicky” or just another fad. Hit the market right because a foundation has been built helping clients and the industry realize what they need, know what they don’t know, then these will certainly be game changers. Those vendors who go to market with as much emphasis on the people, process, organizational and political challenges of BSM understood, addressed, acknowledged and mitigated will see deep, broad based BSM adoption and success. 2010-2013 will be the pivotal years for this.

I look forward to the next decade of Business Service Management! My passion remains high, my vision clear, and belief that the value and benefits from BSM can be realized unshaken. BSM can provide measurable value to the typical IT operations organization and business. How you choose to achieve that value is a journey filled with many decisions, challenges, roadblocks and times of uncertain pain and reward. My hope is to help you get there!

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

• IBM Education Assistant – WebSphere software – The IBM WebSphere Business Process Management Suite contains a comprehensive set of collaborative, role-based capabilities that help you model, simulate, run, change, monitor, and optimize core business processes. The IBM BPM Suite brings together capabilities from across IBM that make it easier for you to get started with BPM.
• Learn BPM BlueWorks – This demo provides an overview of some of the new features in WebSphere BPM v7. Find demonstrations of new features from the following products:
  WebSphere Business Compass v7
  WebSphere Business Modeler v7
  WebSphere Integration Developer v7
  WebSphere Process Server v7
  WebSphere Business Monitor v7
  WebSphere Business Events v7
  WebSphere Services Registry and Repository v7
  Business Space
• Nursing Facility Turns To SaaS For Network Management – With just five IT professionals to support critical functions such as electronic medical records and financial and payroll applications for 1,000 staff members, Navarro wanted a product that could be brought online quickly while also meeting his budget. One company that appeared on his radar was AccelOps, a Silicon Valley startup that offers service management software as both a virtual appliance and as a service. AccelOps offers integrated datacenter monitoring, alerting, analysis and reporting across performance, availability, security and change management.
• Excel Dashboards Webinar – A Quick and Easy
  Way to Set Up and Maintain Excel Dashboards

Links that I have found interesting for January 7th:

• Four Key Trends in the Network Monitoring Market – Network performance monitoring solutions are not one of those “cool” technologies that get a lot of coverage in the media and these products are sometimes perceived as using an old approach to solve new problems. It’s all about capturing and analyzing packet flow data, right? Well, not really. Not many people realize how much this market has changed over the last 3-4 years.

  It is About Applications on the Network, Not the Network Itself

  Between these two rounds of interviews, metrics, such as application response times and application availability, became the top indicators of the health of enterprise networks. These changes in end-user needs had a major impact on network monitoring vendors.

• TM Forum – Business Agreements – TMF506, Service Quality Management Business Agreement, V1.5 – This document defines the requirements for the exchange of management information and the assurance of service quality with a model of FAB functions as documented in TM Forum’s Telecom Operations Map. Specifically, this document will focus in the area of Assurance with regards to performance management of IMT-2000 services (hereafter referred to as ‘services;).

  Whilst this document is focused on third generation mobile services many of the concepts are equally applicable to other telecommunication services. The purpose of this document is to address the Service Quality Management functionality of the Telecom Operations Map.

• Zyrion Enables Unified Monitoring of Diverse and Complex IT Infrastructure Across Distributed Datacenter Footprint – Datacenter Edition of its flagship Traverse network management platform. Traverse Datacenter enables monitoring a complex mix of business services, IT infrastructure and applications based on next-generation technologies, such as Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Grid Architectures. Traverse Datacenter also now monitors a variety of power and environmental equipment and infrastructure, such as, HVAC, UPS and Generators. The new monitoring capabilities expand on Traverse’s proven support for vendor and custom applications, servers, network devices and storage.

  Overcomes the limitations of traditional IT monitoring systems that focus on measuring just the technical metrics and trends of individual IT components. Traverse Datacenter’s integrated network monitoring and BSM capabilities allows datacenter operations teams to rapidly identify the affected business processes or services when problems occur in the complex, inter-related, distributed and virtual IT infrastructure

• IBM – TBSM 4.2.1 adds support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 operating system. – TBSM 4.2.1 adds support for the following SLES 11 on System z, SLES 11 on x86-32 systems and SLES 11 on x86-64 sys

Links that I have found interesting for January 7th:

• Network Frontiers, LLC – The focus of this site is to fully support the Unified Compliance Framework in every form and fashion. Together with our legal partners and Latham & Watkins LLP, the Network Frontiers team originated, designed, and built the Unified Compliance Framework (UCF). This site is dedicated to education and support of the framework.

  The UCF has a somewhat complex lifecycle that follows eight stages of development as shown in the diagram that follows. These stages of development are documented on this site, as well as the schema for the UCF and other pertinent documentation.

• Orb Data – How do I set the default TBSM View Definition? – Setting the Default TBSM View Definition

  To set the default view definition for the a service complete the following steps:

  1. Open the Edit Templates tab for template that the service belongs to
  2. Click the Additional tab.
  3. Click the New Parameter button.
  4. In the Parameter field type ViewDefName
  5. In the Default Value field type the View name you want (e.g. Concentric).
  6. Save the template
  7. Now edit the specific service and click on the Additional Tab again.
  8. This should now have the parameter ViewDefName created.
  9. If the default value is incorrect change it and press save.

  Now whenever you click on the service it will use the view definition defined.

• Cliff Meltzer Joins CA to Lead New Service Assurance Business Unit – Cliff Meltzer joined the company as corporate senior vice president and general manager of the Service Assurance business unit, which includes the company's application performance, infrastructure fault and performance, and database performance management product lines
• Study of Netuitive Customers Yields Startling Results – Netuitive, Inc. announced today the results of a third-party study by Enterprise Management Associates, which researched Netuitive's operational impact on a series of large corporations. Based on in-depth customer interviews, EMA concluded that Netuitive software:

  – Delivers up to a 700% return on investment over 3-years
  – Automates up to 70% of IT monitoring administration tasks
  – Increases alarm accuracy 5 to 10 times, which reduces Mean Time To
  Resolution (MTTR)
  – Conclusively was able to forecast service degradations

  The study included interviews with managers from one of the largest telecoms in the United States, a Fortune 500 insurance company and one of the world's largest banks.

• Connecting the computer dots – Connecting the dots is lots of fun. But what if someone brought you a picture that was already "dotted" and asked you to "disconnect" them – to figure out what dot got connected to which other dot in what order?

  Huh? Why in the world would anyone want to do that?

  Disconnecting dots in a picture surely is not something we'd bother wasting time on (unless a reward was being offered). But being able to successfully disconnect computer "transactions" – actions that takes place in on a hard drive, over a network, or across the Internet – is sometimes an activity upon which thousands of people depend for the resolution of a thorny computer problem, or on which the fate of millions of dollars sometimes rests. And that process, as it happens, has a lot in common with dot-disconnecting!

These are my links for January 6th through January 7th:

• Phurnace Acquired by BMC – Great News – I am pleased to inform our customers, partners and suppliers that Phurnace Software has been acquired by BMC Software. This is great news for everyone: Especially our customers. We will accelerate our innovation and product expansion and we now have the global reach through BMC for sales, support and services. All of the things that you liked about Phurnace, you will love about BMC. The product will continue to be offered as a standalone solution, as well as part of a larger more robust enterprise suite, as part of the BMC BladeLogic family. The product will continue to integrate into a wide range of third party systems; and that capability will not be lost – it will be enhanced. The pace of new feature additions and new platforms supported will also accelerate. BMC shares the vision that Phurnace was formed on – automation of application deployments and configurations that save time, money and eliminate costly errors.
• HP BSM Briefing Center – IT organizations committed to more closely managing and optimizing their technology resources now have better tools than ever, thanks to the growing discipline of business service management (BSM). HP's Business Service Management Briefing Center offers regularly updated news, technology briefings, and Webinars to show enterprises how to successfully adopt BSM and bring greater efficiencies to their IT and business operations.
• Understanding Internet Explorer Rendering Behaviour Performance, Scalability and Architecture – Rendering is one of the key influencers of the perceived performance in web applications. In order to optimize the rendering behaviour of a web application you have to first understand how rendering works in the browser. Mozilla provides a very good documentation on how rendering works in Firefox. Although we are talking here about Internet Explorer, the basiscs are the same. The rendering task is responsible for transforming the logical representation of a document – the DOM – into a graphical representation. This process consists of two steps:

  * Calculating the layout based on DOM elements. This step is referred to as Calculating Layout in dynaTrace AJAX Edition. Mozilla refers to it as Reflow. However they admit that ”…perhaps should have been called layout”.
  * Drawing or painting of the HTML page

• Compuware offers churn adVantage – Compuware says that the tool, which combines DPI passive probes with the ability to view reports of application performance at the subscriber level, will help operators solve the issue of managing and reacting to problems users may be having with data services and applications.

Links that I have found interesting for January 6th:

• Vantage for Mobile Service Providers by Compuware – Compuware’s Vantage for Mobile combines end-user experience monitoring and business service management with subscriber intelligence to allow end-to-end visibility into the customer data experience. This level of in-depth visibility and fault isolation helps service providers deliver superior quality of service to their customers.
• Compuware Launches a New Initiative to Increase the Profitability of Mobile Data Service Providers – Vantage for Mobile is the first integrated solution to provide a real-time view of a customer’s mobile data services experience by starting with an individual subscriber’s experience and linking back to key business functions. Customer benefits include increased subscriber retention, higher data average revenue per unit (ARPU), optimization of network investments, reduction in customer support costs and improved customer exp.

  Unlike existing network-centric management tools that only provide metrics on network performance and the aggregate view of subscribers, Vantage for Mobile effectively addresses the new challenges that require operators to understand individual subscriber experiences on mobile data services. The solution enables network operations teams to identify areas for network expansion; customer support teams to quickly resolve issues; sales and marketing teams to make informed business decisions; and customer retention teams to better understand customer renewal decisions

• 10 Tips for Maximizing Your BSM Investments – An understanding what BSM is: BSM seeks to redefine and refocus IT in terms of business alignment versus more technically niche components. And it is this shift to support business values that is sparking change, especially as business services and IT services become more intertwined.

  Beyond this, BSM highlights IT’s evolving role and suggests, for instance, that the “utilities” model, which became a popular topic for dialog in the IT industry about five years ago, is far from the whole story. The need to assign and manage according to the value of IT services suggests that far beyond simply cutting costs, the more forward-thinking IT organizations will realign towards business-enablement across uniquely verticalized or business-centric models

  Recent history argues strongly that if anyone thinks we’re at the end of a long list of innovations that continue to add context to the intersection of IT and the larger society of businesses and consumers they are willfully deluding themselves

• Assessing Your BSM Technology Investments – So, cutting to the chase, my working definition of BSM is: "Optimizing IT processes and technologies to more effectively manage, monitor measure and govern IT from a holistic business contribution perspective in terms of costs, value and competitiveness." BSM as it’s evolved has a distinctive emphasis on understanding application-to-infrastructure interdependencies, as well as a growing requirement to assimilate the impacts of change on service performance. As such, BSM can best be understood not as a single market, but as a confluence of sub-markets with different lineages, characteristics and advantages to the IT adopter.

Links that I have found interesting for January 5th:

• Data Center Monitoring and IT Service Management Provider AccelOps Opens Office in China – "Even now, the sheer size of China and the number of people using Internet and telecom services creates gigantic data centers," she said. "Since there is no IT infrastructure legacy in China, these data centers make extensive use of cloud computing and are also leading edge. They need a fully integrated, next-generation data center and IT service management solution like AccelOps."
• You can only see what you can see. « Business Transaction Management Blog – several vendors mean when they claim “End to End” coverage of monitoring business transactions. Firstly, they’ll simplify things by saying “URL to SQL”, they’ll then tell you they can provide this visibility by just sticking an agent on each of your J2EE and .NET application servers. With just two tier agents you’ll magically get your “End to End” latency breakdown and all the visibility you need to solve all of your problems and a whole lot more. In fact I know a few vendors who will instrument your coffee machine if you ask them nicely (go the extra mile and all that).
• IBM Offers Hosted Tivoli Monitoring for the Midmarket – IBM officials have admitted that their Tivoli Express products for the midmarket "haven't done as well as they could have," and the on-demand model provides IBM with another way to reach smaller businesses, RedMonk analyst Michael Coté wrote in a blog post about the new service.

  "The challenge for Tivoli (and IBM in general) is always moving down-market and understanding how to get their fingers deep enough in that pie," he wrote. He commended IBM for being open about its pricing.

  Several smaller companies already offer hosted monitoring services, such as Accelops, InteQ and ManageEngine, which is part of Zoho. Larger vendors, including Microsoft and BMC Software, are also developing services or have them already, Coté said.

  The IBM products behind the services are Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.1, Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft Applications 6.2, and Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Applications 6.2.

• Incident Management Software — Isolate Root-Causality of Application Errors – Prelert is the first in a new generation of incident management tools that automatically isolate the causality of application interruptions in real-time without needing any manual configuration, maintenance intervention or topology model.

Links that I have found interesting for January 5th:

• Developers not needed to build this dashboard – A vendor of a tool for building dashboards uses a collaborative workflow creation process and incorporates required functionality into wizards to eliminate the need for developers.

  The primary goal of Dundas Dashboard is to let IT staff and business users rapidly develop and deploy dashboards without having to invest in additional resources, said Alexander Chiang, product manager with Toronto-based Dundas Data Visualization Inc.

  The idea is that a collaborative role-based workflow will allow people with specific expertise across the enterprise to contribute to the building process. Database administrators can work on connecting underlying data sources, business analysts define the key performance indicators, “and, we are opening it up to business users to design the dashboards,” said Chiang.

  The workflow is designed in three major steps: connecting underlying data, finding KPIs, and designing the dashboard. “You need IT staff but you don’t necessarily need a developer,” said Chiang.

• Cloud computing: The next wave in IT – Business Service Management (BSM) solutions for cloud computing give IT organizations the control, visibility, and assurance they need to automate and manage highly dynamic, virtualized cloud computing environments. This approach is helping enterprises and service providers realize the potential of cloud computing. BSM is a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT.

  Fundamental to what "makes" a cloud is very often the management technology. The enabling underlying infrastructure of a cloud solution is often built on top of a commodity server, a layer of virtualization technology, and then on top of that is the management capability.

• Nastel Extends Business Transaction Management to Social Networking – “In today's evolving IT landscape where Cloud Computing is finding more proponents, this technology is especially valuable,” said Charley Rich, Nastel’s VP of Marketing and Product Management. “The creators of the cloud can create generic alerting mechanisms without being constrained by the current state of the art for viewing alerts. Over time, as better tools proliferate, the cloud subscribers will be able to take advantage of them. This new capability brings together the responsiveness of social networking with cloud computing and application performance management.
• Net Management and the Cloud – EMA has just recently completed the data gathering phase of our Responsible Cloud research initiative, and there are some interesting results around the roles being played by network management and networking teams in terms of cloud management and operations.

  While much of the focus on the cloud is on the application platforms, virtualized systems, and storage, accessible remotely as a packaged service, there are also big questions about the role that networking will play.

• Enterprise Cloud Computing Requires Service-Level Discipline – Forging Successful Agreements Based on Quality of Experience

  For business and IT to be successful, a new agreement framework is required. This new agreement framework focuses on striking the proper balance of QoE that is realized through a combination of SLAs, Operational Level Agreements (OLAs), and a new agreement type, the Execution Level Agreement (ELA).