When you ask a vendor whether their product can do X, what are the chances for the answer to be no? Truth is, if there is any shape or form product can possible do X, regardless of how difficult and painful it may be to do so, the answer would be yes. Hence it is no surprise that people are highly skeptical of any statement made by the vendors.

As a versatile and open solution, RapidOSS is designed to be customizable and extensible to be able to solve wide range of problems.  read more »

Stop the presses! We've been notified by EMC Smarts that our RapidOSS product has been awarded “2008 Offering of the Year Award”

As you can imagine we're thrilled about this! iFountain has been an EMC development partner for several years now and we have developed number of solutions that complement the EMC Smarts production suite. It is very nice to get some recognition and appreciated by everyone in the company.

Google revolution is spreading. Prior to search, hierarchical directories (like Yahoo) were the dominant
way to organize and find information on the web. As the amount of information increased, the directory paradigm run into problems handling the scale, and Google's search paradigm with it's simplicity has become ubiquitous way to find information. Users are at ease with search, as a result, search paradigm has been spreading.

Search had already come to desktop. Google Desktop brought powerful search engine into the desktop. And with Windows 7, Microsoft went beyond search as an application and put search at the core of the user experience. Just as search has displaced the directories on the web and become the primary mechanism to find information, it has become the primary mechanism in Windows 7 for most things from starting applications to finding files, displacing Windows Explorer.  read more »

Fault management, performance management and event management trio of tools are typically at the heart of network management solutions. Although there are some integrated solutions that do offer components for all these management disciplines, organizations with large or mission critical networks often choose to use combination of tools that have the best functionality at each area . As a result, integration among these tools becomes crucial for the overall solution to be effective is supporting IT operations.  read more »

IT infrastructure needs to be managed holistically. Its a given. How do we do that? It's been a painful
journey.

First there was the “frameworks” (Tivoli/CA). The idea of building all management tools on a common
framework so that they would all be integrated, have common user interface, etc. was very appealing. But the execution did not match the promise.

A single framework to manage the entire IT infrastructure turned up to be a pipe dream. Too costly, too difficult and too painful to buy, implement, and maintain. After spending hundreds (millions?) of thousands of dollars, many IT organizations abandoned the framework projects or significantly scaled them down. Most people who worked on framework implementation projects can still feel the bad taste left in their mouth.  read more »

Can we have a single unified model to describe all IT "assets", everything IT cares about? The idea is certainly appealing, and excites any IT management geek, this one included. Cote has a post where he articulates the advantages of having one standard model to model everything in IT and argues one of the big 4 open sourcing their CMDB solution may be the fastest way to get there. Can this happen? Stranger things did happen but I'd put likelyhood of this one as very low. It would certainly shake things up if a major CMDB became open source and if (this is a big if as well) the model used by it gained traction. One can only hope, not much more we can do.  read more »