What an interesting time to hold a technology conference. The DLA Piper Global Technology Leaders Summit last week brought together CXOs from Amazon, Walmart.com, Stanford, Safeway, Microsoft, Sun, Cisco and others to discuss the state of IT in general and how the economy is impacting it. Some highlights:

“Cloud computing for large enterprises is a dead duck, in the opinion of several venture capital firms.”

“The current slowdown in the U.S. macroeconomy is definitely going to hurt the IT industry, as it will most of the nation’s businesses, for at least the next year and most likely into the next two years.”

NetApp cancelled its first user conference slated for 2009 citing economy-driven restrictions on business travel.

We recently wrote about the possible upside for MSPs in this economic downtown. A survey from EquaTerra of more than 200 outsourcing service suppliers announced that “more than 40 percent of those polled had seen increased demand levels, despite the economic downturn.” The survey suggests that outsourcing projects are changing, with a strong focus on quick return on investment replacing longer-term initiatives to improve end-to-end business processes, according to InfoWorld. So as we saw during our own surveys this year, it looks like IT will spend time and money against the practical projects that should and could get done and not taking on ITIL and CMDB projects.

Jonathan Schwartz as a puppet talking about open source and his ponytail. The driest Sesame Street take-off you’ll ever see. Check out the video here. For those of you playing a drinking game at home, “ponytail”.

Denise Dubie posted a follow up to her article Novell’s Managed Objects buy, and shared insights from different commenters, including yours truly.

One of our favorites, the IT Skeptic was featured on John Willis’ blog this week, answering some questions about CMDB, ITSMF and more. He also provided his insight into IBM Tivoli, although he “tries to stay non-partisan”.

Inexplicable. HP posted Halloween-themed videos about datacenters on YouTube this week. Unlike the great IBM videos about the mainframe, these videos speak techno-babble without tempering the lingo with being funny or tongue-in-cheek. Various frightening creatures share information on service management processes and discuss virtualization techniques to help consolidate hardware. Scary.

So can open source weather out the economic storm? Emerging from the dot-com bust, open source has matured, its legal framework and values are established, and serious players are in the game. But as this post on ZDNet points out, consolidation is on the way. “IDC renamed its LinuxWorld Show in San Francisco next year Open Source World – a clear shot across the bow at O’Reilly’s OSCON.” Will open source (from free to lower-cost alternatives to commercial software) flourish in a time of tightening budgets or will projects quietly go away for lack of funding (VC and that pesky business model thing) and, let’s face it, the “extra time” of IT pros tasked yet again to do more with less?

It’s October 2008 and Charles Babcock writes, “CA Embraces Virtualization As Future of Data Center Management”. Beyond keeping up with what competitors are doing, I enjoy this article for the masterful way it depicts the nightmare that is working with traditional frameworks. Too slow, too expensive, too complex, too many modules – it’s all in here. And somehow, I don’t think that was the point of it. So, $154,000 for CA Data Center Automation Manager – which can “consult” the CA CMDB (pricing starting at what do you think, something like $500K to a million – don’t forget those services) plus CA Wily APM (Introscope 8 and Wily Customer Experience Manager 4.2; pricing anyone?) metrics that get fed back into Data Center Automation Manager to help determine the virtual machine resources that are needed. Plus can also integrate info from CA Endeavor’s software change management tracking and CA SysView and in future with CA Management Suite for Mainframe Linux, potentially. I am not kidding about this list. And, we’ve been hearing this for a while – “Unicenter” the brand goes away and is replaced by “CA NSM”. The brand goes away. Why retire a successful brand? Ah.

I love this post on EMC, “Eleven Things You Didn’t Know About the World’s Largest External Disk Storage Company.” Although I guess I really don’t know much about Joe Tucci, since #11 says:

“Contrary to conventional thought, it is not true that the EMC President/CEO is the older, gentler brother of the fictional patriarch of HBO’s hit television series.” Hunh. I just googled him, thinking maybe it was a resemblance thing. Nope."

And on a much lighter note. A funny from Dell. 2 years later, I just stumbled across this Proprietaryville , Jibjab-ish video, called Dell the Journey. Legacy systems being escorted onto the Retirement Home bus. Michael Dell as knight in shining armor, singing no less. Joe Tucci and Larry Ellison showing up as heroes leading the charge against Proprietaryville (yes, funny in and of itself). And my favorite, “Now let’s go kick some proprietary apps.”

By all accounts the show did go on, and we have some very interesting results to share with you all.

Take the Top Challenges question. Once again, “Supporting New Technologies/Enabling Innovation” was most popular. But that’s a no-brainer and as one memorable respondent told me, “the definition of what I do”. What was more important was seeing the big jump that “Reducing Management Costs” made on the list, from #5 last year to #2 this year and only 1 percentage point behind #1. Tightening the belt is top of mind for everyone. (As I write, the Dow closed down today over 700 points)

Overall, IT professionals told us they were tackling the practical projects that should and could get done – from deploying Security Information Management solutions to getting Asset Management and Inventory Tools in place. For the first time, we saw a close correlation between what people said was important and what actually got done. Of low importance and even lower actual deployments – ITIL and CMDB, IPv6, Green IT and Cloud Computing.

And perhaps people “fessed” up about virtualization. Instead of the usual “high importance, not so many deployments now, but more deployments planned” theme we’ve been seeing around virtualization adoption, this year the very hot trend seemed to lose a bit of steam. Across the board, the numbers were down for virtualization management, with close to 50% of respondents telling us that their businesses were less than 10% virtualized (4% of that with no virtualization at all).

2008 Detailed Results – showing trends year over year

Comparison of Results from Interop NY 2008 vs FOSE 2008 (government IT)

ScienceLogic: Can you share any of the strategies/advice that you give to companies embarking on their BSM journeys?

Doug McClure: Well, first they’ve got to have a BSM strategy. Nearly all the clients I talk to or hear about wanting to do BSM do not have a BSM strategy. I talk a lot about this on my blog and with clients and it is relevant whether you’re going to think about “BSM Lite” or “BSM Heavy” approaches.

Once we have a BSM strategy, we need to establish a BSM roadmap that guides us in how we’ll implement the BSM strategy in a more tactical manner, focusing on short term iterative quick wins and 30-60-90 day projects. For more of my thoughts on BSM strategy and roadmapping, see the following blog posts.

• Elements of Business Service Management Part 3: Getting Business Service Management on the Radar Screen

• Elements of Business Service Management Part 4: What’s your Business Service Management Strategy?

As I’ve alluded to previously, a client first must define and understand what “BSM Lite” may mean to them. Don’t take what the analysts or the vendors pitch for what you should do to achieve BSM or what value you should get from it.

For any type of BSM to be successful, each client must define what BSM means to them and state what they expect to get from BSM. They must make it personal, make it a part of their company culture and elevate it to be as an important initiative as compliance, risk management, SOA, ITIL, or other initiatives may be within the company.

Please don’t get scared off from this strategy thing. Please don’t blow this off as something that the secret enterprise architecture council should be doing. If you’re unable to get an audience in these areas within your company, start within your own sphere of influence.

Your strategy could be as simple as enabling the local operations center to more efficiently classify, triage and resolve problems based on a simple business service or application contextual understanding. Focus on how this changes the game within your environment. Come up with your own metrics and measures to assess the value this has to this organizational use. Trust me, you’ll need to justify your investment some time in the future.

Another trait of successful BSM implementations is that of the formal monitoring and management tools group has established some sort of database or knowledge repository that enables them to “manage the business of IT management and monitoring” if you will. In my opinion, the vendor community has let their clients down significantly in this area. The CMDB may be the correct answer, but most companies just don’t value monitoring enough to demand that this be included in their formal CMDB initiatives.

In my last job, we developed an application that I referred to as the “Service Management Database” or “SMDB”. Others may call it something else, but in essence, it was the database that captured what was monitored, how it was monitored, who owned it, what business services and applications it supported, the impact an outage or event from it had on the business services or applications, etc.

One key component of this “SMDB” was establishing the relationships of real and synthetic user and transaction monitoring steps to associated servers and applications. This is a significant gap area in many tools and vendor CMDBs.

Clients who have instituted something formal such as this generally have a very good handle on management and monitoring within their environment. Far too many clients do not have adequate monitoring (read visibility) in place to begin their BSM journey.

I’d strongly recommend a good hard look at how well the client’s monitoring and management practices are implemented and managed. Simply put, if they don’t have adequate visibility into how well those business services and applications are performing, you can’t expect to manage what you can’t “see” that may be impacting the business, clients, revenue, etc.

Just ask yourself this – can you explicitly state what monitoring is in place for a given business service or application? Can you quantify the impact of a simple event to a business service or application? Can you explain why something is red, yellow, purple or green and what causes it to change from one color to another? If you can’t, your BSM journey will be challenging.

Those with formal CMDB initiatives have their hands full with high risk, long time to value projects to just get a handle with traditional configuration management models. Taking these low level configuration items (CI’s) and establishing application and service dependencies comes after a lot of work getting through the organizational challenges of getting systems access to populate the CMDB.

I strongly recommend that the formal monitoring and management tools group create an authoritative database that enables them to establish end-to-end visibility into the service and application delivery chain and the impacts it has on the business, customer, etc. This ultimately becomes part of a more realistic federated CMDB within the business.

ScienceLogic: Can you provide an example of a successful implementation of BSM? Were there specific factors that especially contributed to its success?

Doug McClure: I’ve touched on the highlights of the most successful BSM implementations throughout my previous answers. Clients that have rallied around an organizational change or transformation focusing every team member’s efforts and energy towards ensuring that the business goals and objectives are being met through the delivery of highly available business services and applications.

Far too often the “change” never happens and it’s the “talking heads” that are preaching to the choir about what should be done. Every person on the front line, in the support teams, at the help desk, etc. must understand how they support or impact the business in business terms. Try putting this simple phrase after job titles “Hi, my name is Doug. I’m a Systems Administrator, Supporting the Business”.

That was a mouthful, but simply put, these clients have an impressively instrumented business and IT environment with the right amount of visibility into each area, joined together with an organization that thinks, operates and responds based on their understanding of the business goals and objectives and how these business services and applications enable business success.

The operational model for an organization fully adopting BSM identifies ways to establish a service management mentality across the entire business service and application delivery and support chain. The delivery, operations and support organizations must be incented to manage the services and applications being delivered with this end-to-end context.

A leading, outside the box “service management organization” may include the traditional IT silos but within a matrixed fashion focused on one or more key business services and applications. The “service management organization” is then incented to work together, as a team, for the end-to-end delivery and support of these services or applications.

It’s no longer one’s job to just be the systems administrator, database administrator or network engineer, their job is now to support specific business services and applications. They provide the subject matter expertise needed to support the services and applications together, as a team, eliminating the finger pointing or “not my problem” attitudes that exist in the majority of IT organizations today.

Overall, the KISS approach is what will enable BSM of any type (lite, heavy) to be the most successful. If it just feels natural, doesn’t take any additional effort, clicks or tasks to do then it’s going to work. BSM should be transparent and not just another buzz word. It’s not a form that gets filled out or a special process to follow in the run book. It’s doing the right thing for the business, no matter what the situation, crisis, buzz word or technology initiative of the day is.

ScienceLogic: How did you get involved in BSM?

Doug McClure: I think the foundations of my service management background and passion were initially established during my service in the US Navy. Today, I relate that experience to what I call BSM for the Military or Mission Services Management (MSM).

We had been taught over and over that extreme attention to the details of the mission at hand (aka “the business”) was the number one priority and that all of our technology, services, and applications existed for those Sailors and Marines on the other end (the “customer”). I can recall countless instances where mission critical communications services (telephony, orderwires, teletypes, command and control systems, etc.) were impacted in one way or another. It was extremely critical that we understood who was impacted and to what degree so that contingency plans could be activated. We weren’t just talking about lost revenue, poor sales or customer experience; we were talking about human lives and the security of the United States.

It is that military bearing, attention to detail and real world experience that drives me with many of my modern day BSM endeavors. That migration from “Mission Services Management” to BSM was honed working for over 10 years working in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and datacenter, hosting and colocation business.

In those rapid growth businesses during the Internet boom, service differentiation was what “made you millions” or paved your way to bankruptcy. The companies I worked for had an extreme passion and focus on ensuring that their services, applications and Internet access products were of the highest quality, highly reliable and just plain better than the competition.

Again, the IT infrastructure, service quality and customer experience relationship was ingrained in all of our heads. It was all hands on deck when Webmail, Internet access, DNS, or the network experienced problems. We were measured in terms of how many customers experienced a busy signal or dropped connection or if you couldn’t log in fast enough to read your email. Companies like Keynote Systems and LionBridge/Veritest/Inverse tested the quality of our networks, services and applications and publicly ranked us against our competition. We thought in terms of customer experience and impact every minute of the day, 24×7.

It was in my last job managing a traditional enterprise management and monitoring development group for a nationwide ISP where I was able to work with emerging technology to help get a handle on the complexities of these rapidly growing IT environments filled with emerging technologies and products. Applying this early technology to complex service problems in our environment proved to me that the technology, coupled with the right emphasis on how the technology was implemented and an emphasis on the people and processes within the organization could bring BSM to life.

Where I felt left out in the cold was with my vendor relationship. While their technology gave me the potential, they didn’t teach me how to work through the organizational and technological problems to successfully implement the BSM strategy. My very first end-to-end BSM pilot was extremely successful and provided visibility into the IT environment and business service impact that have never been available before.

And here I am today, working at a software vendor for the first time. Welcome to the “dark side” as they say. The approach and methodology we followed for BSM has become the basis of the core BSM Methodology that I teach IBMers and our clients around the world today.

My personal mission and drive here at IBM Tivoli is to ensure that BSM is something that the typical monitoring tools administrator can actually implement and that our BSM story is something that any of our clients can be successful with. The sales and marketing slicks must be backed up by something like this whomever you are these days. Clients shouldn’t put up for “marketecture”, me too and gee whiz buzz words.

BSM takes a partnership and commitment to every client’s success, and I want to be involved in those BSM efforts in every industry or market worldwide. We need more thought leaders collaborating together in an open and public forum to change legacy attitudes about BSM and do what we can to enable client’s to be as successful as they can be.

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We heard a lot about cloud computing at the Gartner show this week. You can read a bit about their take on it here. While we’ve been musing on the different ways we monitor cloud computing resources, Hyperic is already announcing their solution to monitor Amazon’s cloud computing availability. Hyperic believes that “making use of cloud resources would be more popular if the customers had an independent means to monitor cloud services.” They plan to offer the monitoring service to other cloud companies this year. However, John Willis questions the hype of Hyperic.

Here are some interesting NetFlow use stats from our friends at Network Instruments. In a survey they did a few months ago, only 23% of respondents used NetFlow to monitor network performance; 60% didn’t use flow tech and 17% weren’t sure they had anything for it. I have to say we are asked at every Interop show we do if we support NetFlow so the numbers are slightly surprising but useful.

Kuala Lumpur is bullish on Sun’s virtualization strategy.

Just like at the Gartner show, one of the tracks at the Burton Group’s conference this week is on virtualization. This post on the Data Center Strategies blog covers Day 1 with some interesting notes on where virtualization needs to go, from clarity around software licensing and support to the use of raw storage (connecting VMs directly to LUNs) to improve VM performance, provide better integration with storage and data management solutions, and prevent vendor lock-in.

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Research Director Patricia Adams and VP and Distinguished Analyst Ronnie Colville presented this thought provoking session. It seemed to echo what ScienceLogic has been talking about regarding our thinking around the practical ways to efficiently accomplish key tactical gains against your Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) initiatives.

They started out with, what are the prerequisites to a successful CMDB implementation?

Garbage in = Garbage out

There is no miracle occurring in all of these new fancy framework tools; these complex databases are only as good as the trusted source of information inserted. You have to put a bunch of elbow grease into figuring out what to actually put in the CMDB.

So how do you define the metrics?

First you need to know where you are starting from – you will need to baseline the environment. Then baseline what your state is 3, 6, and 12 months after installing CMDB.

Next: break metrics down to 2 strategic areas:

1. Strategic
   1. Operational Costs
   2. Application performance
   3. Compliance - internal auditors doing analysis – keep track of their findings and incorporate into your elements for data gathering
2. Operational Metrics
   1. Changes unplanned (typically 80% unplanned or emergency)
   2. Changes withdrawn (how many changes were withdrawn / roll back)
   3. Application downtime (what did it cost from app being down)
   4. Server downtime (before and after)
   5. Tickets generated (before and after)

Having the data to show how you are performing makes it much easier to show why you need more budget to improve performance in specific areas. Having metrics allows IT managers to do marketing back to the business units about the value you are delivering.

Gartner said that from their Enterprise customers they often hear “I haven’t quantified the value yet”…That is not the right answer.

During the session, Gartner did a real-time wireless poll of the audience with some interesting questions:

What are the tools to build and populate your CMDB with IT services?

Focus of CMDB?

• Inventory 20%
• IT service relationships 68%
• Other 6%
• Don’t know 6%

Interesting to note, a very consistent set of information from year to year polling which equals a mature understanding of the CMDB’s role for analysis and decision process.

Have you heard of ITIL V.2 & V.3 and considered how it impacts this discussion?

ITIL is a process framework, it is not a technology automation framework. Just because something is pink ITIL certified does not mean that it will help at all with the automation of the process framework.

Gartner quantified the market as being about 2 years old this month. So the point here is we are in early days of this technology. The way they see it, the Large Enterprise/Framework vendors selling you is like a lock-in, but the interesting thing about CMDB is that the tools that you need to integrate and federate were only recently acquired, so the entire framework vendor integration and alignment story is mostly incomplete.

Gartner’s Evolution of the CMDB deployment

On average it takes 12 – 18 months to get up and running.

Through 2011 enterprise should recognize that any of the CMDB tools bought today may require significant upgrades to offer near real time service views to support decision support analytics.

Several items from this presentation jump out at me:

1. IT Organizations need to deploy tools that will help to automate the continuous collection of IT asset inventory, configuration and business impact analysis. That is a big gap that exists in the marketplace today… the speed at which information is collected and updated into the CMDB.
2. Investing too much into this immature market before the official standards are set and then adopted by the industry (estimated 18 months after final adoption) is quite risky.

The conclusion that I made from this presentation is that you are better off with our 80 – 20 rule around CMDB’s. Use a tool that will collect 80% of what you need to operate the business in 20% of the time it takes to deploy these heavy, less than automated framework tools!

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