SaaS is taking a bite out of the $18 billion IT management market. A new Forrester Research report forecasts SaaS-based IT management accounts will be 10% of the market by 2013. The reason: high level of interest from medium-sized and large enterprises. Forrester also predicts that enterprises with 1,000 or more employees will account for 50% of SaaS installations in 2009. We’ve seen this on the service desk side with the rapid growth of upstart Service-now.com. Companies are looking for easier and rapid deployment, lower upfront and capital costs and rapid time to value – all benefits of SaaS as well as our own appliance model.

IBM snapped up Transitive this week. Their QuickTransit software dynamically translates native code between architectures, enabling apps compiled for one processor to be run on another without any modification. Apple was the first licensee and used it to build Rosetta, a translation system that allowed users of Intel Macs to seamlessly run legacy PowerPC apps. IBM plans to use the technology to move workloads onto IBM systems without recompiling, allowing customers to “save on energy costs due to hardware consolidation and reduced TCO.”

At CA World, CA announced a partnership with Amazon to provide “management capabilities around Amazon’s EC2 utility computing platform, potentially including discovery of software running on EC2 instances, performance monitoring, configuration management, software deployment capabilities and provisioning”. John Willis, in spite of some pretty funny potshots and stories about CA (don’t we all have them), writes that “CA is the first of the Big Four to take the cloud serious”.

After Interop Las Vegas you may have seen our analysis of the data that we collected and delivered in our NOC view.  I thought I’d recreate the same data for NY and do a short comparison.

1) Like in Vegas, uptime for the network 100%.  This is no small feat considering that we introduced a new wrinkle in NY, taking down the primary NOC while the education portion of the show was still going on.  This was a forced failover to the backup systems, and it went flawlessly.  I’d like to give a little credit to EM7 on the 100% uptime as it caught a failover to battery power that allowed AC to be restored before a series of critical equipment would have gone down.

2) Again like Vegas, the average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization.  Still lots of computing overhead availabe in the show network.

3) The NY show network wasn’t nearly as busy as in Las Vegas, sustaining an average of only 27Mbps of usage (versus 56 Mbps) in Vegas.

4) Power consumption for the network and NOC in NY clocked in at 445kwh per day, about 25% less than the Las Vegas show.  This wasn’t because the equipment was any more power efficient, but instead because the show was smaller and therefore there was less network gear.

5) Finally, a stat we didn’t track too carefully in Las Vegas, but that I find interesting.  During show hours the wireless network average 1,100 users attached.  That’s a lot of people and a lot of wireless devices.

The good news is there was nothing too unexpected in the data, overall the smaller show led to a smaller number of tickets and smaller consumption of resources across the board.  We hope to have the opportunity to work with the InteropNet team again next year and take a look at this data year-over-year for each show.

We have been conducting polls of our customers and of IT professionals at technology trade shows for the past two years and the results are in: Pulling together all of the management pieces and processes is even more crucial in a virtualized environment.

So what does this mean for you? You will need to refine your incident and problem management processes with new technologies in order to reduce downtime and maintain end user performance. But of course even the most basic technologies are not well integrated even in today’s world.

I recently participated in a Gartner Conference and watched to my amazement a real-time electronic survey of the audience. To my disbelief, the audience, filled with 300+ people from Fortune 2000 companies provided real-time responses to the question:

What level of integration does your IT org have between event management and service desk applications?

• None: 10%
• Manual Phone call from IT ops to IT service desk staff member: 46%
• Manual click button on event manager to open trouble ticket: 20%
• Automated event management system automatically opens trouble ticket without requiring human oversight or approval: 24%

Unbelievable… still very few of the survey respondents have yet to formalize problem management systems with event management systems. For 56% of the audience the process is still manual!

Another interesting real-time survey question at the Gartner Conference was:

Who in your organization is responsible for critical problem processes and resolution?

• IT Service Desk 13%
• IT Operations 49%
• Process Team 12%
• Other 9%
• Responsibility not formalized 17%

Virtualization adoption and the speed with which things change in a virtualized environment require automation and will transform Incident and Problem Management. Clearly with this new technology we are required to re-think Organizational, Behavioral and Cultural Challenges required to take advantage of the opportunities that virtualization provides.

Incident and problem management processes and metrics must bridge organizational silos that have been the norm within IT. With virtualization, people have to work more closely together in the different silos than ever before. IT leaders need to break down the walls between the technology-centric silo mentalities.

Business Imperative Action Plan:

1. What can you do today? –Understand the impact of virtualization on incident and problem mgt. workload, provide technology training for helpdesk/service desk staff.
2. What can you do in the next 12 months?

Formalize problem management processes, metrics and personnel.
Invest in tools and processes for systems on virtualized servers.
Long term: On the Radar Screen!
Instill teamwork into all groups responsible for the virtualized environment service and support. Map components and configuration items directly to end user services.

Final Thoughts: Know the management pieces and ensure that they fit together. It’s great to buy new technology, but be demanding to ensure that your vendors show you have they will help to link all these pieces together - Change, Inventory, Incident, Problem, Server, Capacity, Performance, Configuration, Event, and Integrated Workflow.

I’m sure you already know about the other “network management” – where ISPs and carriers get their hands publicly slapped for limiting bandwidth to high-traffic offenders. But when is this kind of “network management” a good thing? At a panel sponsored by the FCC in DC, reps from carriers and ISPs discussed what steps they’ve been taking to prepare for a pandemic or other major global crisis – that would force workers to stay at home or work from more remote locations to limit exposure.

Are people paying attention to ICANN? They’re saying that IPv4 will be fully allocated in the next two or three years. Does anyone care? In their bid to make people care, ICANN talks about the state of IPv6 adoption and touts Africa as the most rapid adopter.

SOA soon part of the ‘cloud’? No, please no.

Microsoft – The Silver Lining in Every Cloud. Joe Wilcox over at eWeek’s Microsoft Watch, has been following Steve Ballmer around and collecting some nice quotes on how the company is transitioning. “For many years, we had kind of what I would call the all-encompassing mission, vision and scorecard statement: a computer on every desk and in every home. …Well, our footprint and portfolio is broader than that. “ [In every hand and of course, in every cloud…] “So, as a vision statement we talk about creating seamless experiences that combine the magic of software, the power of the Internet across a world of devices.” The magic of software – something I haven’t thought about for a while. And:

“You need a real platform in the cloud. When we wanted to go after the PC, we built an operating system. When we wanted to go after the phone, we built an operating system. When we wanted to go after the enterprise, we built an operating system. We’ll announce a new operating system, one that runs in the cloud and has a wide variety of capabilities.”

Interop NY

• East Coast version of this major networking show. ScienceLogic is the official provider for network monitoring and help desk for InteropNet, the world’s largest temporary network. See us in action in the NOC. Stop by the booth, #1045, to chat, pick up your own deck of EM7 cards, or fill out a survey for a free t-shirt.
• When: Conference runs from Mon 9/15 – Friday 9/19. Expo days are Wed 9/17 – Thurs 9/18.
• Where: The Javits Center, NYC.

VMworld 2008

• The largest virtualization show put on by VMware, the leader in the space. VMworld is only a couple of years old but growing like gangbusters. This year’s show should be an interesting one in light of all the turmoil surrounding VMware and Microsoft’s putsch, oops I meant push, into the space with Hyper-V.
• When: Mon 9/15 is Partner Day. Conference runs from Tues 9/16 – Thurs 9/18
• Where: The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas.

Hosting Transformation Summit

• Executive-level hosting/service provider show run by The 451 Group (and Tier 1). The analysts at The 451 Group and Tier 1 discuss state of the industry and trends.
• When: Mon 9/15 – Wed 9/17
• Where: The Mirage, Las Vegas

ICE Summit

• Also run by The 451 Group, the ICE (Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise) Summit will focus on “virtualization in context”. This overlaps the last day of VMworld (personally making my life a little harder).
• When: Thurs 9/18
• Where: The Mirage, Las Vegas

Inc 500 / Inc 5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony

• Since we made it on the list (#350!), we thought we should show the flag at the Inc 500 conference, culminating in an awards gala on Saturday night.
• When: Thurs 9/18 – Sat 9/20
• Where: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at the National Harbor (DC)

Stay tuned for live blogging and video from the various events with always lively commentary from the ScienceLogicians.

One source at the Knight Center for Digital Excellence notes, "The new network owners are supposed to have a much more sustainable business model." Supposed to. Later, "Network Acquisition Company, which acquired the network, hasn't talked publicly about the details of its new plan, but it has hinted that its strategy will differ from EarthLink's." Hasn't talked publicly. Then, "[NAC and Tropos] spokespeople said the companies would talk more about the network later this month when details of the new business plan are ready." Huh.

Reardon explains digital divide issues and looks into what Wireless Philadelphia has been up to, although doesn't note that delays in EarthLink's deployment and other factors have led to just a few hundred individuals that have been assisted by the non-profit; numbers may have changed, but that was as of a few months ago. Still, Wireless Philadelphia has apparently diversified its funding sources--Reardon cites 30 now.

I think we're still coming off the doldrums of August.

The Anchorage Daily News reports back in September 2004:

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator. Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich’s computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.

The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician “said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff,” Palin said in an interview. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was there.”

And this is how Salon reports the same incident:

“In a neat symbolic fit, the agent responsible for Alaska’s current moment of reform and modernization is a woman, a breed once nearly as rare in far Northwest politics as a Democrat. Sarah Palin, a libertarian and hockey mom from the fast-growing suburbs of Anchorage, began her political career — as an appointed member of the state’s Oil and Gas Commission — by hacking into the computer of another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, chairman of the Alaska Republican Party. Palin was seeking the evidence that she would eventually use to charge him with an improper relationship with lobbyists. (Ruedrich would later settle state ethics charges against him by paying a $12,000 fine.)”

Is this where the McCain administration is going to get their computer security expertise? She’s not a security expert but it is nice to see someone at the level of state govenor who knows their way around a computer.

Companies think they own their reputation, but in reality they don’t. A reputation is the aggregate of the popular opinion about you. Opinions, or thoughts, belong to an individual, true or not, and a company doesn’t own a person’s thoughts, therefore a company doesn’t own its reputation. QED.

Yes.  Absolutely.  In fact, there are already changes in the works to the FAIR model that reflect this line of thinking that will allow us to approach reputation damage in a much more rational manner that anything else I’ve seen to date.

Second, RE:  Hansei & Kaizen, Richard left the following comment.

I don’t agree with your view on Gemba even if we live in a virtual world. Look into any company’s wiring closet and you’ll immediately see a reflection in its maturity from the state of the equipment, the labeling / documentation and overall neatness. “Man with messy wiring closet, will have messy virtual servers.”

However, the true benefit in Gemba is not in the actual visual inspection. It is in in the journey from your desk to the data center / wiring closet.

I agree that the benefit is in the journey.  I can’t see the wiring closet as the main destination (I just don’t see it as a useful prior).  Maybe I wasn’t clear, or was taking for granted that you guys have been reading the blog for the past 2 years, but the journey needs to be to the LOB that owns the application.  The example most given when describing Gemba is going to the production line to look at the issue that causes a problem in the ability to create and sell a car.  The “security” journey is not to the wiring closet, but to the system itself and the logs that we have for the system and whatever network-based controls might be applicable.  And we, as an industry, are just starting to understand that this “security” is only part of the picture.  The whole picture is represented by the factors that create risk.

And for our “risk journey” that security journey is only a one of serveral useful pieces of prior information for use in analysis.  For risk we have to also journey back to the “production line”, or, in our case, to the application/LOB owner.  It may also be to corporate counsel, to marketing, to all sorts of other places in the enterprise because probable losses (a necessary measurement we need in order to understand risk) may come from many different sources in the organization.  For those with FAIR knowledge, think of the six forms of loss to get an idea of what sorts of journeys we need to make.

This is why tomorrow’s post is designed to look at what should we be reflecting about, and what is needed for reflection.

Hint:  our models for risk & risk management can give us an idea of how to create structure around Hansei for the IRM program.

He’s a bit indignant that so much energy goes to sporting events like the Olympics rather than more important news that isn’t getting reported around the world.

This is in a year when tons of journalists are getting laid off.

This is in a year when there are tons of stories around the world that aren’t getting reported on.

Could we take half of those photographers and send them to Russia, for instance

Reminds me of a feeling I had back in college as an undergrad student studying social sciences and humanities, about the way my friends who were physicists interacted with the world. They were so awed by the stars, Mars, astrophysics, and it seemed to me interesting but altogether unimportant. They argued they may find something outside our planet that could help solve Earth-bound problems like disease, or find the origins of earth and humanity — but really they were doing it because they loved it. One of my friends had a good argument, though — there are enough people right now that we can specialize in what we care about, and there will still be others covering other topics. He could be a physicist and look into the universe’s origin, while I studied social interaction and writing, and our other friends looked into solving cancer or eradicating invasive plants in the native wetlands. We have to specialize, and there are enough of us to do it too.

I think it’s the same way in journalism — whether it’s sports, celebrity journalism, or coverage of politics and war, there are a lot of opportunities right now for journalists. Of course the business model is changing, and some old-schoolers won’t know how to roll with that, but generations change slowly; we’re learning.

Also, the Olympics is seen as more than a sporting event, it’s also a symbol of world competition and cooperation too — a way for countries to come together and share entertainment globally. I think that’s worth covering.

In the second post, Robert Scoble says there are plenty of great journalists but the public doesn’t care. In some ways I have to agree with that, but I don’t think it’s negative, necessarily. I had a conversation with someone the other day about world news reportage. He says, “I was just reading this story, but what does it matter to me if there’s a flood in some city in another country I’ll never visit and some farmer lost his sheep?” World news is only important when it’s relevant, so it’s no wonder that many people don’t care — if they don’t know much about the area, and it doesn’t affect them, they have no incentive to give it full attention. You can call that apathy, but I think it’s an important selectivity skill that humans have. We have to choose what to give priority to, so if nothing stands out as being particularly important, we just ignore it or gloss over it. Human nature…

Also I think the common person today just gets desensitized and doesn’t know where to turn their energy, when surrounded by so many crises. Either you focus on one specialty and do your best to work toward one cause in your life — and maybe that’s just in the course of your daily work — or you become a complete Attention-Deficit-Disorder case and bounce from one problem to the next, without knowing how to solve anything. That just causes a sense of bewilderment, despair, and either that bogs you down or eventually you get desensitized.

There’s a commenter on Scoble’s blog, Spencer, who talks about this generation’s apathy. There are so many people who want to blame today’s generation or the young generation for this “apathy” that they sense. But I see it as a survival mechanism that arises from the way information flows these days. We’re surrounded by crises, everyone wants us to know about them — the water shortage, global warming, death in Iraq, the national deficit. Okay, crisis, I get it. But no one gives a real clear idea on what any individual is really supposed to do to solve the problem. You can’t get involved with one global cause, without ignoring all the others, and if you do get involved it’s likely to become your life’s purpose. Most people are concerned with other things — their families, their work, personal development, their homes and futures, and really that’s enough to take up all their time.

I’m always amazed when I read about the early unionists. Emma Goldman for example, the activist who pushed for the 8-hr workday, and campaigned for free love in the early 1900s when women were still wearing corsets, used to work 16 hour factory days as a seamstress, then lead meetings late into the night. Today we lead cushy lives comparatively–8 hour days, plus commute and lunch, family time, dinner time, gym maybe, sleep… but it still doesn’t seem like we ever have enough energy and time.

What Emma had that most people today don’t, is a community living in the same conditions as herself, with clear goals about what they were campaigning for, and a cause that affected their own daily lives. Today, unionism and local activism is in much shorter supply, in part due to the many people who work fairly comfy desk jobs, and the problem that everyone has his own specialization, works in a cubicle, does his or her own thing. The problems we’re facing today in terms of global warming, global water shortage, aren’t the same kinds of problems that activists have fought for in the past, and there’s no clear road map for how to solve them. Our leaders sure aren’t leading the way.

What we do have, at least, is the Olympics, which is an age old symbol of international cooperation, play and competition…so, uh, go sports! As for full disclosure, I don’t actually have a TV and haven’t watched the Olympics in many years, but I do try taking short showers–does that help?