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.

I’m just not sure how a customer is ever expected to become an expert in the product(s) they’ve purchased, and hope to successfully implement, when the manufacturer requires nearly 60 experts on a call to answer questions.  I understand that a customer generally won’t use all parts of the Tivoli suite of products, but how do you even figure out what to buy?

And let’s not forget…12 hours! That is one long support call.

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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ScienceLogic: What is “BSM Lite” and how is it different from “heavy” BSM?

Doug McClure: I think the concepts that Peter Sevcik from Net Forecast initially outlined in his blog post sum up what “BSM Lite” is all about: a simpler, less expensive, more responsive way of achieving the goals and objectives of Business Service Management (BSM).  He’s contrasted this nicely against what he termed “BSM Heavy” being the larger investments in time and resources to deploy domain specific tools and solutions each providing a view into the business service delivery with some aggregation and consolidation to tie up all of the disparate tool’s information into a concise end-to-end business service management story.

I’m pleased that he leveraged some of my thinking around a better working definition of what BSM really is from the BSM Defined page on my blog. Of course, these definitions are going to vary depending on whom you talk with and how they see the overall BSM Maturity Model.  I’ve created a BSM Maturity Model that aligns with the famous Gartner IT maturity model.  I’d like to think that a “BSM Lite” solution is one attacking the low hanging fruit, enabling one to achieve value quicker, and in a more tactical manner.  The “BSM Heavy” solutions are capable of the same, but span all along the BSM Maturity Model by adding additional point solutions, products and technologies from their broader portfolio. 

ScienceLogic: Does “BSM Lite” just refer to the tools, or can it refer to the process and methodology as well?

Doug McClure: I think that BSM is as much a philosophy as it is technology, process, people and methodology.  If we can get people to think, operate and respond differently than they do today with a focus on the business, customers, quality, revenue, or whatever else is most important to their business goals and objectives, than that is Business Service Management and could be “BSM Lite” if you will. 

Being that I work for IBM Tivoli, one of my personal objectives is to identify ways to use our key BSM enabling products in a more efficient, effective and BSM centric way. This was a huge driver for trying to hold DevCampTivoli focused on “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. 

In my opinion, we don’t make things very easy for our clients and the answer can’t be to “buy this product, module or widget” to fill in the gaps.  In my opinion, we must establish a BSM overlay within IBM Tivoli’s development and product management organization that ensures that we have clearly thought about how to enable BSM with the hundreds or products that we sell.  In my opinion, every product release must incorporate the fundamentals of enabling BSM in addition to the core domain specific functionality intended. I hope to keep this spirit alive and get our smartest IBMers and clients thinking about the best way to take a “BSM Heavy” solution and make it “lighter”. I hope to share more about my plans here and guidance for the industry in general soon.

That said, I am always interested in consulting with clients and collaborate with peers in the industry to figure out how to get the focus on the people, process and technology as key components of their BSM strategies.  I am absolutely convinced that without a documented BSM strategy, roadmap and top level sponsorship within the business and IT, the chances of BSM success greatly diminish.

ScienceLogic: Given the complexities involved in implementing a BSM strategy and dealing with the people and processes components of any business, how does “BSM Lite” really work? Should the expectations and outcomes be “lite” as well?

Doug McClure: Time will tell if “BSM Lite” will work.  I’m seeing emerging companies that are already breaking down some of the barriers to BSM success.  I do not expect that those choosing to begin with a “BSM Lite” approach should expect “lite” outcomes. 

The outcomes are the same regardless of the approach IF you’ve got a documented BSM strategy, roadmap and top level sponsorship in place before you begin. New features, capabilities and technologies will be needed as the needs of the business change and companies mature in BSM and fundamental IT management. This will likely force companies to move in more “BSM Heavy” directions to fill those gaps. 

In my opinion, this is the ideal scenario now as it gives “BSM Lite” vendors opportunities to grow their products and solutions. It also GREATLY improves the chances for success with a “BSM Heavy” solution because the organization would have already had matured enough to approach a “BSM Heavy” solution than if they hadn’t done a “BSM Lite” solution in the past.

ScienceLogic: Is “BSM Lite” more appropriate for a small or midsized organization, or does it apply equally to large companies? Is there an ideal profile for a company that can successfully implement a BSM strategy? Is there a different profile for “BSM Lite”?

Doug McClure: From an economic perspective, the concepts of “BSM Lite” are appropriate for all companies.  Remember, with “BSM Lite” we’re focused on identifying ways to make the goals and objectives of BSM easier to implement and in a more cost effective way.  Any company concerned about their IT cost overhead should care about this, especially when the risks of starting out with a “BSM Heavy” type deployment are much greater and the time to value generally much longer.

The “ideal” profile for any company is one where the BSM initiative begins by establishing top level buy in through creation of a formal BSM strategy for the company. This BSM strategy personalizes how the company defines what BSM is, what value the company expects from it, and how it will use BSM as a competitive differentiator for delivery of its business and IT services, products, etc.

The organizational “profile” I’ve seen most successful is when implementing a BSM strategy originates from within or actively includes a group that many companies have now that serves as a liaison or relationship management role between the various lines of business and IT. Sometimes this group is often seen as the gatekeeper to filter (and hinder) business driven requirements into the IT organization. In the ideal scenario, this group works very closely with the business and IT (usually staffed by business people and not IT people) to understand both the business side and IT side of complex business services and applications. 

Apart from the traditional IT components, what this group can do is help IT really understand the business perspective.  Analysis of the impact on the business in business terms is only possible by collaborating with a group such as this.  True value oriented BSM becomes attainable when we get to this level of IT and business alignment, cooperation, collaboration and communication.

If BSM is an IT only initiative, this will likely result in an IT centric perspective severely lacking in the necessary business perspective.  In these cases where IT doesn’t invest their BSM efforts with the business as an equal partner, the implementation ultimately becomes a “CYA” tool for IT and not achieve the desired value oriented expected.

To some degree “BSM Lite” may have an entirely different profile. If we see the price points, complexity and time to value change significantly we may see these types of deployments originate exclusively within the Line of Business. The possibility may exist where large enterprises operating in a shared IT services or IT outsourcing type model that the Line of Business brings in a “BSM Lite” solution to gain the visibility, checks and balances needed to ensure that the LoB’s needs are being met from the internal/external provider. I’d envision that “BSM Lite” may even be capable of operating within a “SaaS” model or other managed service type offering where the price points are below the signing levels triggering broader IT involvement and review.

To Be Continued…

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John Willis talks about customers that use a hybrid approach of priority and open source monitoring tools depending on how important what’s being monitored actually is to the business. He says,”a running joke that was going around in the early 2000’s is that BMC and Tivoli created Mercury (now HP) Sitescope because they, BMC and Tivoli, would not budge on their per server pricing. In fact many of the enterprise proprietary monitoring vendors still don’t deal with the not-so-important-server issue.”

One of our favorite writers, Michael Vizard, examines the virtualization market and more at Masked Intentions. He says that, “Virtualization continues to evolve, and companies such as IBM, CA, BladeLogic and Hewlett-Packard have all made specific commitments to extend their tools for managing physical servers to virtual machine environments.” We would add ScienceLogic to that list of course. But what’s more interesting is the statement that newbies focused on point solutions around virtualization management are saying that virtual machines represent a paradigm shift that will make existing management tools obsolete. Am I missing something here? All management vendors need to keep up with technology changes – hence the move to support virtualization. The market needs change; the management tools change, hopefully apace.

PacketTrap thinks that commercial open source is dying. So does that mean they think only commercial open source is their competitor and not just open source monitoring software?

So their value proposition is not that their feature set and value are better, but that they’ll probably be around longer than any open source products dabbling in trying to drum up revenue.

Want to work inside the Interop NOC? We’re looking for some great people to join the volunteer team at Interop.

And finally, snicker, snicker. Here’s a truly funny post on the Broadcom debacle.

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Charlie Babcock at Information Week reported that VMWare just acquired an application performance management company. What is it with VMware and the little companies they purchase? Actually, comments like that aside, I think this is a very interesting acquisition. Clearly moving in the right direction to take advantage of virtualization features to help optimize app performance/availability and maybe even automate remediation based on the info coming out of B-Hive and policies set up in VI3. We’ll see.

A new series called “OpsMgr Answer This” began this week on Windows’ Operation Manager blog. The first question asked, “Why should one go to Operations Manager 2007? You may be using MOM 2005 and be perfectly happy with it. There is an adage: "if it works, don’t break it" - so why go to Operations Manager 2007?” Kerrie Meyler answered with this, “The biggest change in OpsMgr 2007 versus MOM 2005 is in its approach to monitoring. OpsMgr incorporates end-to-end monitoring - not just server monitoring with MOM 2005… but the health of applications (including identified components across the network) and services. Which would you prefer to know?” We already know our answer.

Virtualization implementation needs more strategy behind it, says Michael Vizard of eWeek’s Masked Intentions. “Instead of thinking of virtualization as glorified system software, IT organizations need to take a more holistic approach to virtualization.” We couldn’t agree more – in fact, we talk about virtualization as a technology strategy in and of itself. A successful virtualization strategy combines people and process changes with the right tools for a company’s unique computing environment and goals.

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Charlie Babcock at Information Week reported that VMWare just acquired an application performance management company. What is it with VMware and the little companies they purchase? Actually, comments like that aside, I think this is a very interesting acquisition. Clearly moving in the right direction to take advantage of virtualization features to help optimize app performance/availability and maybe even automate remediation based on the info coming out of B-Hive and policies set up in VI3. We’ll see.

A new series called “OpsMgr Answer This” began this week on Windows’ Operation Manager blog. The first question asked, “Why should one go to Operations Manager 2007? You may be using MOM 2005 and be perfectly happy with it. There is an adage: "if it works, don’t break it" - so why go to Operations Manager 2007?” Kerrie Meyler answered with this, “The biggest change in OpsMgr 2007 versus MOM 2005 is in its approach to monitoring. OpsMgr incorporates end-to-end monitoring - not just server monitoring with MOM 2005… but the health of applications (including identified components across the network) and services. Which would you prefer to know?” We already know our answer.

Virtualization implementation needs more strategy behind it, says Michael Vizard of eWeek’s Masked Intentions. “Instead of thinking of virtualization as glorified system software, IT organizations need to take a more holistic approach to virtualization.” We couldn’t agree more – in fact, we talk about virtualization as a technology strategy in and of itself. A successful virtualization strategy combines people and process changes with the right tools for a company’s unique computing environment and goals.

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Charlie Babcock at Information Week reported that VMWare just acquired an application performance management company. What is it with VMware and the little companies they purchase? Actually, comments like that aside, I think this is a very interesting acquisition. Clearly moving in the right direction to take advantage of virtualization features to help optimize app performance/availability and maybe even automate remediation based on the info coming out of B-Hive and policies set up in VI3. We’ll see.

A new series called “OpsMgr Answer This” began this week on Windows’ Operation Manager blog. The first question asked, “Why should one go to Operations Manager 2007? You may be using MOM 2005 and be perfectly happy with it. There is an adage: "if it works, don’t break it" - so why go to Operations Manager 2007?” Kerrie Meyler answered with this, “The biggest change in OpsMgr 2007 versus MOM 2005 is in its approach to monitoring. OpsMgr incorporates end-to-end monitoring - not just server monitoring with MOM 2005… but the health of applications (including identified components across the network) and services. Which would you prefer to know?” We already know our answer.

Virtualization implementation needs more strategy behind it, says Michael Vizard of eWeek’s Masked Intentions. “Instead of thinking of virtualization as glorified system software, IT organizations need to take a more holistic approach to virtualization.” We couldn’t agree more – in fact, we talk about virtualization as a technology strategy in and of itself. A successful virtualization strategy combines people and process changes with the right tools for a company’s unique computing environment and goals.

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• 73% said Green IT was important
• 16% said it wasn’t
• 9% admitted they didn’t know what the agency’s policy was

The follow up question (and the responses) was the kicker though:

• Only 13% had tools/solutions for Green IT in place
• An additional 13% had plans this year to implement
• 55% didn’t know or had no plans to implement

Call me a skeptic, but the environment, and what people do to “save it”, must be pretty high on the list of things people pay lip service to. 3 out of 4 people said Green IT is important – but most people seemed to be responding from a personal perspective. I mean, who’s gonna come out and say “I don’t care about the environment”? In our conversations at the show, there was a lot of talk about energy-saving solutions that people personally used, but very few institutional examples.

Not to say that companies aren’t doing it. I was just talking to a Gartner analyst who had a customer with 2500 servers and ended up virtualizing them 6:1 with a resulting annual power savings of $1.1 million. Very cool. And of course, Opus Interactive, whose data center is 100% wind-powered. But so far, these guys are the exception and not the rule.

I was reading recently about IBM’s Big Green initiative, launched last year. There are many different components to this plan, but their recent announcement on new power/energy monitoring capabilities was pretty interesting. IBM partnered with companies like APC, Eaton, Matrikon, OSIsoft and VMware, to come up with a way for Tivoli customers to collect data from partner products in the power and cooling space.

So what’s going to drive adoption of Green IT? The cost savings – especially as energy costs rise? A more institutional approach to doing what’s right for the environment? Will it be a side benefit of the push to virtualize? Another article on how “hot” Green IT is? More vendors baking energy/power management features into their products? (Which I think is a great thing, BTW)

What do you think?

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