Top 10 IT Predicts for 2011 Prevail - Here are a Few More Controversial Topics - ITIL Wane, Sourcing Options, Management License Models Tis the season for Vegas, gambling and the Gartner Data Center Conference and thus many top 10 Predicts for the coming year. I'm not a gambler, take these as you may, but for those who know me might say she might just have a bit of challenge the status quo in her and a knack for blowing things up from time to time. I am a bit of a thinker and researcher of the IT management industry, however, these are just my musings to add to recent flurry of top 10 lists from my friends on WorkloadIQ and Baseline that sparked my imagination of further possibilities. Here goes.....remember I said a tad controversial.....I welcome the discussion as my co-workers say oh no, she's at it again and they duck and hide......cowards! :-) Continue reading

Are you leading your organizations cloud roll-out or are you reacting to it? It is happening, better to lead than follow! The WorkloadIQ post and the article Richard references on the Stealth Cloud from a CIO article reminds me of a previous artilce about the Accidental Cloud Leader from a Networkworld article. Both of these articles point to the cloud is coming, the choice facing IT organizations is whether to lead, control costs, mitigate risk, deliver quality service and manage costs or to follow with rising costs, reactive IT, high risk and poor service quality. Richard hits the nail on the head, IT is traditionally change averse and insecure with the concept of outsourcing services. Technology is evolving faster and faster and the very organization that should adopt, deploy and lead with technology continues to lag. Continue reading

Novell Operations Center meets WorkloadIQ - Monitoring and Measuring Intelligently What a fast year it has been and what a crazy last couple of weeks for us on the Business Service Management team at Novell. Wednesday was launch day for us and a very exciting time! A time to reflect as well as I spoke to many in the press this week always being asked just what this Business Service Management technology is, what do companies need, how does it differ from the competition, what is your longevity secret sauce and what makes it different than all the rest with this WorkloadIQ approach. I found this intriguing and a very exciting time for the technology in the days of mixed physical, virtual and cloud environments. Continue reading

Getting to SLAs that are Meaningful I stumbled into a blog thread yesterday that prompted me to add another SLA blog regarding the components and measurement of meaningful SLAs. Earlier this summer I posted two blogs on SLAs, a Part 1 and Part 2. SLAs could generate a multi chapter book. In the first one, I discussed the relevance of SLAs with your service and cloud providers and in the second one I discussed more about how to approach building meaningful SLAs. Today let's talk about the components of relevant SLAs. Continue reading

Simplicity of a Name - in the Name of Progress! Novell Operations Center is creating a buzz out there already! Thank you for all the questions and comments on the blog post earlier this week regarding the name updates. Let me answer some of those questions and provide some insight. Continue reading

Announcing Novell Operations Center - New Name in the Name of Progress! It has been a fast year for me back with the Business Service Management solution here at Novell. Change is always inevitable, often feared and sometimes brings simplicity in complex times. Business Service Management is a concept that IT organizations seek to attain in aligning infrastructure as business services within their organizations. Continue reading

Standard Tool to Define, Input & Report, but "No More, One Size Fits all Meaningless Data!" As the Cloud and as-a-service consume the airwaves, trade rags and vendor messaging, one thing is becoming more and more relevant - IT Aligning to the Business, Measuring in term of how the business consumes services and Communicating in terms of services and business metrics. Flexibility to measure and communicate the way business uses technology and agility to customize measurements and communication are key and will become more complex in a mixed physical, virtual and cloud computing environment. Developing the proper management, measurement and communication today will enable embracing cloud delivered services without an interruption in service communication. IT organizations that implement proper management, measurement and communication in terms of services will be those that drive value into their businesses. Continue reading

Tale of Customer Service, Cost of Service Impact, Speed to Restore and the "Charley" View! As we are in the heart of Hurricane season, I'm reminded of the old "Charley" Business Service View - a Category 4 Hurricane in 2004. This is a true story about a power company and how IT is impacted and how IT, by being proactive and hurricane prepared, can be the business driver in containing and managing the impending events that a hurricane brings with the loss of power due to downed lines. This is the second in a series of Business Service Management (BSM) Stories from the Trenches that I'll post describing the benefits of a single-pane-of-glass and the management of complex infrastructures as services to the business and the customer driving customer satisfaction, revenue and growth. Continue reading

Tale of Customer Service, Cost of Service Impact, Mitigation of Risk and the CMDB Heart! This is a story about a manufacturer, a retail buyer and the consumer and how IT management touches them all. This is the first in a series of Business Service Management (BSM) Stores from the Trenches that I'll post describing the benefits of a single-pain-of-glass (I did mean the pain of glass!) and management of complex infrastructures as services to the business and the customer driving revenue and growth. Continue reading

Business going to the Cloud can be the Catalyst for IT to Measure and Communicate Value! How many of us have heard what a road block IT is, how costly / what a mystery IT is and IT cannot communicate value to the business leaving frustration in the organization. It's sort of like the Mars and Venus thing and "if they only understood me better" debate. It's OK to laugh, we all suffer these discussions, I too am guilt - the makings of a good Dilbert cartoon no doubt ending with Catbert reigning down his wrath of mandates. However, with all sourcing decisions, it is about creating change in an environment where change is difficult and should be embraced. IT has the opportunity to do just that and be the hero in the end. This is a good sourcing option as it creates the change that will drive down costs that are difficult for in-house IT to drive. Continue reading

Consolidate Management Tools and Reduce Costs through Federation, While Aligning Service Delivery to the Business - How Can this Be? What a time to be in the IT management software business, just when you think everyone is consolidating tools and removing tools from their portfolio, in comes a vendor selling management tools. How can a new tool to the environment be a good thing and why would I consider this as a senior IT executive. If that tool can help you to de-dup your environment, add value and remove cost, what is there not to like about that solutions? Read on and see how the right investment can benefit objectives and reduce costs. Continue reading

Operate, Control & Deliver Services through Technology is the Job of IT Operations Cloud and Virtualization brings Agility - At What "Hidden" Cost and What Value? When the Novell Business Service Management product team was on the cusp of releasing an integration to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service (EC2) this month the very first thing that came to my mind as a one time (century's ago in the dark ages of mainframes, assembler, CICS and COBOL) application developer was, "if dialing up a VM is 'free' in the cloud, what is to stop me from calling it continually, on a whim and just leave it running?". If I don't see the cost, how would you expect the costs to be managed conscienctiously and with frugality? Why would that occur to me? Coming from the dark ages, I worked for a large outsourcer where size of the code, how fast it ran, how many requests for the same data was scrutinized (read once, use often), etc. Reminds me of having a mobile phone, sent to Europe to travel and told, just use the phone. Then I found the roaming charges as I investigated my own usage one month in an attempt to estimate what I might require on a personal plan. WOW! The hidden roaming cost would have changed my behavior had I known ahead of time. Read on for quick run down of these hidden costs brought on by new technology........... Continue reading

Gartner Identifies Emergence of Enterprise Security Intelligence or Maybe More Aptly Put, the Convergence of IT Silos into Services Aligned to Business! Someone passed the latest Gartner research to me today, very timely I might add. Report Numer G00201051, "Prepare for the Emergence of Enterprise Security Intelligence". It was timely as I have been spending a great deal of time over the last 2 weeks meeting and discussing with my counterparts in Novell's Security Management solution organization just this topic of "Intelligence", real-time infrastructure and SIEM in the context of services to the business with regards to impact, prioritization and management of resources. This could be my most blasphemous blog to date, debating an analyst report. Being and ex-META analyst, I'll be brave as I know they enjoy a good "discussion" :-) and it isn't that I disagree with the research and the points, maybe we don't require another "concept" to achieve the results covered in some part by the current concept of Business Service Management (BSM). Read on especially if you are a Novell Sentinel Customer and/or Novell Business Service Management customer as I would LOVE to hear your comments on this value proposition in what you have available to you from Novell. It's a good thing I'm meeting with Gartner next week, timing never my forte. :-) Continue reading

IT Operations often Maliced as a "Roadblock" - Time for Datacenter Redemption! BSM is more of a "market" than a single tool as is IWM, both with areas of focus that deliver the goal in the end. Both are dependent upon marrying many IT metrics to turn them into actionable information. Infrastructructures supporting the market of IWM bring in the added complexity of portability, dynamic configurations, policy driven, identity aware, mixed environments (many outsourced to Cloud service providers), the likes IT operations and datacenters have yet to experience. Daunting no doubt. The question becomes, will your Operations Center be the "roadblock" or the "catalyst" for agility with control, business alignment and responsiveness to take action in real-time? Read on....first of several blogs to address the topics of Operate, Control and Deliver services in the new paradigm of Intelligent Workload Management................ Continue reading

After the fact "reporting" is merely just reporting the score of the game! Bold statement, I know. Let me explain. When asked about where BSM or IT to business alignment projects begin, I can generally categorize in 3 buckets: •Fixing "Boo Boo's" - Availability & Performance - ROI tangible, tied to revenue impacted by outages •Process Efficiency - Automation, Change, Control - ROI is tougher and more "cost management" •Service Alignment - Service to Business Impact - ROI tangible, tied to manual cost reduction Service alignment driven projects tend to the final stage of maturity, however, this does not need to be the case as defining these service objectives defines the objectives and behavior of the previous 2 project categories and has the potential to drive bigger bang for the buck by driving top line revenue versus bottom line costs. Read on to find out how to make your SLAs matter............. Continue reading

Hype and Bubble Burst for the CMDB Finally - Fall of the Dreaded 4 Letter Word! They fall as fast as they rise. What is the "value" of static data from the past in a database? Outside of tracking how many, cost and depreciation value, I cannot think of a single thing. Although as I watch the Nats play the Mets, baseball is all about metrics and stats from the past without relative value for the novice watcher. Number of homeruns in relationship to how many others have hit or the most ever hit brings a whole new perspective. It's the relationship and relativivity of the metric that brings "value" by creating "information". Continue reading

Will history repeat itself with a "busting" explosion of rolling thunder from dotcom days? CIO Magazine reports from a recent Economic Impact Study (April 2010) that 39% of the 410 respondents say that the economic recession has accelerated their organization's use of alternative IT models (e.g., cloud, on-demand services, SaaS). As an ex-analyst from the sourcing era of ASP's, ISP's, MSP's, etc. in the dotcom rush to get to the web via hosting providers, this is a reminiscent trend and one that repeats with each new technology trrend. Continue reading

Technology as a Commodity Utility Keeping the Lights on OR Technology as Innovation Driving Business Growth Two articles from last week have caught my attention as well as the continued pressure in corporate objectives to use technology to drive business growth and be an enabler, differentiator in the market and not just a utility running the business like electricity as a commodity. It catches my attention both from a marketing perspective and the role of technology to drive business growth. Read On..... Continue reading

The Intuit outage on Tuesday night, June 15th that lasted 36+ hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers and one third of the $1.607 B in revenue as reported for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering of it's Turbo Tax Online, Online Banking , Small business Accounting, Online Payroll and Intuit Website spurs this much awaited blog entry - Do SLA's matter? YES! Continue reading