links for 2008-07-23
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Correlix, a venture-funded Wall Street startup, has selected Endace NinjaBox(R) appliances and Endace Data Acquisition and Generation (DAG(R)) interface cards as the foundation technology for its Latency Intelligence(TM) solution.
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PowerView BSM, we provide the skills, products and analytics needed to deliver a packaged solution. Our approach is incremental in allowing capability to be added in a phased approach, and allowing adaptation to occur in line with organizational maturity.
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“The Definitive Guide to Business Service Management” available at http://www.compuware.com/ebook , provides IT organizations with easily adopted best practices and innovative new processes to deliver increased value through improved IT service delivery
July 22, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-07-22
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Widgenie empowers everyone, from bloggers to business people, to quickly visualize data and share it in many different ways.
July 21, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-07-19
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IBM grew 14.1 percent, faster than the overall market which grew 13.5 percent to more than $12.9 billion in total revenue in 2007. The report also shows that IBM extended its lead and grew revenue share while closest competitors each lost share.
July 18, 2008 No Comments
OpenNMS Replacing and/or Complementing Netcool/OMNIbus & Impact
The weekly source for hot IT management news and gossip is the IT Management Podcast hosted by Cote’ of Redmonk and John M Willis of Zabovo. This week’s episode featured OpenNMS’s Tarus Balog.
Tarus dropped a few interesting tidbits throughout the conversation around Network Management about a couple very large IBM Tivoli Netcool clients that were moving from or complementing their existing architecture with OpenNMS. One was a large telecommunications company in Italy (Telecom Italia?) and another a very large mobile telecommunications company in Switzerland named Swisscom.
This led to some discussions around product scalability, licensing models, etc. Tarus didn’t have any specifics to share other than one requirement for OpenNMS to handle event storms of 2K-3K per second. He said they’re working through architecture approaches to ensure that their backend databases can continue to scale in ways similar to Netcool/OMNIbus’s in-memory database.
Tarus also mentioned capabilities in OpenNMS on par with what Netcool/Impact offers. I believe he called them Automations. It’d be neat to hear more on this and if they’ll have a library of data source interfaces/integrations similar to Netcool/Impact.
Everything that Tarus and the OpenNMS team does is ultimately driven back into the main code tree for all to take advantage of. The OpenNMS DevCamp kicks off in a week or two where the foundations for OpenNMS 2.0 will be worked on. This is taking place in my backyard down at GA Tech if I recall correctly.
Congrats to the OpenNMS team for your entrance into the telco space with these clients. I also really want to learn more about your Papa John’s deployment and if I heard glimpses of Business Service Management (BSM) there or if you were just using that as an example!
July 18, 2008 3 Comments
links for 2008-07-18
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TPI is now hosting Digital Fuel’s ServiceFlow, customized to its Service Management and Governance processes, as part of its standard offering.
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addresses the need of IT service managers for end-to-end reporting on the performance and availability of their line-of-business (LOB) applications.
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You might be surprised to discover how effectively a dashboard can be designed using Excel, when enriched with MicroCharts, which adds sparklines and bullet graphs to Excel’s library of charts. These dashboards were designed for actual use.
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Displaying many disparate Banking Key Performance Indicators, and designed as the basis for the Management review of business performance, it truly achieves More Information per Pixel.
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InfoCaptor is a dashboard Designer, BI reporting and documentation tool. It is an all purpose Dashboarding tool suitable for Data-warehouse projects, Project Management Dashboards, Executive Dashboards and any kind of Database Reporting.
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examples of actual modeling projects that have been completed using WebSphere® Business Modeler. They represent a cross-section of industries, containing many elements and processes that are familiar to industry insiders.
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supplementary tutorials and sample modeling projects to introduce you to more advanced modeling constructs, elements, and potential methods that you might use to create the projects for your own business or organization.
July 17, 2008 No Comments
An IBMers Journey to acquire CA/Wily Product Information
In a post many months back I spoke to why I thought IBM was like an open source company. The analogy was that nearly all of IBM Tivoli’s product, support, best practices and user groups are open to anyone to access. Unfortunately, nearly every other vendor doesn’t have such an approach in place. Here’s my story of my journey to get product information for CA/Wily Introscope and CEM. I’m glad it had a good ending, but it sure could have been easier!
When customer’s ask, it’s usually all hands on deck to figure out how to get things done here at IBM Tivoli. When presented with a challenge on integrating one vendor’s technology with another vendor’s technology, your options vary greatly and depend upon how well vendors choose to play with one another or how open their technologies are.
The task at hand - leverage the powerful data, metrics and KPIs that the CA/Wily Introscope/CEM products provide and incorporate them into aggregate business service management displays within TBSM v4. Simple as it sounds, we ask all of the standard questions. Tell me about the data collected, how its stored, and if there is a standard API or ODBC interface to get at the data. The challenge here with the CA/Wily product is the non-standard JDBC API (and .jar file) it uses for Introscope and the WebServices API for CEM. You really need some documentation and/or examples to get moving here.
These questions usually lead us in one direction or another, but most often the internal emails begin to fly and folks hit Google. I spent nearly six hours executing every known Google trick I know to search for documentation or any other resources on what my options may be. Results - nada. Everything I needed was “behind the firewall” at CA/Wily. I posted a note to my blog, which resulted in a few new paths to follow. One of my regular followers put me in touch with their CA/Wily SME and he shared his expert advice on what they do, but understandably, was uncomfortable providing copies of manuals. (Thanks Jay, Steve, Tom, Abbas)
I found CA/Wily’s User Group/Forums and requested an account. This was sent to an email alias and a nice lady said, as I expected, “you’re not on our customer list”. I replied, this time from my IBM email account stating that I’m sure we’re partners and I’m seeking information for a joint customer on how to accomplish an integration. She forwarded my email to the CA/Wily - IBM Tivoli Relationship Manager and I received a phone call and an email from her. (Thanks Marilyn!)
The CA/Wily Relationship Manager exceeded my expectations and took ownership of the situation. She tracked down account teams in two separate geographies, created a support case and rallied the troops. In the end, I received the necessary manuals and SME contacts I needed to move forward.
I’m pleased with the cooperation I ultimately received, but continue to think that it shouldn’t have to be this difficult. I think this is where the next generation companies will take the leadership roles. Transparency, honesty, “on-demand” information access, “real-time” support and enablement, cooperation between vendors for the client’s benefit, etc. The level of effort it takes to transform into this type of organization is immense, the commitment and investment in FTEs to sustain it for the long haul is significant. The benefits in the long run should be what keeps those clients coming back for more.
We’re heading in the right direction here at IBM and within Tivoli. I do worry though as the times get tough, that these programs and investments will be the first on the chopping block. Every product’s investment plan should fund these initiatives for the long haul. The support model for a community driven approach shouldn’t be thought of as a ratio (1 FTE managing dozens of blogs, wikis, communities, etc.) and that the community must be invested in (incentives, bounties, individual/group goals and objectives - PBC/IDP, etc.).
What are your thoughts on open access and transparency within the vendor community? What are your plans?
July 17, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-07-17
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current offering and future plans of Oracle’s IT management group
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distributed performance management, virtualization performance management, enterprise performance management, and z/OS(R) performance and reporting management.
** I’m still interested in learning more about ASG’s BSM solution and who uses it. **
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Reliance IDC is already in talks with over 50 technology solutions providers for tie-ups to provide these services. … The company has already entered into a tie-up with Compuware for providing business service management (BSM).
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effective IT needs to be accomplished in a way that the business can understand. We in IT need to speak the language of business. When problems occur, we need to relay their impact to our business leaders using language they can understand.
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The typical cause is a combination of a lack of design plan AND not correlating the business value impact. The latter point on correlating business value impact is usually due to fear of transparency.
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Nine out of 10 IT managers want to provide different views of the same performance management data sets to different users, yet almost two thirds said that their application performance management software could not deliver this key requirement.
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software-as-a-service (SaaS) option, the Aptilo Managed Service(TM). With this hosted solution, Aptilo operates the wireless broadband service from one of Aptilo’s Network Operation Centers (NOCs).
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wireless service management platforms designed for service providers, enterprises and municipalities needing rapidly deployable, scalable multiservice solutions to easily manage data and voice services over WiMAX, Metro wireless and WiFi networks.
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This page is the Performance Management section of the IBM Network Management Newsletter
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The IBM Service Management Newsletter is to assist Service Management Professionals enhance their skills in the management of their organisation’s Service Management products
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This page is the Event Management section of the IBM Network Management Newsletter
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The IBM Network Management Newsletter is to assist Netcool Professionals enhance their skills in the management of their organisation’s Network Management portfolio of products.
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How does Firescope CMDB compare or complement Spiceworks… in terms of discovery and monitoring.
July 16, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-07-16
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SL’s RTView is a new entrant into the BSM arena, but is built upon 25 years of experience in delivering process control systems to the likes of Honeywell, the Kennedy Space Station, and ABB.
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how to implement ITIL based Service Catalog processes in an enterprise environment utilizing the IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager V7.1 product
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With “Business Service Management” in the military…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.
July 15, 2008 No Comments
