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Posts from — November 2006

Enterprise Business and IT Service Scheduling & Calendaring??

Is there such a product or capability in a product that could do enterprise wide scheduling and calendaring? What I’m interested in is not related to people, meeting, conference room scheduling, but more along the lines of enterprise planning, BI, etc. where one could input into such a solution that ‘between the hours of 12pm and 2pm’ are the most critical hours of the day for this business service, application, transaction. Or something that could be the repository for killer business impact information based on BI type data feeds, etc. Or something that bleeds into service catalog/IT cost & usage that could track costs/impacts/revenues for use of business and IT services during a certain period, from a certain location, etc.?

Not sure if this is an SLA type tool as SLA’s and OLA’s may not always necessarily be involved. Something more along the lines of an uber-business-intelligence knowledgebase that’s business service, application, process, transaction, flow, etc. aware.

Just curious…

November 30, 2006   No Comments

links for 2006-11-29

November 29, 2006   No Comments

IBM acquires Vallent

I’d been seeing interesting Google hits land on my blog for this for months now. This helps fill out some gaps in network quality and performance management and monitoirng in service provider networks, specifically wireless and radio access networks. This will be part of the Netcool pillar under the Tivoli brand.

From the PR: (link here)

“Vallent is a leading supplier of network performance monitoring and service management software for wireless service providers worldwide. Vallent’s software helps service providers manage the performance of their network infrastructure through monitoring and reporting problem areas such as dropped calls and traffic bottlenecks. It also helps operators improve wireless service quality and identify network problems before they impact a customer’s experience.

The combination of Vallent’s software and IBM’s comprehensive management capabilities will enable service providers to deliver and manage end-to-end high quality services across wireline, wireless, IP and converged fixed/mobile network infrastructures. Adding Vallent to IBM Tivoli Software’s Netcool portfolio creates a broad set of service assurance capabilities spanning fault, network performance and service quality management over a wide array of technologies and third-party equipment and applications. Vallent will augment IBM’s ability to help communications service providers manage their networks as they deploy innovative new services while migrating from legacy to next generation infrastructures.”

November 28, 2006   1 Comment

links for 2006-11-28

November 28, 2006   No Comments

links for 2006-11-23

November 23, 2006   No Comments

links for 2006-11-22

November 22, 2006   No Comments

Tivoli Netcool/RAD 3.0 Enabling Business Service Management or Business Activity Monitoring

I worked up a pretty slick demo for a client this week who expressed an interest in Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) as part of their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Websphere MQ/Message Broker/ESB evaluations. I’ve had many thoughts on this topic from my past, but the work on this demo and discussions with the client affirmed that leveraging the Tivoli Netcool/RAD platform and enabling technolgies/products as an entry point into Business Service Management (BSM) or Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is viable. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works, but bringing a Service Oriented Architecture and associated services to life with the Tivoli Netcool/RAD Business Service Management (BSM) / Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solution was really quite easy.

I continue to be amazed by the depth of assets and resources that we have here at IBM. The things that I’m seeing come from our Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) efforts are incredible enablers for creation of the Business Service Management (BSM) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) practice. The BSM, BAM, BPM, B-I-N-G-O acronym soup of technologies, products and concepts will benefit greatly should the concepts of service orientation take hold in the mainstream and we can make it easy for clients to grasp these concepts, give them straight forward and easy ways to change from the legacy ways of enterprise and service provider architecture and design, and support them with solutions that help them manage, monitor and leverage these investments for the betterment of their business goals and objectives.

Lots of exciting times in the future for sure!

November 21, 2006   4 Comments

Network Performance Blog

Found this today (this AM) that NetQoS is putting out. Looks like a good resource on many good topics near and dear to me.

http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/

November 16, 2006   2 Comments