Posts from — January 2008

Compuware has been a sleeper for some time in the Business Service Management space. Last year with their purchase of Proxima I expected things to change. I have personal experience with deployment of the Vantage suite, specifically the Client Vantage and Application Vantage products. I was very fond of the Adlex technology and product as well which they acquired in 2005. At this point, these two acquisitions are as I call them stand alone non-integrated products (or SNIPs) now called Vantage Service Manager and Vantage Service Check. I’m assuming that they can’t be fully integrated into the core Vantage suite because of the significant architectural and platform limitations that it has.

Not free from their own internal problems and financial challenges, Compuware has struggled to make a name for itself within the IT Service Management and Business Service Management space so far. Recently, their CEO has taken a personal interest in getting Compuware back on track. His mission is called Compuware 2.0, the message - reinventing the company, culture and image. Thier CEO offered a brief introduction to what Compuware 2.0 is this week and hired an outsider as the SVP of Compuware 2.0.

What will the new Compuware 2.0 product strategy be? Will they reinvent the Vantage suite to make it competitive? Will it evolve and rectify the architectural and platform challenges that it has? Will they have a real ITSM/ITIL/CMDB story? What about event management? Will they leverage the Proxima technology and platform better within the Vantage suite or will it continue to be a stand alone non-integrated product? It’s a shame that the Adlex technology hasn’t been a platform for innovation. This stuff can be used all over within a traditional enterprise environment.

I hope to hear from Compuware about what their 2.0 strategy will be. I hope they’ll join the Business Service Management discussion and help raise the bar for everyone else. They have the potential, but they must make some significant changes to get there.

• Indicative Software Nets $6 Million in Venture Capital
  We’re ready to establish Indicative as a clear leader in a loosely defined but crowded market for enterprise management software, and with a focus on end-to-end service value chain management.”

  ** Anyone seen this stuff?? **

  (tags: Indicative e2e servicemanagement valuechainmgmt)
• uptime Software : Server Monitoring Software - Capacity Planning and Reporting with Virtualization and Consolidation
  By providing powerful, easy-to-use and lower cost server monitoring and capacity planning software, we help organizations eliminate unnecessary IT outages, increase service availability and reduce the costs of systems management on an annual basis.
  (tags: uptimesoftware systemsmanagement appmgmt monitoring capacitymgt esm)
• BMC Software’s William Hurley: A Penguin Among Sharks
  This isn’t about trying to jump onto the open source marketing bandwagon. It’s about directly interacting with customers in how you can apply open source to build better products.
  (tags: BMC whurley OSS)

• myDIALS
  myDIALS’ interactive, online dashboards present Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) specific to an individual’s position and industry.
  (tags: myDials dashboards metrics kpi kpm visualization bi bpm reporting)
• IBM Tivoli Common Data Model: Guide to Best Practices
  This IBM® Redpaper presents a set of example templates and scenarios that help users learn and apply the basics of the Common Data Model. Each scenario identifies the CDM classes that are used and defines the important relationships among these classes.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli commondatamodel cdm uml redpaper taddm tbsm patterns)
• Webmetrics: Website Monitoring - Hosted Website Monitoring Service
  Collaborative performance management services for complex web ecosystems. Services test, monitor and measure the performance of websites, transactions, web services and streaming media to ensure 24/7 uptime and performance integrity.
  (tags: Webmetrics monitoring user-experience transx-monitoring ria-monitoring)
• Getting Started with Event Management
  Event management isn’t monitoring, it’s what you do about it
  (tags: eventmanagement events process workflow operations)
• Bindows™ : FREE Gauges
  Use the Bindows free gauges library toolkit to add vector-graphics based, Ajax-enabled gauges to any HTML page.
  (tags: code ajax freeware javascript gauge svg via:berkay)
• Business Service Management - CA
  Running a responsive and efficient IT organization isn’t enough. You are expected to become a strategic business partner in your organization’s success. You must generate value and drive innovation.
  (tags: CA bsm business-service-management)
• The Five Essential Ingredients for Effective Event Correlation and Root Cause Analysis - CA
  During this podcast, we’ll explore the “must have” ingredients for effective event correlation and root cause analysis.
  (tags: CA eventmanagement events eventandfaultcorelation eca rca)
• CA’s Unified Service Model - CA
  CA’s Unified Service Model provides a 360 degree view of the services IT provides to the business. This white paper describes the value of the Unified Service Model, which is the centerpiece of CA’s Enterprise IT Management vision.
  (tags: CA servicemodel unifiedservicemodel USM CDM SML modeling EITM ITSM)
• Driving Business Advantage Through Enterprise IT Management - CA
  With our Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision, we help you simplify the management of your complex IT operations. We enable you to govern, manage and secure IT—and derive more business value.
  (tags: CA EITM ITSM vision strategy)
• SMART ENTERPRISE INSIGHTS AND PERSPECTIVES FOR THE CIO
  Smart Enterprise is produced and published by CMP Technology in conjunction with CA.
  (tags: SmartEnterprise CA)
• Business Intelligence Made Easy: Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails
  it shows you how the Ruby language and Rails framework can create truly compelling reporting services by plugging into popular third-party applications and services such as Google AdWords, UPS.com, iTunes, and SalesForce.com.
  (tags: bi businessintelligence rails ruby rubyonrails reporting)
• Actuate Launches First World-Class Performance Management SaaS Offering, Actuate OnPerformance
  Actuate OnPerformance, the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution from Actuate’s Performance Management portfolio.
  Actuate OnPerformance securely provides relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to managers who can positively impact performance
  (tags: actuate onperformance bi saas kpi reporting dashboards)
• Calling All (BEA & Aptsoft) CEP Professionals
  IBM having recently bought Aptsoft, doesn’t know it has bought a CEP vendor because of the re-branding and follows the BEA model and licenses an open source CEP tool to deploy in some parts of their Websphere line.
  (tags: Tibco CEP IBM Aptsoft prediction)

• Letter from CEO Peter Karmanos: ‘What is Compuware 2.0?’
  At this crossroads there are two choices: BAU or what I am calling Compuware 2.0. We have selected Compuware 2.0. However, since there has been enough chatter about Compuware 2.0, I decided to tell you a bit about what it is. And, what it is not.
  (tags: compuwware compuware2.0 strategy)
• BSM Views
  Taking the BS out of BSM

  *BMC’er blogs about BSM*

  (tags: bsm business-service-management BMC blog)
• Rolling Review: Quest Software Foglight
  - Deep insight into service relationships that exist among end users, business services, IT resources, and critical infrastructure components
  - Quest delivers the information required to diagnose and troubleshoot pesky application performance issues
  (tags: questsoftware foglight systemsmanagement monitoring synthetictranx appmgmt dbmanagement review)

A newcomer to the Business Service Management (BSM) conversation has emerged from BMC over at BSM Views. He’s got a great tag line for his blog “Taking the BS out of BSM”! Wish I would’ve thought of that!!

Brian shares his blogs mission in his About page.

“As IT becomes an increasingly critical driver of business, the pace of maturity and change increases within the IT department, and many smart strategies are being employed with, at times, great results. IT now has a direct effect on the bottom line. In my work with BMC Software, I talk IT strategy with diverse organizations weekly basis, and this blog is a attempt to share many of the good ideas I am exposed to.”

Welcome to the BSM conversation Brian! I look forward to what you have to say and helping you “Take the BS out of BSM”.

• IBM developerWorks: Wikis - IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager Wiki - Home
  Welcome to the IBM® Tivoli® Business Service Manager Wiki where you can find and contribute information and scenarios about the product.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TBSM developerworks wiki)
• Cognos` Rob Ashe: Working Under the IBM Umbrella - Performance management is the new battleground.
  There’s sort of a category collapse going on where CPM and BI, reporting, [and] analytics are kind of starting to merge. The lines are getting very grey and I think customers are broadly viewing all this stuff now as performance management.
  (tags: cognos IBM M&A performancemgt bi)

It’s been many many months now since Quest Software picked up Magnum Technologies. Where’s the beef? Where’s the new Business Service Management (BSM) story? How’s the Magnum Technologies solution integrating into the Foglight 5 architecture? Are there significant architectural challenges preventing this?

Like I mentioned last year, I can tell that you have added some of the things I taught your PM’s about way back in 2004-2005, but where’s the new story? Where’s Foglight 5.x/6? When will you bring a new BSM story to the market? This is a bit stale and doesn’t look like the Magnum Technologies stuff is incorporated.

I realize there may have been challenges with the NASDAQ distractions and M&A activity in other areas of your company. Maybe you might consider donating your Foglight and/or Big Brother suites to the Open Management Consortium (OMC) for oversight and development? They’re in search of a good Open Agent and I think you’ve got a great platform and framework for just that.

I must say though that the Big Brother site has a very nice look and feel! Unfortunately, the product as demo’d on your site is still not fit for executive consumption.

We’re in the process of launching a developerWorks based wiki for TBSM. At this time, deployment and integration content is available and more. We see this as a vital component of the Tivoli BSM community and strongly encourage support, contribution and collaboration.

I know you don’t need yet another place to go for information. I will do what I can to make this a valuable source for all things related to BSM and our TBSM product.

Visit here and join in the collaboration!