• Nimsoft, Indicative join forces to take on the Big Four
  Two vendors, in particular, this week announced they had merged (the details of the cash and stock remain undisclosed) and plan to alter the market landscape with more choices for customers and more competition for the incumbents.
  (tags: Nimsoft Indicative M&A itmanagementguys)
• Netuitive Reports 100 Percent Win Rate Against Competitors
  “In case after case we are proving that the Netuitive is the quickest to implement, has the most advanced analytics and the highest quality indicators of application and service health in both physical and virtual environments.”
  (tags: Netuitive analytics events integrien proactivenet)
• Adaptivity — Service Oriented IT Requires Adaptivity
  Adaptivity enables organizations to accelerate business and leverage IT as a strategic differentiator. Our offerings incorporate creativity, urgency and blueprints of execution to solve complex alignment, architecture and infrastructure challenges.
  (tags: Adaptivity)
• Quest’s Foglight Now Monitors and Manages VMware Virtualization
  Foglight v5.2 has the ability to monitor the impact virtualization changes can have on databases, applications and end users, while simultaneously correlating the usage of resources on both physical servers and virtual machines.
  (tags: questsoftware foglight vmware esx monitoring virtualization)
• FireScope Unveils Engage Touch-Screen for IT Operations
  In addition to supporting FireScope Engage touch-screens from 19-42 inches, FireScope is working on additional interface methods to deliver ubiquitous Business Service Management. Blackberries, PDA’s and other mobile devices …
  (tags: Firescope bsm business-service-management innovation user-experience GUI)
• RapidCMDB, an open source federated CMDB solution for the enterprise
  RapidCMDB is a pragmatic solution. It does not compete with traditional CMDB products. It is designed as a federated solution from the ground up (not an afterthought) to leverage existing systems and data sources easily.
  (tags: RapidCMDB ifountain OSS CMDB)
• Astellia - Quality of service and network performance monitoring solutions for mobile networks
  All-in-one Astellia solutions cover 2G/2.5G/3G/3.5G technologies in areas ranging from radio access to core network. They provide easy access to a rich set of independent Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
  (tags: Astellia SQM serviceassurance sla wireless ranmonitoring monitoring QoS KPI KQI ITNSQM)
• With end-user performance management tool, credit union hones troubleshooting
  Insights into Symphoniq’s Trueview product
  - Web page instrumentation via agent
  - Server agents
  (tags: symphoniq user-experience transx-monitoring monitoring)
• IBM Expands Business Events Software Portfolio; Technology Uncovers Trends Among Millions of Business Transactions
  When coupled with IBM’s Tivoli IT event management capabilities, WebSphere Business Events customers can quickly correlate IT and business events to detect and isolate issues such as firewall outages.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli Websphere business-service-management business-events BEM BPM BAM)
• IBM Redbooks | Best Practices for IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console to Netcool/OMNIbus Upgrade
  Draft Redbook on TEC to Netcool/OMNIbus Upgrade
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TEC OMNIbus Netcool eventmanagement Redbook Implementation)
• Catching Mice in China
  Technology and business in and around China
  (tags: blog business china)
• Choreology - Pioneering the Business Transaction Management (BTM) market
  Choreology’s Business Transaction Management (BTM) software manages the coordination of loosely-coupled applications, bringing transactional certainty to a wide range of business interactions.
  (tags: Choreology BTM businesstranxmgmt transx-monitoring transxmgmt)

These topics are all the rage now and have taken center stage in the virtualization, utility, cloud and next generation datacenter discussions. Great stuff, good things to shoot for, but on an even more fundamental level, anyone who’s attempting automation, autonomics, run book automation, etc. without having a solid implementation of the fundamentals of network, systems, application and service management and monitoring in place is, frankly, F-O-O-L-I-S-H.

You’ve absolutely got to have the right level of visibility into the environment first. When some automated activity takes place, you’ve got to know if it was successful, and the impact it may have had on the bigger end-to-end service or application, system or network environment. The only way for this to happen is to ensure instrumentation and eventing is in place, have a consolidated (network, server, application, service, mainframe, distributed, middleware, transactions, virtual, vmware, cloud, etc.) event view with analytics in place to ensure that operations focus is on the right events and a presentation layer that ties everything together into a business service context.

That’s hard to do. It’s no wonder that the things that are first to go are patch management, operating system or core system (CPU, Memory, Disk/Storage) automation activities. They’re low(er) risk, repetitive and time consuming tasks. What group owns these tools? The systems administration groups for the most part. Do they have an end-to-end business service focus? Do they understand (or care) about the impact on the bigger picture? Do the tools used provide eventing, status and insight into what they’re doing? Are they integrated into the broader IT management and monitoring architecture? Would the operations group know how to respond to a “CPU Provisioning Event” if they even got one? Would they know what system, application or business service it’s impacting? Would they know how to prioritize this event against the hundreds of others they are faced with?

What are your thoughts or experiences here? How are you operationalizing investments into automation, autonomics or run book automation beyond the systems administration groups? Can you get useful eventing from these tools? What’s the level of effort required to instrument an “autonomic lifecycle”? What’s being done to align these “sexy” buzz words into the Business Service Management (BSM) story?

FireScope announced a new initiative around the next generation presentation layer for Business Service Management (BSM) called Engage.

From the overview here, FireScope isn’t just talking, they’re doing. Other vendors (mine included) have the token screen shots of what a product may look like on a Blackberry or iPhone, but the level of effort, customizations, and pain to get them to work (full feature set) keeps them in the “slideware” category in my opinion.

-snip-

“Engage was built by decoupling the interface from FireScope’s service-oriented architecture, giving FireScope users a menu of interface options to select from. In addition to touch screens, other interface options targeted to mobile devices, including an Apple iPhone application, enable ubiquitous Business Service Management.

From CIO to System Administrator, FireScope enables every member of IT to fully immerse themselves in IT operations through the interface method of their choice. A VP of IT may prefer a touch screen mounted on his office wall, while system administrators seamlessly switch between FireScope’s fully customizable portal or mobile interface. Regardless of where you are, or what technology you have on hand, with FireScope Engage you gain instant access to the real-time business impact of IT operations.”

I applaud FireScope’s continued innovation and challenge to the status quo. It’s things like this that are disruptive and will make everyone else improve. Some may feel the touch screen, PDA, iPhone, etc. interface are just “gimmicks”. In reality these are just the means to the more important things that are enabled by innovations such as this. The true value proposition is getting more people talking about how IT supports, aligns and impacts the business. Business Service Management (BSM) takes a huge leap forward when it starts to get as easy as touching a button to get insight into the bigger picture that each server or application plays in critical business service delivery.

Keep it up FireScope! What’s next?

Let’s finish the story. With the hype of IBM’s Impact 2008 conference on all things SOA this week, I noticed an interesting business partner offering from a company called Nastel.

Nastel offers

“application performance management solutions that enable businesses to ensure the required levels of performance, high availability and reliability of business-critical applications necessary for meeting SLA’s. Nastel’s AutoPilot Suite leverages its built-in Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine to deliver complete business situational awareness, speeding problem resolution and providing unique proactive, predictive problem prevention that enables governance in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), facilitates SLA and regulatory compliance, and provides Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) support.”

These are all very important capabilities that an emerging IT organization must have, but how will they integrate with the broader IT management and monitoring portfolio? We must break down all of the silos of tools and data and ensure that we’re integrating and incorporating all of this valuable data and information into the broader end-to-end service management and monitoring efforts. The information that the Nastel AutoPilot M6 solution can provide is CRITICAL to any maturing business service management (BSM) solution.

There is a SIGNIFICANT opportunity for IBM business partners to take the extra effort to talk about the bigger picture and provide content and capabilities that can be leveraged by the broader family of IBM Tivoli products. Most OPAL contributions take the easy path and simply provide for event based integrations using ITM Universal Agents (UA) or simple SNMP Trap event integrations. How about providing custom Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) dashboards, service models and rules that can provide immediate broad based value to the IT organization? How about operational rules, procedures and expert advice that could be used to help quickly isolate the problem? How about custom launch in context (LIC) integrations from the core presentation layer components (TBSM, TIP, TEPS, TCR, etc) into your domain specific product? How about custom reports based on the standard Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) framework that make use of the data you’re solution collects? These are all very simple things that can help your solutions and products gain more adoption (or sales success).

I challenge all of our business partners (or start ups, OSS plays, etc…) to take the extra steps to contribute to the broader IT management and monitoring solutions that most clients already have made significant investments in. Your rewards may be more than you expected!

Just noticed that Nimsoft and Indicative have decided to join forces and work towards a more competitive offering for the future.

From Gary’s Blog, I particularly like this:

“The second area is Business Service Management. We decided that the big guys had had this space to themselves for too long and they needed someone to shake it up a little by providing easily implemented and easily managed products with a low cost of ownership. We intend to make Business Service Management “within reach” just as we have done with the other disciplines.”

Gary, I encourage you to visit my blog and especially the presentation I gave at BarCampESM for ideas that you can start with in your BSM product development journey. I’d also encourage you to look at what the folks at Firescope and Integrien are doing. Blending all of this in with your newly acquired technology, a nice interface and fundamental BSM capabilities will help you create a differentiating product for wide spread adoption. Please share your BSM thoughts as you progress (ping me if you want to guest author on the BSM topic here).

I hope this is the start of the smaller players joining forces to create products and offerings that start to shake things up. There are so many good things from these companies that have been overlooked for too long now. This isn’t just something that the “proprietary” folks should be considering either as the OSS guys need to think along these lines as well. Would it be a cardinal sin for an OSS player to join forces with a smaller “proprietary” player?

Good luck to the new Nimsoft!