Posts from — May 2008
links for 2008-05-31
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Tivoli is now starting to roll out solutions based on Maximo, so I figured an overview, explanation of the names of things and list of resources would be helpful.
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Beyond cost comparisons, replacing already-installed market leader HP Openview with upstart EM7 required more explaining about additional features, extended value to the business and long-term viability. For those in a similar position, we hope this helps
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Paglo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that provides a ‘system-of-record’ by making all of an organization’s IT data immediately accessible and useful.
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Maximizing the efficiency of monitoring was critical to provide the service levels that Hughes’ customers expect. Hughes needed to eliminate false alarms, ensure that all systems were being discovered and managed, and consolidate management tools.
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“I could learn Flash and Actionscript and write my own charting component, release it as Open Source, … And that is what I did. And that is why it is free. I guess the moral of the lesson is: don’t piss off your customers.”
May 30, 2008 No Comments
links for 2008-05-30
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software has been updated to include discovery, impact management, relationship mapping and configuration management database capabilities to some degree.
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today’s open-source network-management tools deliver high-quality functionality for a fraction of the price of their closed-source counterparts
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Optier’s CEO Israel Mazin hurried to announce his plans to raise capital to buy several companies, this year. Optier believes that the market is going through a consolidation process and according to the Marker, the company plans to raise $15 million in
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Good application performance management requires structure, and like a well built physical structure, application performance management requires good building blocks that fit together well.
May 29, 2008 No Comments
My IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 Session on TBSM: Planning for the Next Generation of TBSM - Distributed, Mainframe and Beyond
I’m making my IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 session on TBSM available for those who were unable to attend the user conference this year or missed my session. The links below will allow you to download the session slides and an mp3 audio recording.
The session agenda was:
- Overall Migration and Upgrade Planning
- Architectural and Functional Planning
- TIP Planning
- Event Source Planning
- LoB, Service and Application Decomposition
- Service Model Design Planning
- TBSM v3 to TBSM v4 Planning
- TBSM v4.2 Migration, Upgrade and Architecture Options
Please feel free to contact me or your local IBM Tivoli teams if you’d like help in preparing for your next generation deployment of TBSM. I hope that through this session you understand how critically important planning, design and architecture is for your success with Business Service Management, the TBSM solution and enabling products.
Doug McClure’s IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 Session Audio
All IBM Tivoli 2008 session presentations are available here. I will be adding the session audio for a few others related to BSM and TBSM soon.
May 29, 2008 1 Comment
links for 2008-05-29
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Clearly, Tivoli’s ambition is to roll these two disparate disciplines into one, expanding the idea of “infrastructure” out from just computers and software needed to support the business, taking on a maximal scope for Business Service Management.
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Customers shouldn’t need to engage in a services contract to get IBM’s extensive process expertise loaded into the vendor’s software products.
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For the last 3 years I have specialized in Enterprise Management in general and in Tivoli in particular. I have been employed by IBM since 2007.
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The software discovers the path an application takes across the infrastructure to deliver IT services and then determines a baseline of normal behavior to alert users when any components don’t live up to normal standards.
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VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to offer proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within VMware virtual machines - on both servers and desktops.
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With its roots in mainframe performance management products, the company evolved into systems management, and now puts itself in the business service management (BSM) camp.
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“The cost of Sarbanes can make a 5-10% difference on pre-tax profit,” said Allen. “For that reason I don’t believe there will be any companies still public with revenue of less than $100m. They will all be acquired or merge with each other.”
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“Adv in platform technologies together with strategic acquisitions by the major software providers has finally enabled serious solution providers to provide a fully integrated set of Service Management and Service Assurance solutions by a single vendor,”
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Oracle Real User Experience Insight enables enterprises to maximize the value of their business critical applications by delivering insight into real end user experiences
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The tool also allows creating and deleting BA. It also allows keeping the BA up-to-date, by looking at new relationships for the CIs that are part of a BA and adding the related CIs to the BA.
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TELUS (TSX: T, T.A; NYSE: TU) has selected ReachView Technologies, an Alcatel-Lucent company, to deploy IBM Tivoli Netcool software into its network to deliver superior service and value to its customers while positioning the company for long-term growth.
May 28, 2008 No Comments
My IBM Tivoli Pulse Recap and Pulse Presentations Archive
As a long time attendee and speaker as a customer at vendor user conferences, IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 was a massive event. The location was hot and humid Orlando, FL., a short, yet painfully packed with tourist flight took me safely to MCO late Saturday night. I’d spent nearly six months of my life attending electronics training in the US Navy in 1990 to know that Orlando is one heck of a humid place. I still think Houston has it beat though, and I’m glad to say that Atlanta, GA where I live hasn’t been as bad as it can be in the past few years.
The conference location and hotel was the Swan and Dolphin, a typical tourist location, a bit worn out in places and over sanitized, but with pretty decent conference facilities. My trip to China in March paid off with Platinum status with the Starwood hotel chain so I was offered an upgrade to a junior suite. Nothing to write home about - but I christened it the “Unofficial BSM Suite” for the week.
I attended the Business Partner events Sunday afternoon with one of our business partners - NGea Solutions. My badge apparently wasn’t the right color so I couldn’t eat lunch with him but I was able to attend the sessions and cocktail hour. If you’re ever in need of someone to take your Netcool/Impact or Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) deployment to the next level, look up Suresh at NGea Solutions. I enjoyed discussing the finer points of the BSM space and where I saw opportunities for our business partners or other start ups to attack opportunity.
The Business Partner Accreditation program was announced by my VP Bill Kribbs. I don’t know all of the details, but have heard there’s some level of support for our AAA accredited business partners directly from folks in the ISST Lab Services organization. I’d love to get out there and help some of our business partners develop and mature their Business Service Management (BSM) Practices! If you’re AAA accredited (or want to be) in the TBSM space, reach out to me and lets get something rolling!
Monday was the kick off event, full of high tech music, drama and demos. Lots of great vision and messaging. I was VERY HAPPY to see a demo that could actually almost be 100% implemented out of the box with products in our BSM portfolio. I’m working on getting the stuff they showed off out on the TBSM Wiki so you can complete some of the things in TBSM that they demonstrated which aren’t possible OOB.
The sessions through the week were decent. Many were way too crowded and they had to turn people away. RFID tracked all of the attendees movements so they should have some valuable data on how to plan next year. My perception was that this conference was dominated heavily by clients and business partners associated with the MRO (Maximo) acqusition. Nearly every person I randomly introduced myself to was associated with Maximo. The only place to meet a heritage Tivoli or Micromuse customer was in the demo peds or in a specific session targeted to those product sets.
To that point, what needs to change next year is some way to visually identify attendees by their core product alignment. I know we want “one Tivoli” but most practitioners want to congregate, eat breakfast/lunch/dinner with someone they can talk shop with. All that it would have taken would be a simple color code on the badge or a sign at various tables where you could just plop down and talk about monitoring, asset management or better yet BSM! I would’ve been at that table every day!
We had a pretty cool concept for giving people easy access to “gurus” to talk to. There was a “Guru Galaxy” event and a “Meet the Experts” room available throughout the week. I spoke to one business partner who had issues with a TBSM deployment in Croatia. The rest of the two hours was discussing the finer points of our SLA strategy (?) with the appropriate product and market managers hoping to share a vision on where we should go in this area. Next year we should have the barriers to access even lower by setting these sessions up at breaks, meals and alongside the expo floor so folks can plop down and chat whenever they feel like it. The demo peds are generally pretty crowded so creating alcoves where people can get together with a whiteboard and dive into product x, y or z would be ideal.
As this was my first user conference as an employee of a vendor, I obviously see things from a different side now. I see how important these venues are to the business, the brand, the client relationship and the sales process. That said, I still think I’m the ultimate practitioner/user advocate and would have liked to see more participation, more attendance and more focus on the user and business partner than I saw. The sessions needed to be lengthened to get into any real details above and beyond the traditional messaging, roadmap, etc. slides. User centric presentations need to be increased in time at a minimum. Core sessions where products are converging absolutely should have been longer or scheduled multiple times. For every one IBM led session we should have had five customer or business partner sessions.
While the sales and relationship building at an event like this is important to IBM Tivoli, we need to go out of our way to make sure that EVERY attendee walks away feeling empowered, educated and excited about attending and that they’re equipped to do something better, different, cheaper, faster, of more value to the business, etc. than before. I’m not sure we did that in all cases this year. I hope we make the conference and session surveys public information to the new Tivoli Pulse community and talk about what we’re going to improve upon next year.
I had the pleasure or meeting with many of you who follow me via this blog. It was an honor and if there’s anything that I can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask. I was Twittering along throughout my time at Pulse, so check out the feeds for that. I convinced our Senior Product Manager for BSM Dan Tabor and our Market Manager for BSM Clayton Ching to create a Twitter account so I’m slowing opening the doors of change here at IBM Tivoli. I also saw a Tweet from Jim Fletcher our Distinguished Engineer in our AABSM and Green IT space! I’ve challenged them to now create a blog outside the firewall and make more information available about where we’re heading within our BSM portfolio.
I enjoyed my time at Pulse 2008 (feet finally recovered) and I think I made positive impact on those I spoke with and provided value added information to the 100+ who attended my session on TBSM Migration and Upgrade Planning. (slides and podcast audio coming soon). I hope to be invited back next year.
The presentations are available now here. I recorded the audio for as many of the BSM/TBSM related sessions that I could attend and will be making them available soon. I hope we do this for all sessions next year!
May 28, 2008 1 Comment
links for 2008-05-28
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Most concerning are availability SLAs that are either not tied directly to business services or incorrectly assume that server uptime equals application availability.
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IBM quietly announced earlier this month to consolidate its ITCAM line from several products down to three: ITCAM for Applications, ITCAM for Microsoft and ITCAM for SOA
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CorrelSense Ltd. has raised $3 million,
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Take a page out of the Pragmatic security playbook. Ignore it and manage upward to the CIO and other senior managers to ensure they understand that you are focusing on the stuff that is most relevant to the business.
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Integrien now provides support for virtual agent technologies from IBM, HP, Hyperic and nworks supporting for the following virtual environments:
• VMware
• Microsoft Virtual Server
• Citrix XenServer
• IBM AIX/IBM System P
• Sun Solaris Contai -
BMC Software reported today that it has added two names to its executive roster. Both individuals, the company said, were formerly C-level executives at BladeLogic, the data center automation software developer that BMC acquired in April.
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monitor IT and business activities on a single dashboard by converting ITCAM for SOA events for display and processing by WebSphere Business Monitor. Three sample scenarios illustrate how to define monitor models to configure WebSphere Business Monitor.
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This project will allow EMC ISV partners to develop, test and eventually submit their integrations with EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager for the Designed for EMC (DFE) accreditation.
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Lowering the barriers for EMC Smarts partners to experience standard EMC Smarts environment without the need to download, install and configure the product.
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This blog is where I’ll wax on about performance surround the WebSphere Application Server middle-tier integration environment.
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There has been an increasing demand from within Quest Software to host external blogging. As a result, we have installed Wordpress MU on an externally hosted server earlier this month. Already, we have created three blogs in addition to this blog.
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Customers have told us their actually scared of what BSM may mean to the IT systems and processes that they’ve built up over the past 20 years. So we’re offering them a pragmatic approach to BSM
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We’ve broken down the performance roadmap into three categories:
1) Historical.
2) The Present.
3) The Future.
May 27, 2008 No Comments
Quest Software’s Foglight Group is Blogging
If you’re a Quest Software Foglight user, check out the Foglight community that’s recently launched. (where was my heads up Tyler and Greg? 
)
Greg Crow has a post sharing some insight into Quest’s thoughts on the Business Service Management (BSM) space and Tyler Jewell shares some of Quest’s thoughts in the Performance Management space.
Congrats to Quest Software and the Foglight team for opening up some and sharing your thoughts and ideas with the community. To my knowledge, there are ZERO IBM Tivoli, HP, CA, BMC or Compuware Product Managers blogging outside the firewall or actively participating in public forums. Keep it up Tyler, Greg and crew. Post often!
May 27, 2008 4 Comments
links for 2008-05-24
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My recent article on BSM generated more e-mail than just about any other story this year. What was most interesting were the different (and diametrically opposed) perspectives that I saw.
** Where’s my comments on this post? **
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“You can look at the ‘health’ of all your data-center stuff in relation to how smoothly, or not, the business is running,” said Michael Coté, an analyst with Redmonk.
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despite their potential benefits, BSM initiatives can be daunting. This session presents practical advice designed to help you avoid pitfalls and achieve quick wins right now!
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I can’t help but think Firescope is onto something. The company is achieving an 8% conversion rate from downloads. That is high by any standards. In those larger deployments: NASDAQ and Slumberland are customers - Firescope offers a deeper range …
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The Megavendors In IT Management Software by Jean-Pierre Garbani, Peter O’Neill - Forrester Researchweakness of the US domestic market will lead to increased competition between these megavendors in both the US market and abroad, where currency exchange rates make markets even more attractive.
**Anyone have access?*
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This white paper summarizes the BMC Foundation Discovery and BMC Topology Discovery 1.5.01 performance and scalability lab test results.
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Challenge: “Make Managed Object’s products available for download as part of a free trial, publish your prices and the real cost of and the timeframe of implementing your products. Then let the customers decide what solution delivers against their needs”
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No one wants to put themselves through so much pain to end up with a solution that’s collecting dust a year after deployment because it was too hard to maintain.
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announced that it has named Abbas Haider Ali as Vice President of Product Strategy
** Hmm, little mention of a BSM background? **
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Some things which are bad and make no sense:
* Lack of clarity in strategy for Webtop vs TBSM (which customers seem to build BSM on Webtops).
* ITCAM is total junk, and is years behind competing products from HP (Mercury).
May 23, 2008 2 Comments
