Category — BSM4SMB

FireScope’s countdown excitement was revealed today (a little bit late ) and their next steps in Business Service Management innovation are now visible. It appears that there will be a 28 day launch cycle of numerous new products and tools.

FireScope’s Business Edition (BE) concept consists of a couple key components aimed as initial entry points for smaller enterprises. The fuller featured Enterprise Editions (EE) are the natural migration paths or starting point for larger enterprises. Pricing modelers are available right on their website.

Some of the “coming soon” tools looks like it puts them in company with PacketTrap and SolarWinds. FireScope BSM:BE and CMDB:BE puts them in company with Nimsoft and Managed Objects.

BSM BE

Optimized for the unique needs of small to medium sized businesses and starting at only $2,450, FireScope BSM:BE features an engaging and user-friendly interface and flexible auto discovery provides rapid time to competency, with multiple setup wizards and inline help designed to make implementation accessible for any level of user.

CMDB BE

FireScope CMDB:Business-Edition delivers the same enterprise-grade functionality as traditional CMDB’s, minus the exhorbitant price tag and pain inducing deployment. For less than $10,000, IT Organizations gain real-time visualization and documentation of their infrastructure along with a complete view of the interrelationships of the software and systems impacting those operations, without the need to hire an army of consultants and mind-numbing planning sessions.

Hmm, the free trial download isn’t available to me yet. Anyone else?

Found a guy that I could really get along with - Steve Cotton, CEO of FireScope. I’ve known about FireScope for some time now, but I didn’t know about Steve and his passion for Business Service Management (BSM). (John - you need to reach out to him!)

Steve posts about how he’s seen “BSM from the CEO Perspective” evolve over his tenure in executive management positions. I think Steve’s got the right approach and passion for BSM and it sounds like he’s leading FireScope down an path full of innovation for the BSM market.

-snip-

“Business Service Management, in my opinion, represents the best approach to resolving these issues and making IT a full partner to the success of the business. That’s because, as I see it, BSM is all about measuring and reporting IT in such a way that a VP of Sales, the CFO and CEO can all easily grasp what IT is doing for them and the business as a whole. It’s about looking at technology from a completely different perspective that lifts the discussion above the technology and focuses on the end result.”

“I’m passionate when it comes to Business Service Management. Of the multitudes of emerging technologies I’ve seen in the new millennia, I thoroughly believe that BSM and the best practices and processes surrounding it will have a lasting impact on technology and the perception of users and administrators. The days of technology for technology’s sake are over, at least as far as the business world is concerned. It’s time for IT to prove its value and align its focus on the business.”

Quest Software announced their intentions to acquire Business Service Management vendor Magnum Technologies today.

I’m not sure of how much penetration Quest has ever gotten into the larger enterprise accounts with their full Foglight solution, but they have had broader success across the board with their various point tools for databases/applications, Java and Windows. Foglight (and it’s counterpart Big Brother) and the Spotlight products/plugins play firmly into the IT organization silos. They’ve got some great diagnostics capabilities and very “geek” oriented dashboards for managing, tweeking and tuning databases and applications. I’ve never seen too much of a top down, business oriented, non-IT focus other than messaging from Quest’s Foglight line in what I’d say was a true Business Service Mangement manner like other vendors have today. In my past, I helped break in Foglight 4 into an environment with upwards of 2000+ servers and hundreds of services/processes/transactions and it wasn’t a painless process. Foglight 5 is out now and at least looks like they’ve done some of the things they talked about in roadmap sessions I was familiar with in 2004-05. I am not sure how the backend architecture changed which was where all the problems existed for large deployments. A great product for environments with a few hundred servers!

It looks like the Magnum acquisition could be what Quest needs to get a real business and top down story in place and to broaden out from the pure play systems and application management space. If they play their cards right, having purpose built Business Service Management plays that are in line with Quest’s strengths that visibility into systems/application/databases, Java and Windows and SMART pricing/packaging could be very attractive for the SMB market. I know little about Magum’s Business Service Management solution and do not know anyone who uses it. I do know IBM Tivoli OEM’s some of their network discovery technology in the IBM Tivoli Netview family. More emphasis on network monitoring and management would also be a plus for Quest as well. They could easily take on share from the likes of the What’s Up Gold, Solarwinds and Open Source Software folks if they can find a way to “unify” the IT organization silos into a single vendor/solution strategy.

Should be interesting to follow the integration messaging!