Category — General

Links that I have found interesting for August 20th:

• RapidInsight for Netcool - IBM Tivoli/Netcool Omnibus is an event management solution widely used by service providers and large enterprises. RapidInsight integrates with Netcool Omnibus and makes events from Netcool Omnibus server available through standard interfaces.

  RapidInsight for Netcool provides an innovative web based interface to work with Netcool events:

  * an active (read/write) interface (AJAX) without no activeX or java applets
  * the interface is designed to work with high volume of events with ease
  * easy to use google search like interface that enables users to create and save queries to filter events by point and click, without requiring programming knowledge.
  * data from the server side is exposed over web api (XML/JSON), enabling development of alternative/additional user interfaces easily.
  * same interface is used to access historical events as well as active events

• Complex Event Processing, Event Stream Processing, from Aleri CEP - Aleri offers these products to address specific needs in financial markets, further showcasing the power of Aleri Complex Event Processing (CEP).
• Complex event processing (CEP) engine & Algorithmic trading platform - Progress Apama - Proven in the most demanding of markets, Apama offers the broadest, deepest and most flexible platform for building event-driven applications. Apama allows both business users and IT to exploit the power of complex event processing.
• Event Zero - Event Zero produces an industry leading event processing technology which enables our customers to exploit the power of event processing to acquire real-time Operational Intelligence (OI) across the enterprise, to better understand and rapidly respond to events impacting their business. Our highly scalable Enterprise-Class Event Processing Network (EPN) is a fully integrated framework that captures, processes, and responds to diverse types of events and our unique EPN ” last mile” support provides the ability to rapidly integrate data from many heterogeneous event sources, distributed in multiple geographic locations, and across a large number of endpoints.
• Xceedium Appoints Klaus Sonnenleiter as Vice President of Engineering - Xceedium, a premier provider of entitlement management solutions that control high-risk users, today announced that Klaus Sonnenleiter has been named vice president of engineering. In this role, Klaus will be responsible for overseeing all aspects of product development and quality assurance.
• ITRS Group - Effective real-time management of systems and applications is more important than ever in today's fast moving financial markets. The growth in electronic trading, increasing reliance on electronic straight through processing, regulatory focus on best execution have all added to the complexity, and therefore the cost, of conducting your business. Risks associated with Hardware, Application or Network problems can impact both profit and just as importantly company’s reputation. At ITRS, we understand that real-time means just that. Not one, five or ten minutes after the event. With ITRS Geneos, you get a comprehensive, up-to-the-second view of all your mission critical systems, applications and processes, and instant notification of issues before they turn into business problems. All consolidated into a single desktop view.

Links that I have found interesting for August 19th:

• ZenPack - Powerware UPS - Commercial Open Source Network, Systems and Application Monitoring - Zenoss - This ZenPack provides voltages stats, load, ambient temperature, battery capacity and more for Powerware UPS products. UPS status is found through the the SNMP oids.
• Converting TDW Timestamps to DateTime in BIRT - We have previously published articles on how to convert TDW timestamps to "regular" timestamps in DB2. In BIRT, you may need to tackle the same problem again. The TDW timestamps can not be used for DateTime arithmetic and Charting functions in BIRT and has to be converted to regular DateTime. Though you can use the SQL to convert these timestamps to regular, in some cases, you may want to use the JavaScript integration of BIRT to convert them as well. Here is how to do it.

  ** Important for creating custom TCR Reports based on TDW data!! **

• Firm snubs IBM, HP, CA and BMC, picks Nimsoft for network monitoring - "We don't feel like we've been put into some box," he said. "We feel like they're highly interested in us and believe they will be there to work with us. I think that's important for companies that are small- to medium-sized and growing." "To get bigger, we need a software provider that's willing to roll up their shirtsleeves and work with us."

  Callaghan said Melillo's perspective is on target. Smaller providers will tend to be more responsive to new requests for functionality to be added. Meanwhile, with a behemoth like IBM or HP, a smaller company like Diversified could make a recommendation, but until several companies ask for the same thing, it's doubtful the change will be implemented.

  Another benefit of Nimsoft is the agility that comes with being small. "No pun intended," Callaghan said, "but Nimsoft can be a little more nimble in embracing new technologies. With IBM, HP and BMC, it can take a little bit longer to get it out of the labs. There's more bureaucracy to deal with."

• Data Synapse Utility and Cloud Computing Monitoring - Trying to get your infrastructure working effectively within a Cloud Computing model can be a difficult task. All the new tools and people required to administer this innovation can cause serious cost-inefficiency and unnecessary complexity, cancelling out the benefits of shifting services to least cost infrastructure in your network cloud.

  The DataSynapse Dynamic Application Service Management (DASM) platform standardizes the management of enterprise cloud services across your cloud, ensuring that mission-critical business applications are uniformly provisioned, activated and scaled onto least cost infrastructure. The platform delivers:

  * Effective management of service delivery across your network cloud
  * Cost reductions through services sourced from least cost providers
  * Guaranteed service performance and scalability

  If you want to deliver on the promise of Cloud Computing, think DataSynapse.

• BMC's own CMDB figures - The IT Skeptic | The IT Skeptic - A podcast of the original post a back-of-an-envelope re-analysis of Forrester and BMC's own CMDB research

  Several readers argue well that ROI is not the right measure for a CMDB, but nevertheless management want to know what they get for their money, and BMC's own research suggests "not much".

  ** A must listen - just to hear Rob's voice and style if anything! **

• Tivoli Service Request Manager Integration with Netcool/OMNIbus - OMNIbus is a central event management console for enterprises. TSRM is a service request platform. To better leverage TSRM functions like incident management, service request management, they can be integrated together. Incidents or service requests can be automatically created based on TSRM and OMNIbus integration package, and events in OMNIbus can be closed automatically by synchronizing with TSRM.

Just thinking out loud here…

• What’s it really take for a community to start and evolve?
• Who must participate?
• Who shouldn’t participate?
• Who should facilitate?
• How does the “What’s in it for me” get addressed?
• Is this really what a community serves? Free support, free tools, utilities, open access to information?
• If this is true, can “real” relationships ever be realized?
• How transparent should the community be?
• Does transparency/openness help/hinder participation?
• Should everyone be able to see who’s participating, where they work, their background and motives?
• Should companies incent/encourage/mandate participation by their SMEs and practitioners?
• How should they?
• Who has the best community and what makes it so good?
• What’s an example of a bad community?

Thoughts?

Links that I have found interesting for August 18th:

• EMC on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) - Join Glenn O’Donnell, EMC principal product marketing manager, as he offers some practical, well-informed guidance on achieving a successful IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) implementation. ITIL has become enormously popular as a definition of best practices for IT operations, due to the increased need for operational discipline in IT. Find out how your organization can benefit from ITIL.
• Jitterbit - Jitterbit creates open source integration software that aims to overcome the challenges of cost and complexity associated with connecting applications, data and systems.

  Jitterbit’s open source integration solution is a graphical platform for connecting legacy, enterprise and On-Demand applications, including Business Process Fusion, ETL, SaaS, and SOA.

  The Jitterbit Open Source Integration Platform also makes use of sharable integration templates called Jitterpaks that allow the community to reuse common integrations with the most popular web services, application APIs, and databases.

Links that I have found interesting for August 18th:

• Stevey's Blog Rants: Business Requirements are Bullshit - How do you go about gathering business requirements, so you know what to deliver to the customer?

  Signed, blah blah blaaaaaaaaaah."

  (Note: not a verbatim transcript. But close enough.)

  And my answer was: Business requirements are bullshit!

  Well… actually it was: "gathering business requirements is bullshit", plus a bunch of accompanying explanation. But the shorter version sure is catchy, isn't it?

  The rest of this little diatribe expands a bit on my reply to this guy. (I actually sent him an email with much of this material in it. When I do reply to strangers, I still try do a thorough job of it.)

Links that I have found interesting for August 14th:

• BMC BSM Overview - BSM is the most effective approach for managing IT from the perspective of the business. BSM helps your IT organization do more of what supports the business and less of what doesn’t. With BSM, you will reduce cost, lower risk of business disruption, and benefit from an IT infrastructure built to support business growth and flexibility.

  We will provide an overview of BSM and key IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) processes: Configuration, Incident, Problem, Change, and Service Level Management. Additionally, Infrastructure Management and Service Impact/Event Management are included to provide an end-to-end view of BSM.

  This Webinar is geared toward an overview of BSM, and is not meant to be an in-depth look at product features. It is appropriate for anyone wanting to understand BSM and wanting to see how it could benefit the organization.

• Managed Objects Steams Ahead in Q2 - Managed Objects, the Business Service Management (BSM) Company, today announced impressive results for its second quarter 2008, underscored by especially strong sales in North America, which surged more than 50 percent over the same quarter in the previous year.
• visualvm: Home - VisualVM is a visual tool integrating several commandline JDK tools and lightweight profiling capabilities. Designed for both production and development time use, it further enhances the capability of monitoring and performance analysis for the Java SE platform.

  ** Need a how to on use of this with TBSM! **

• ANSMTUG - Atlanta Network & Systems Management Technical User Group - ANSMTUG Info

  The Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group was created in January 2004 to foster collaboration between administrators, architects, engineers, and operators of applications and tools used to manage and monitor networks, systems, applications, services, and business activities.

  This technical user group helps the local user community through monthly meetings to learn about best practices, how- to's, FAQs, lessons learned, etc. outside of annual vendor sponsored conferences or meetings. The meetings will allow for local networking opportunities within the user community, hearing monthly presentations about user driven topics of interest as well as presentations about user/company/vendor implementations or products.

Links that I have found interesting for August 13th:

• eTelemetry | Turning Network Traffic Into Business Intelligence - eTelemetry develops solutions that help enterprises in any industry derive real–time business intelligence from people’s activity on the network. Our network solutions have been deployed in enterprises ranging from world-class hotels to architecture and engineering firms, government agencies, and universities.
• Competing Visions of Enterprise Data Center Management at Mainframe Executive - This is where IBM also sees data center management going. It’s less about managing individual devices, systems, applications, or data. Just keeping systems up and running is no longer enough. Now data center management is about BSM, meeting service commitments, and aligning with strategic goals.

  …

  IBM’s new management vision and the new Tivoli toolset, however, may be more complex than some customers need. “For us, a lot of the Tivoli suite is overkill. The footprint is more than we want now. We’re more incremental in our management approach,” says A. Harry Williams, director of technology and systems at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

  …

  Underlying the jockeying among Tivoli, CA, BMC, and others for leadership of this new generation of data center management is “the issue of full lifecycle cost, which can give one vendor a tremendous advantage,” says Day. This dramatically changes the tool selection equation.

• ASG updates its MetaCMDB software - Network World - MetaCMDB 3.2.0 is available now and pricing begins at $600,000.

  ** Does it do the laundry and cook dinner too? **

• ITIL v3 and Business Service Management - So what does ITIL V3 have to do with BSM?

  BSM is now an ITIL best practice. ITIL V3 defines it as “the ongoing practice of governing, monitoring, and reporting on IT and the business service it impacts.” It’s an approach that leverages processes and technology to make the goals of IT and the goals of the business one and the same.

• The Business Of IT: Are You A Stuck-In-The-Mud IT Manager? Here's How To Save Your Career - It's All About The Business: The key to making the CIO, the tech managers, and the whole IT department a strategic part of the business is to understand that IT is a part of the business that deals with a specific business area (technology) just like the rest of the business. This means that it needs not only the code jockeys but also the business heads to make the whole thing work.
• The Business Of IT: Here's What's Really Wrong With IT And How To Fix It - What would this do for a CIO? First it would instantly boost his / her respectability. All of a sudden everyone would realize that the CIO and the IT department were really part of the company and that they were working to make a profit also. This would allow the CIO to start to take on different information management tasks that showed real value to the company. Finally! Alignment would be possible.
• The Business Of IT - So what do CIOs spend their time doing? The gut answer would be playing solitaire and shopping on eBay; however, I'm hoping that is incorrect. The survey says that CIO spend less than 10% of their time managing IT operations. Since CIOs aren't spending their time dealing with strategic issues, they end up spending it on tactical issues and then justifying their tactics. What a waste!

  One of the reasons that the CIO is in such a bad situation is because the survey reports that in only about 66% of the companys did the CEO advocate IT as a strategic asset. Without this support, the IT department has no support at the strategic level of planning.

• The Business Of IT: I.T.I.S. (It's The Information, Stupid!) - Who's to blame for the current situation? Well, we IT departments have more than our fair share to bear. All too often we interact with business customers using technology terms. When we do this we are seen as the "geeks" that we really are instead of business partners. What we should be doing is talking business with the business folks and reserving our technology discussions for when we are back within the IT department and talking with our teammates.

  Final thought: hide the technology and the data from the business customers. Instead, talk with them about information systems and the types of information that they need in order to help the company be successful.

• Jaspersoft Delivers Business Intelligence Development Platform for NetBeans and MySQL - iReport is the graphical report and dashboard design tool for JasperReports, the world's most popular open source reporting product and the Duke's Choice Award winner at last year's JavaOne conference. iReport has been available in Beta since December as a native NetBeans plug-in, during which time it rapidly became the most downloaded plug-in by this community of 600,000 developers from more than 130 countries. iReport developers deploy their reports with JasperServer, which includes a secure repository, dashboards, scheduling and ad hoc reporting. iReport and JasperServer are included in Jasper for MySQL.
• StrikeIron SOA Express for Excel - Bring your SOA to life in minutes! Build rich composite applications quickly and easily within Microsoft Excel without any programming. Traditionally this has only been possible by hard-wiring Web services into Excel with complex Visual Basic programming. This is the first drag-and-drop composite application builder available for Microsoft Excel. SOA Express can leverage an entire library of services available within any SOA, enabling rich "live" powerful applications to be built in minutes.

  Now, I.T. can put the power of live data directly to the desktop without any risk to internal data controls. And Business Users can build "live" Excel workbooks with real-time data available all over the organization and combine them with data that is available over the Web.

• Next-generation BI at Hand, Forrester Reports - Despite the last 18 tumultuous months in the BI marketplace, a recent Forrester research report (The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008) concludes that the BI leaders of today are much like those of two years ago: a handful of vendors — namely, IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects, followed by Oracle Corp. and SAS Institute Inc. — still sit atop the BI platform market.

  "IBM Cognos also tries to make it as easy as possible for its customers to migrate applications from one environment to another [e.g., development to test to production, for example] with a rich set of impact analysis utilities." Other Cognos advantages include not one but two OLAP engines (both PowerCube and the TM1, which Cognos picked up from the former Applix Inc.), as well as a business activity monitoring (BAM) appliance — Cognos Now! — which the company picked up via its acquisition of the former Celequest Inc. last year.

• IBM WebSphere Business Events enables users to manage business events, flowing across systems and p - Business Event Processing (BEP) allows business users to define business events, those signals that something of interest has happened in the business and that triggers actions based on identified business event patterns. BEP allows business users to proactively define, analyze, and take action on changes occurring in the business to seize critical business opportunities or to mitigate risks.

  WebSphere® Business Events is a software system designed specifically for managing the business events flowing across systems and people with the goal of providing timely insight and response. Business events are discovered and described in business terms to meet business objectives based on high-level management goals. WebSphere Business Events allows business users to detect, evaluate, and react effectively to the impact of business events.

  WebSphere Business Events delivers this capability through intuitive business user tools that define, implement, and manage business events.

Links that I have found interesting for August 12th:

• Birt: A Field Guide to Reporting, Second Edition - This second edition, revised and expanded, adds updated examples and covers all the new and improved product features, including
  * Cross tabs and OLAP cubes
  * New chart types, including Gantt, bubble, tube, and cone charts
  * Web services as a new data source
  * New report output formats, including doc, ppt, xls, and PostScript
  * The capability for reports to reference CSS
  * Localization of report parameter and data values
• End-user monitoring company hooks up with HP, CA - End-user performance monitoring company Knoa is working with Hewlett-Packard and CA on a project that could let IT managers get a more complete picture of application performance.

  Knoa is one of a handful of companies in the end-user monitoring area, although other larger vendors such as IBM, HP and CA are incorporating end-user evaluation features into their back-end application management products. Knoa is now working with HP and CA on such a project, said Lori Wizdo, Knoa's vice president for marketing, in an interview last week.

• Orb Data - ITM 6 Host Type Codes -
• Orb Data - Configuring Process Control - Process Control executes external procedures specified in automations and manages local and remote processes such as ObjectServers, probes and gateways. The scripts can be installed on UNIX based platforms to allow the process agent to start automatically when the system boots.
• Orb Data - Tivoli Common Reporter and BIRT - # ITM 6.1 SOAP Reporting with BIRT: The Basics
  Introduction to using BIRT to create reports from the ITM 6.1 SOAP interface
  # ITM 6.1 SOAP Reporting with BIRT: Parameters and Batching
  Generating ITM 6 reports with BIRT using report parameters and the API.
  # Alternate Row Highlighting
  This tip shows how to highlight alternate rows in a table in BIRT.
• Democratizing IT Service Management - This new social model for managing information collection and dissemination based on communities is a radical but interesting idea. The visionaries will see many other opportunities for this model, while others may consider it to be no more than a gimmick and point out many of the problems that its use raises.

  However, this approach provides an opportunity for IT to break down the barriers that have previously existed between IT and its customers, and by using a community-based approach it can make IT more realistic to the end user in terms of cost and value.

• Measure What Matters… Critique of the RFM Model - Like the Pharisees who would keep scripture-filled boxes around their arms at all times, us Marketers need to stay focused on ACTIONABLE analysis only. Whether it be customer survey data, customer behavior data, industry trend data, competitive analysis, or any other analysis activity, let us keep this question on our minds, “How will this information help me market MORE accurately and effectively.

  I put the emphasis on “MORE” because you can waste your time tracking metrics that tell you something you already know from an ACTIONABILITY (<–new word) standpoint. Even if some new insight into your customers can enhance your marketing efforts, it needs to be approached from a cost/benefit perspective. In other words, “Will the changes I make to my marketing program from this new insight produce enough ADDED profit to justify the resources (time, energy, money) it takes to retrieve that insight?”

• It’s All About RELEVANCE— A Broad Introduction to KPIs - To achieve your goals in the Age of Information, there are few principles more vital than that of Relevance.

  For our purposes, Relevance is: the ability to sift out the circumstances, variables, possibilities, and data that do not give insight into the progress of your goals, in order to make a decision that will achieve those goals based on what matters, and nothing else.

  A Key Performance Indicator is a super-concentrated piece of information that delivers maximum insight into the progress of your goals. In other words, Key Performance Indicators are the most Relevant factors in your decision making progress. If you have specific and clear goals for your business, then Key Performance Indicators do exist for those goals, whether you’ve been using them or not.

• "We've Found the Killer App … and It Is Voice." - "In the investment banking world," Reidy said, "there's something called a Ready for Business check. At 6am every morning, the brokerage goes through a checklist—sort of like a jet at the airport before takeoff. They go through a checklist before saying, 'OK, we're ready for business today.' So, throughout the day, that brokerage's Ready for Business check is confirming that it's continually ready for business. Even this call we're on, there's a constant check to confirm that the call is satisfactory. It's taking the equivalent of a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) score through several metrics every 8 seconds, looking for peaks and lows, and packet loss and jitter, then combining all those metrics into a database for comparison, trending, and troubleshooting. We're constantly testing and monitoring networks."

  ** What are you doing to check that your critical business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities are "Ready for Business"? **

• Mainframe confidence growing, survey says | IT PRO - Almost two thirds (63 per cent) currently operating separate mainframe and distributed systems said having shared tools and applications across both platforms was very important and something they plan to implement. While broad business service management (BSM) disciplines including service desk, change management and IT service management were seen as particularly important tool set features.
• IBM SJ 47-3 | SOMA: A method for developing service-oriented solutions - Service-oriented modeling and architecture (SOMA) has been used to conduct projects of varying scope in multiple industries worldwide for the past five years. We report on the usage and structure of the method used to effectively analyze, design, implement, and deploy service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects as part of a fractal model of software development. We also assert that the construct of a service and service modeling, although introduced by SOA, is a software engineering best practice for which an SOA method aids both SOA usage and adoption.
• More on the IBM/ILOG Relationship » Smart (Enough) Systems, the blog - IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies - they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is critical to success. Rules, analytics, business events and policies were all identified. While today’s briefing could not cover any future plans, I did get an overview of IBM’s current relationship with ILOG.