• Netuitive Extends Self-Learning Performance Management Capabilities to CA eHealth - Netuitive today announced that its self-learning performance management technology now integrates with leading network management product CA eHealth® Network Performance Manager to give CA eHealth customers greater insight into service health, behaviors and trends. Today's news is the latest in a string of recent integrations that Netuitive has announced with other market leaders, such as IBM Tivoli and HP OpenView.

• Deal Radar 2008: Zyrion - Sramana Mitra on Strategy - Continuing the trend of technology democratization, Zyrion provides mid-market enterprises with business service management (BSM) and IT infrastructure monitoring software. Their flagship BSM product, Traverse, is based on technology that is being used by large enterprises worldwide.

  Zyrion’s objective is to fill a gap in the marketplace: mid-market companies were looking for enterprise-level BSM and network management products in an attempt to move up from smaller tools like Solarwinds and WhatsUp Gold. Without the operational budgets to deploy and run large products like the Big 4 (BMC, HP, CA and IBM) can, mid-market companies require solutions with capabilities such as end-to-end correlated network and application monitoring, real-time status of IT services, integrated business/technical views and SLA management. This solution must be easy to install, use and run with only one or two people to manage it.

• The cloud’s most important equation - If you build a traditional data center platform for your application, you worry about three variables: The amount of traffic to your site, your capacity to handle that traffic, and the user experience they get, such as latency. The equation looks like this:

  User experience = Traffic / Capacity

  As traffic increases, user experience gets worse and delay goes up. This is because each visit to your site consumes resources on your infrastructure, and some users wind up waiting for the app to respond. Networks get full; databases encounter record locking; message queues back up; and so on. Ultimately, some of your visitors have a lousy experience.

  On-demand computing platforms fundamentally change how you deal with this, because as far as you’re concerned, they have infinite capacity.

• ABC's Of BPM - Forbes.com - This week, JargonSpy takes a look at Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and one that is just emerging, Business Process Expert (BPX). From the JargonSpy's point of view, unless you start thinking of the first two as a matched set, and then find people to play the role described by the third, you are going to be in a world of pain.

First off, let’s talk about just what a transaction is. Here’s my current working definition.

Transactions are one of, if not the most, critical components of how IT supports the business in meeting business goals and objectives. They are the simple and complex entities that get work done. They are the “movers and shakers” within the IT environment that are actively responding to client or business requests via the business services and applications that IT delivers. They move key data and information between infrastructure components that make up complex end-to-end business services and applications that exist in nearly every company today.

There are many common types of transactions and transactional architectures deployed by IT to support getting things done within companies today. These include the most common n-Tier (web, appsvr, db) transactions, the much hyped Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach, the tried and true mainstay of Mainframe (CICS, IMS) based transactions and I’m sure many others could be added to this list in the EAI, Complex Application, Web, J2EE, Mainframe or Network Service Provider areas.

I also like to bundle into this area something that’s likely not often thought of when we discuss types of transactions or transactional architectures and that’s the area of transactional based Workload Management (Batch Job/CRON) and Managed File Transfer (FTP/SFTP/SCP) type solutions. These technology areas have a very transactional based nature and are often responsible for getting some of the most high value units of work done within a typical enterprise. They should not be forgotten from any modern day or leading edge BTM solution.

What is Business Transaction Management (BTM)?

My views for BTM span many areas and focus on the following types of BTM activities. The BTM marketplace has vendors focused on one or more of these areas. Hopefully we can establish a uniform way to classify vendors and their technology, products and solutions into these or other categories.

Transaction Discovery and Inventory: Techniques for discovering transactions whether active, passive, configured, scheduled, or in-flight, for the purposes of establishing relationships between dependent systems, applications, databases, components, etc. based upon this transaction discovery as well as establishing an inventory or repository of transaction information. This would be used to extend a configuration management system, database (CMDB), asset management system or other. Ideally, we’d use this capability to establish the finite business relationships each transaction has, how it supports a business service, application or other unit of work, the impact if the transaction fails, blocks, queues, is slow, etc.

Transaction Tracing: Heavily focused on in-flight transactions, flows and paths, transaction tuning and optimization, transaction troubleshooting, complex relationships with other systems applications databases. This section includes transaction latency tracking, timing and profiling.

Transaction Monitoring: Focused on monitoring every aspect of the transaction, performance, availability, capacity, SLA, timings, etc. This section includes latency monitoring, an area of critical importance in many financial and trading environments.

Transaction Intelligence and Analytics: The application of sophisticated analytics to transactions to learn, monitor and managed transactions with applied intelligence. This is often seen in the financial and telecommunications industry as anti-money laundering solutions, credit card or other fraud or abuse of services/networks or similar solutions aimed at watching for patterns of activity or behavior as seen in transactional activity. The Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM) areas are also very focused on using transaction intelligence and analytics to drive the business, make better decisions and respond to changing conditions in the business environment.

Transaction Management: General term, focused on all of the above areas. I consider a transaction management solution as one that provides capabilities across all of these areas rather than just one or two.

Are there and other areas?

Why does Business Transaction Management (BTM) matter?

BTM is a key component of my “BSM Value Proposition” model and a maturing BSM strategy for any company. I’m tempted to say that if you’re not incorporating BTM into your BSM strategy than you’re likely to never get real value from your BSM solution.

I think BTM matters because the transactions are the things that get stuff done in business. It doesn’t matter if you have vendor x, y or z software, application, database, etc. they could all be black boxes. It’s the transactions that flow in and out of those things, those finite units of work that are the backbone of every business.

The future will be filled with clouds or generic compute capability full of loosely coupled services, interfaces, and transaction pipelines to get work done. Things we know today as web servers, application servers, database servers, etc. will all be commodity black boxes in the future and we’ll program against API’s or other loosely coupled interfaces to accomplish work or move data and information between the IT environment components.

Understanding the performance, availability, capacity, reliability, and impact of these transactions on IT and the business is critical just as it has been for the traditional IT infrastructure that enables them. This level of understanding and impact must not be limited that of the typical IT organization, application or integration architect, developer or administrator. Transactions and their impact must be easily understood by the folks on the front line, within IT management and the line of business. Every transaction’s contribution to the bottom line or impact on a higher or lower level system, interface or business goal or objective must be thoroughly understood.

Folks, it’s simple. Transactions that don’t complete, fail, slow down, queue up, hit a bottleneck, etc. will impact the business in significant ways. Batch jobs or other file transfers that don’t complete can cost companies in many industries large fines and penalties, lost revenue, botched orders, and ultimately upset customers or business partners. Managing end-to-end transaction flow and user experience could easily be said to be much more important than anything else you do in the network/systems/application management & monitoring area.

How important are transactions in your environment? What are you doing to increase your ability to think, operate and respond differently by deploying transaction management within your organization?

• 10 questions on business service management: A discussion with Casey Kindiger - Not quite sure what business service management entails, where it’s headed, or what benefits it offers? CEO and founder of generationE Technologies explains how BSM works, how it’s evolving, and what your organization can gain from its implementation.

  On a recent trip out to San Clemente, CA, I got the chance to sit down with Casey Kindiger, CEO and founder of generationE Technologies, to get his views on the future of business service management (BSM). He offered some practical explanations about the inner workings of this popular technology/business nexus-building strategy and how it relates to today’s corporate marketplace.

• Free tool collects logs, manages security and compliance - Network World - QRadar SLIM Free Edition (SLIM FE) enables IT managers to collect, analyze, report and store network, host, server, application and security event logs via syslog from routers, switches, security devices and servers.
• Roy Schulte on the BPM drive and SOA adoption - So is it complex event processing that has the most meaning to the business user?
  Schulte: Absolutely. Business people won't call it complex event processing. Most of them will call it a dashboard. Or they will call it "situational awareness." If you've got situational awareness through a dashboard that's what the business people can see. You and I may know that under the covers of a dashboard is an application that uses the principles of complex event processing. But the users won't call it that. The users will call it situational awareness or operational intelligence.

  So do business people have any understanding of business process management?
  Schulte: The business person may sit beside the business analyst while they are mapping out the business process but that's at development time. At runtime, the business user doesn't see SOA or BPM. What they do see is dashboards. They are seeing key performance indicators displayed.

• Ylastic - Manage your cloud - A single unified interface to manage your Amazon Web Services environment - S3, EC2, SQS and SDB.
• Service-now.com Offers to Save the IT Service Management Industry From Struggling HP Service Desk and BMC Remedy Implementations - MarketWatch - Service-now.com, the pioneer of on-demand IT service management, today announced it is offering to save the IT service management industry from struggling HP Service Desk and BMC Remedy implementations through the power of technology built on the Internet and delivered via software-as-a-service. A new Service-now.com program guarantees reduced licensing cost and implementation time for HP and BMC customers while promising the elimination of ITSM software upgrades.
• Event Processing in Enterprise Operations (Event Driven Architectures) - The article "Returns on Event Processing" focuses on identifying and capturing returns within an enterprise. Paradoxically, event processing (EP) systems can't perform those functions by themselves, but rather EP sits in the center of the value identify-capture process. Let's define value-capture as minimizing or avoiding a cost incurrence or the capture of a profitable sale. In addition, there is both a first-mile and a last-mile in a successful event-processing implementation and Business Intelligence (BI), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and Business Process Management (BPM) play important roles. This article examines event processing in enterprise operations and how BI, BAM and BPM complement event processing in achieving returns.

• jKool Online - J2EE Transaction Monitoring Service - jKoolTM Online is a free and secure off-premise J2EE/transaction monitoring web-based service that lets you monitor your J2EE environment from any location. There are no web or application servers and databases to install. This translates into immediate benefit to you.

• Zyrion Introduces Affordable Business Service Monitoring to the Mid-Market With New Traverse Solution - Zyrion Inc., a provider of BSM and IT infrastructure monitoring software for mid-market enterprises, today announced the Zyrion Traverse™ business service management (BSM) solution for mid-market enterprises. Zyrion Traverse is powered by the company’s unique Business Container and Service Level Management (SLM) technologies, enabling mid-market enterprises to manage increasingly complex business services to gain end-to-end correlated monitoring capabilities.

• Adventures in Open Source » Blog Archive » OpenNMS 1.6.0: Birthing an Elephant - The OpenNMS Group announces that OpenNMS, the world’s first enterprise-grade network management platform developed as 100% free and open software, has released a new version: 1.6.0. This is a stable, production release that incorporates nearly three years of development.
• VantagePoint - The IT Service Management podcast from Compuware, lets you hear directly from industry experts and thought leaders on a variety of topics relevant to IT operations.
• Nimsoft Blogs » UK Financial Services institution aligns IT with the business - The problem with SLAs in this context, he says, is that they "sometimes drive the wrong behaviours and if they're too top level, they could be causing customer dissatisfaction." This is not least because "if you ask the business what level of availability they want, they won't necessarily understand the question. So you can pick something that makes you look successful, but that takes away trust".
  …

  Cutts warns, however, that it is only possible to adopt such an approach if the IT department is providing a good basic service and has suitable monitoring tools in place. He also believes that the IT team needs to be provided with incentives to carry through on any changes.

  "I'm putting SLA performance into my personal objectives and that of my team because if they're not linked in, there's no reason to engage. It shows my real commitment to this approach as I don't feel that you can do this kind of thing half-heartedly," he concludes.

• Welcome to Simtrol - Simtrol powers enterprise-class software solutions that manage the extended network of connected devices.

  From digital displays, security cameras and interactive whiteboards to DVRs, projectors and microphones, extended network devices are becoming more functional and less costly everyday. As these devices flood the market, more and more organizations are relying on them for mission-critical aspects of their daily operations. That's where Simtrol comes in.

  Our Device Management Platform opens up the possibilities of the extended network by increasing asset utilization, reducing operational costs, reducing energy consumption, and improving technology utilization across the enterprise.

Check it out yourself here.