What’s the future hold for Business Service Management (BSM)? Well, if John and many analysts are right it’s really going to be “in the sky” with the emergence of cloud computing. Read some of John’s thoughts on the topic in “Demystifying Clouds”.
The motivation for cloud computing is usually to control costs, standardize, eliminate headcount, reduce impact of change, etc. All of these link back to the goals and objectives of the business – control costs and make money. John and I talk about this stuff a lot. Everything has an angle back to BSM in one way or another. If you’re like most of the clients I see these days who struggle with the basics of IT management and monitoring, your future isn’t going to get much easier. Just look at where we are in terms of Virtual Machine management and monitoring today, we’re still stuck in the old way of doing things.
I expect John to dive into more of the gory details as he posts more, but the tenants of BSM must be thought of even more within a utility compute or cloud computing environment. If you’re not thinking about the end game, you’re just jumping on the bandwagon. BSM and the ability to instrument to have the necessary visibility into what’s happening at all levels in the cloud is critical. All of this must be tied back into a central repository for managing business services, applications and transactions in the cloud environment. This isn’t just CI or CMDB stuff here, this is end-to-end services with the necessary alignment with the business.
If you’re a cloud computing, utility, grid or other virtual player, John and I would like to talk to you about supporting DevCampTivoli. The theme is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End Business Service Management Solutions” and you may be able to help by providing a virtual environment, business service or application that would be at the core of this initiative in May. I see huge opportunities for someone to offer a “development environment in a box” where IT management and monitoring practitioners around the world (read IBM, HP, CA, BMC, Hyperic, Zenoss, etc. clients) can “turn up” business services and applications and develop appropriate IT management and monitoring solutions within their own cloud environments. This becomes a very affordable dev-test-release to production enabler!