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In 144 days, the 2008 Olympics begin in Beijing, China…

in Business Service Management

We’ve heard of the massive infrastructure construction underway in Beijing to support the upcoming 2008 Olympics, but are China’s key businesses ready? Are the largest banks in China ready for the massive increase in tourist use of ATM banking? Are wireless providers ready for the massive increase in handsets in the Beijing area? Are they ready for the information hungry Olympic crowds seeking near real-time video clips of that gold medal moment or the ever so popular medal count contest? Can Beijing’s traditional network infrastructure, satellite TV and fiber optic infrastructure support hundreds of news outlets seeking to rebroadcast this content into the farthest reaches of the planet?

I’m sure that China’s Olympic planners are well on top of many of these areas. I’m sure many of the largest companies and government run organizations within China are preparing as rapidly as they are in Beijing. I wonder if they’re taking advantage of this opportunity to rethink how they’re doing things? I wonder if they’re planning on not only throwing additional capacity and infrastructure into their business services and applications environments, but what are they doing to leave a great impression with the visitors to the 2008 Beijing Olympics?

When I use the ATM machine outside of the opening ceremony pavilion in August, will I get the same level of service and quality of experience that I do at the local bank branch in Atlanta, GA? Will my transaction complete when 1,000,000+ other transactions are fighting for the same back end resources? How will these companies know if there are problems? How will they ensure that this ATM machine is performing as expected and that my transaction for 5,000 RMB is equally important as every other transaction? What will the potential revenue loss or image and reputation impact be when I can not complete this transaction and I move to another bank’s ATM machine?

More to follow…

—Anyone know how to post this in translated Chinese characters? All I get is ???? when saving.—-

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  • I certainly hope that you’ll be able to get your cash in August, Doug… Wouldn’t want to see you walking the streets of Beijing penniless!

    Kidding aside, whether or not China or Chinese companies get this right, the problem is much larger than just the influx of people into China for the Olympics as you know. Companies throughout the world deal with revenue loss and damage to their image and reuptation due to business service slowdowns and outages. Something as simple as a new marketing campaign being introduced can bring down a mission critical business service or slow its performance so much as to make it unusable.

    Unfortunately, most businesses are ill-equipped to handle these issues because IT is not driven by business performance, but rather by IT metric performance. While BSM dashboards are great at bringing business and IT performance data together in a plethora of views, the problem remains. When business performance key indicators are performing poorly, BSM consoles provide no way to automatically correlate abnormal behaviors in the IT infrastructure to focus troubleshooting efforts. All you do see is the thousands of hard threshold-based alerts from the siloed monitoring solutions. Time to get another bridge call going…

    The missing catalyst to achieving BSM and a business-focused approach to IT Ops is this automated correlation of abnormal behaviors across the business service in the context of poor performance of key business indicators. This is precisely what real-time analytics solutions are bringing to the market. They provide immense value to both the LOB manager and IT Operations.

  • Precisely. I’m finding that companies here appear to be making more efficient use of IT as most have grown organically compared to the M&A driven growth of similar companies in the US. Unfortunately, they appear to have adopted the same operations frameworks that we have and live in silos still.

    What’s needed is a simple way to allow the silos to begin to share data and find common threads where they can truly partner for a common good (hopefully the business, but WIIFM will prevail).

    I’m seeing significant need for an easy way to span mainframe, distributed, network, virtual/cloud/utility, services/transactions and facilities/datacenter. I think it would be very interesting to see what an Integrien like product could do here (assuming the technology is “silo” neutral).

    How might a mainframe operations group and a distributed operations group begin to break down the silo? Where might a breakthrough idea come from? Why do we have to have redundant and duplicate deployments of tools and software just because of the platform type (obvious reasons aside)?

    Is the answer business transaction management and overall transaction monitoring? Is a Correlsense, Correlix, DynaTrace, OpTier or other incumbent tool the solution? I think this is an obvious place to start since transactions are flowing across both environments.

    I think there’s opportunity for someone to start a company, invent technology, lead the industry in this area. If we leave the LPAR, Sysplex, z/OS, AIX, Linux, Bladecenter discussions aside and focus on transactions like never before, what might we gain?

    Keep it coming Steve! Anyone else?

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