Let’s finish the story. With the hype of IBM’s Impact 2008 conference on all things SOA this week, I noticed an interesting business partner offering from a company called Nastel.
Nastel offers
“application performance management solutions that enable businesses to ensure the required levels of performance, high availability and reliability of business-critical applications necessary for meeting SLA’s. Nastel’s AutoPilot Suite leverages its built-in Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine to deliver complete business situational awareness, speeding problem resolution and providing unique proactive, predictive problem prevention that enables governance in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), facilitates SLA and regulatory compliance, and provides Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) support.”
These are all very important capabilities that an emerging IT organization must have, but how will they integrate with the broader IT management and monitoring portfolio? We must break down all of the silos of tools and data and ensure that we’re integrating and incorporating all of this valuable data and information into the broader end-to-end service management and monitoring efforts. The information that the Nastel AutoPilot M6 solution can provide is CRITICAL to any maturing business service management (BSM) solution.
There is a SIGNIFICANT opportunity for IBM business partners to take the extra effort to talk about the bigger picture and provide content and capabilities that can be leveraged by the broader family of IBM Tivoli products. Most OPAL contributions take the easy path and simply provide for event based integrations using ITM Universal Agents (UA) or simple SNMP Trap event integrations. How about providing custom Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) dashboards, service models and rules that can provide immediate broad based value to the IT organization? How about operational rules, procedures and expert advice that could be used to help quickly isolate the problem? How about custom launch in context (LIC) integrations from the core presentation layer components (TBSM, TIP, TEPS, TCR, etc) into your domain specific product? How about custom reports based on the standard Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) framework that make use of the data you’re solution collects? These are all very simple things that can help your solutions and products gain more adoption (or sales success).
I challenge all of our business partners (or start ups, OSS plays, etc…) to take the extra steps to contribute to the broader IT management and monitoring solutions that most clients already have made significant investments in. Your rewards may be more than you expected!