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Interesting Links for August 13th

in General

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.