Looking Back at Business Service Management (BSM) in 2009

As I look back at how the BSM industry evolved in 2009, my thoughts focus around 2009 as the year of “Hybrid BSM” players coming into their place in the market. Another term I use here is “BSM for SMB” or even “BSM Lite” to some degree but I feel “Hybrid BSM” is best fitting as it describes what these solutions provide. I see a “Hybrid BSM” product as a single product that incorporates many aspects of fundamental infrastructure, application and service management and monitoring along with some fundamental and foundational BSM capability. These don’t fit into a stand alone “Pure Play BSM” product category nor do they need to have additional stand alone products playing together to achieve BSM value as a “Portfolio BSM” solution would.

So who were the players in 2009? Here’s my ten second highlights reel.

Nimsoft launched their initial BSM story with the release of their solution incorporating their Indicative Software acquisition. FireScope continued to dominate much of 2009 with new releases and solutions in “upline” areas such as compliance. Zyrion was launched and really came out as the one to plug into the “BSM for SMB” space. Manage Engine leveraged their heritage AdventNet portfolio with the IT360 offering and launched the first “BSM as a Service” with Manage Engine on Demand offering. AccelOps came out of stealth mode and launched their extensive hybrid solution with both a SaaS and Virtual Appliance delivery model for broad based IT management and BSM. Monolith Software picked up speed and clients with strong focus on IT operations needs and core BSM foundations. The second half of 2009 saw many of these companies jumping on the virtualization and cloud computing band wagon. This is a natural fit for the target markets many of these vendors play in as virtualization and cloud computing took off in 2009 and will grow exponentially in 2010+.

Apart from the typical vendor “we do that” announcements of doing BSM for X, Y or Z in 2009, I haven’t seen any real innovation from the typical “Big 4” or “Other 6” vendors who participate in the BSM space. Releases throughout 2009 focused on portfolio consolidation, integration and optimization as well as incorporating “new” capabilities or extending support for the 2009 buzzwords around cloud computing, virtualization, green IT, optimization, etc. I think there are a couple vendors who’ve made significant improvements across their portfolio in 2009, especially in capability consolidation, ease of use and licensing innovation as well as some key acquisitions that have the potential to be “break out moves” for their BSM capability in 2010+.

Regarding my virtualization and cloud computing band wagon comment, I still struggle to see this as anything but a natural evolution and application of a vendor’s standard IT management and monitoring fundamentals. Until we have innovative vendor solutions that can truly manage the “end-to-end”, “top to bottom”, “side to side”, “domain to domain”, “provider to provider” services, across any and all technologies, on premise or off, in the cloud or not, from a transactional flow, workload performance, user experience and ultimately with an understanding of the state of the business’ goals, objectives and outcomes, I’m just challenged to be impressed at this point. Yes my expectations are high. Yes I’m sure many are “working on it”. The industry must set the “bar high” and start addressing the broader based “death from a 1000 cuts” problem in IT operations environments today.

In addition to 2009 being the year of “Hybrid BSM”, I also consider 2009 to be a year filled with innovation and growth in many key BSM enabling technology and product areas. End user experience (EUE), real user monitoring (RUM), quality of experience (QoE) and business transaction management (BTM) vendors and solutions matured and improved in 2009. OpTier, Precise, Nastel, Correlsense, AmberPoint, Aternity, Symphoniq (Coradiant), Knoa, Keynote, Gomez (Compuware), Digital Fuel, Oblicore (CA) and newScale all kept my interests peeked with advances in their capabilities and techniques for providing visibility into some of the most critical areas of service delivery and the things that often have the most direct impact on business goals, objectives and outcomes.

My thoughts for 2010 swirl around the continued M&A potential in the space. As I type this today, the independent SLA player Oblicore looks to be snatched up by CA. I think that more consolidation will take place in the BTM area by folks in the “Hybrid BSM” camp, “Big4” or “Other6”. These BTM vendors are rapidly evolving and addressing deep technology challenges within the constantly emerging technology and protocol landscape. The capability to have rich end user experience visibility is so valuable some vendors may want to extend beyond their synthetic or limited sampling approaches. My thoughts on any M&A activity in this new decade are that it must be around portfolio and product consolidation, addressing gaps and striving for a simpler, more efficient footprint for anyone desiring to achieve broad based coverage. Gone should be the days of “add ons” and more “stand alone” products. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If it’s not broke, think about it differently and you may see that it really is “broke”! Make the right decisions to fix or simplify it. The “Not Invented Here” (NIH) mentality often leaves you standing at the alter when others have acquired capability and made the right decisions to move their products and solutions forward.

Will there be any significant, game changing BSM innovation in 2010? Time will tell. I’ve seen some pretty interesting concepts being tossed around in the industry lately. It’s a matter of market timing and client maturity in most instances. Any mis-timing, things come across as “gimmicky” or just another fad. Hit the market right because a foundation has been built helping clients and the industry realize what they need, know what they don’t know, then these will certainly be game changers. Those vendors who go to market with as much emphasis on the people, process, organizational and political challenges of BSM understood, addressed, acknowledged and mitigated will see deep, broad based BSM adoption and success. 2010-2013 will be the pivotal years for this.

I look forward to the next decade of Business Service Management! My passion remains high, my vision clear, and belief that the value and benefits from BSM can be realized unshaken. BSM can provide measurable value to the typical IT operations organization and business. How you choose to achieve that value is a journey filled with many decisions, challenges, roadblocks and times of uncertain pain and reward. My hope is to help you get there!