In flight, LGA to ATL 9:30PM on my Blackberry 8700C…

I just wrapped up two days of deep dive technical training on our new release of Netcool/Real-Time Active Dashboards (RAD) version 3.0 in NYC (post Blizzard of 2006).

It was great to spend the time with our leading developers, product managers and systems engineers from around the world and hear the excitement from the field around the product and what it is enabling our clients to do in their environments.

Another thing that pleased me was seeing the excitement of our key BSM product family developers, product managers and executive management as they got their first immersion into ITIL during their ITIL foundation training.

Hearing folks generally pretty far away from IT Operations excited about change management, service level management, and the various ITIL training fun (the proper English, wacky IT scenarios, and practice tests) took me back to my training, certification and implementation experinces at EarthLink.

I am sure this training will help them greatly as they dialogue with new and existing clients worldwide. I encouraged most of them to keep it up and try for the practitioers certifications as I have.

Back to our new product release. The name Real-Time Active Dashboards only partially captures the capability and potential clients have at their fingertips with RAD. What that name doesn’t convey are the powerful service and dependency modeling, data source integration, and overall BSM, BAM and BPM capability. I encourage you to take a look at the PR on it from this week as it launched at the Pink Elephant ITSM show in Las Vegas.

I hope to write about some of our many solution, application and architecture ideas on how clients can leverage our BSM product family (including our new Tivoli parent’s product portfolio) in their environment. No, not theoretical ramblings, but keeping it real and aligned with my goal of bringing BSM (really B*M) to life in the real IT Operations environments you work in.

I’ve also opened the door for some of the product and development folks to jump in and blog with me here. I hope they do!

Yesterday, Micromuse’s era in the network and systems management space ended as we formally knew them. Micromuse was founded 15 years ago and my exposure to them as a customer goes back 10 years. I can vividly remember my first Netcool experience at an ISP in Norfolk, VA called InfiNet. Netcool was the saving grace for an ISP in the mid-1990s. Having cut my teeth on HP’s NNM and Cabletron’s Spectrum plus a handful of unique element management systems for the network and server devices, having Netcool to consolidate all of these systems into a “single pane of glass” worked wonders in the NOC.

Yesterday was my first day as an employee of IBM Tivoli. The future of the combined Micromuse Netcool and IBM Tivoli product families is extremely bright. I’m looking forward to learning and growing within IBM Tivoli and continuing to seek ways to bring the goals and objectives of business and IT best practices (BSM, BAM, BPM, ITSM, ITIL, etc.) to life by focusing on the not just the technology but the people and processes required for a successful implementation.