These are my links for June 30th through July 6th:

• IT Reliability™ through Business Transaction Management – Business Transaction Management (BTM) has been getting a lot of attention lately as a powerful way to enable IT reliability by allowing organizations to collect and analyze the transactional data required to drive effective IT management processes and achieve IT reliability.

  Managing IT by the traditional siloed approach is no longer enough to enable IT reliability. A horizontal foundation that connects between the end-users, network, proxy servers, web servers, load balancers, application servers, message brokers, databases and mainframes is needed in order to provide IT reliability. As the common denominator of all of these silos, transactions are able to provide the foundation for IT reliability.

  SharePath's unique patent pending technology is able to automatically discover and correlate all of the transactions that flow through these numerous IT silos and store them in a Reliability Management Database (RMDB) in real time.

• IT Reliaility – Correlsense’s new spin on BTM – So what is IT Reliability? On principal, it is allowing IT staff to take control of their multi-tiered, distributed applications.

  The sole purpose of an IT organization is to make sure business transactions are processed as fast and as accurate as possible. For that they need to know what is going on right now, and be able to compare it to what happened last month. The need to be able to figure out who is misusing or corrupting the data, plan ahead in terms of physical resources and virtual resources (cloud), maintain a clear picture of dependencies between physical and logical components, make sure changes to applications and infrastructure don't create any unexpected results, and make the business departments pay for what they are using in practice rather than in theory.

• CA Expands Offerings for Unified Business Service Assurance and Automation for Next-Generation Virtualized Data Centers and Private Clouds – CA is broadening the scope of CA Spectrum(R) Infrastructure Manager, CA eHealth(R) Performance Manager and CA Spectrum Automation Manager to encompass in one fully-integrated, end-to-end management solution both physical and virtual server and network environments, as well as databases, voice and unified communications systems, and other networked applications. The products are being enhanced to support VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus(R) 1000V distributed virtual software switch, which is an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. The extensive solution will help enable customers to easily and coherently manage these environments through one user interface and within a powerful unified information model. This will help customers achieve Lean IT by speeding time to problem identification and resolution.
• Questions you should ask ANY IT Service Management Vendor « John Clark’s $.02 (or 1.25p) –
• Awe and Disbelief « OpTier’s Business Transaction Management Blog – Despite being one of the privileged few who witnessed BTM grow from a mere idea into a full-blown enterprise solution, I still find myself sometimes awed by this technology. It is, after all, an ambitious attempt to visualize complex, abstract business ideas, and manage them like any other assets of the organization. How is it possible? Does it really work? As my friend and colleague Andy previously noted, the “aha moment” for BTM typically doesn’t arrive until after the customer has already seen it live in their own environment. And that’s when the fun begins.

I firmly believe that the next generation of Business Service Management (BSM) will consolidate, integrate and leverage Business Transaction Management (BTM), End User Experience (EUE), Real User Experience (RUM) and Application Performance Management (APM) solutions and their respective domain data and information.

While the simplistic definitions of what BSM is still hold true, the value of understanding each of these domain areas is critical to the business and should be to emerging IT operations organizations who are maturing beyond resource management and IT silos to a true end-to-end service management methodology.

The ITCAM for Transactions v7.x product and broader ITCAM family provides industry leading depth and breadth across any large enterprise IT environment. I haven’t come across anyone’s portfolio that covers more than what Tivoli’s does today. The “manager of managers (MoM)” concept that we’ve had tremendous success with in the event management space is similarly replicated with the ITCAM for Transactions v7 product’s ability to consume, consolidate and stitch together complex transaction level information across a multitude of technology domains and IT organization silos. For more insight into BTM, check out some of the information and podcasts available here.

As part of ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 FP2, the ITCAM development team has developed an initial foundation for integration and data exchange between ITCAM and TBSM v4.2. This integration leverages all of the latest model and resource build capabilities of our DLA based integration as well as our new ITM Data Fetcher capability to bring in the relevant metrics and KPI’s from the backend ITCAM (ITM) systems. All of this is used to underpin and drive a basic example of an operations dashboard where business transaction information such as availability, performance, quality, etc. and the supporting IT infrastructure component relationships are displayed.

From this foundation, it would be very easy to build out follow on views, pages and portlets that would enable application support groups and LoB executives to see availability and performance information for transactions from any technology domain or IT silo within the service delivery chain.

I’ll try and get some examples built of what this could look like in the future. I’ve included a picture below of what the ITCAM development team has included in this integration package. This integration content is available via the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 FP2 download site as an individual download component. See the FP2 release notes for more information. You can review the white paper detailing the integration on the TBSM Wiki here.

ITCAM for Transactions TBSM Integration