Links that I have found interesting for April 21st:

• Verizon Business SLAs: Novell Provides the Secret Sauce – To be clear, Novell has not entered the MSP market nor is the company aggressively positioning Business Service Management to MSPs. Instead, Novell’s BSM software primarily serves internal IT departments that are trying to monitor their SLAs and mitigate risk with internal customers.

  But Verizon Business is an acception to that rule. During an April 7 seminar in New York, Novell described how Verizon Business has launched an SLA portal for external customers. The portal, built on Novell BSM software, allows customers to check a range of SLA data points. Novell disclosed the Verizon Business deployment as part of case study session.

  Generall speaking, I don’t hear much about Novell in the MSP market. But I think BSM software could emerge as a niche solution for larger MSPs that need to manage SLAs.

• Fujitsu Services and Opalis Achieve Breakthrough Production Capabilities – 'We have extremely stringent requirements for our production IT operations environment' said Keith Clifton, Operations Manager, Fujitsu Services. 'Opalis unlocks the potential of Business Service Management by automating the overarching business services we deliver to our customers. Opalis reduced operational expense while improving the consistency of our service delivery. We were able to integrate, orchestrate and automate the processes that cross the task silos. The support and commitment from the Opalis team has been exemplary.'
• The FireBlog: Imitation is the best form of flattery – It’s been nearly a year since we launched the Business-Edition of FireScope Business Service Management, designed to make BSM accessible where it never was before – smaller, growing businesses. And if our rapidly expanding customer base wasn’t proof enough that this was a brilliant idea, the number of our competitors following our footsteps certainly is; Nimsoft being the latest, and only a year behind the times.
• IBM – Installing TBSM 4.2 IF2 on 64 bit Windows machine – From the command prompt run the following : set ProgramFiles=%programfiles(x86)% .

  This will set the environment variable correctly to "C:\Program Files (x86)" The install of IF2 will then succeed.

• IBM – Tivoli Netcool Webtop 2.2.0 Interim Fix 3, 2.2.0-TIV-NCWebtop-IF0003 – Component: IBM Tivoli Netcool/Webtop 2.2.0 Interim Fix 3
• Nimsoft – BSM Express – Business Service Management – Optimizing IT Service Delivery for Maximum Business Benefit – BSM Express automates virtually the entire process, doing automatic discovery, integration, and Web portal dashboard population.

  BSM Express features several service model templates that are available out of the box, providing business service dashboards that organizations can use, without any development effort whatsoever. To implement any of these pre-configured service models, administrators simply need to go through a wizard-driven interface that guides them through the steps required.

  BSM Express offers pre-configured service model templates for Web (HTTP, Tomcat), Email (Exchange, SMTP, POP3, IMAP), Database (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL), and Naming (Active Directory, LDAP, DNS) services.

• Nimsoft Blogs » The Next Generation of Business Service Management has arrived – So, how did we get here…what have we done?

  Well, first of all, the Indicative acquisition that we made in April of last year was absolutely key. As we told our customers at the time, we purchased Indicative to gain access to the BSM modelling technology that has made it the preferred solution of multiple large environments around the world such as BUPA, NTT, Easynet and The US Department of State.

  But, we've spent the last 9 months making an industry leading solution, even better. We've added tight, database level integration with Nimsoft's Monitoring Solution. We've added attractive and highly functional new dashboards that integrate directly with the monitoring dashboards of Nimsoft, we've added multiple "out of the box" business models for common applications – and we'll be adding many more.

  How much? Well…it starts at $10,000 and can go up to $20,000. No…before I get lots of comments,

• YouTube – Nimsoft BSM Express – Discovery –
• YouTube – Nimsoft BSM Express – Installation –

Links that I have found interesting for April 21st:

• YouTube – Nimsoft BSMx Take 1 3 – Nimsoft's BSM Express intro video – Can embedded YouTube videos remove/reduce the need for software services/consulting? I prefer wikis.
• Nimsoft Breaks Open the Business Service Management Market with BSM Express – Nimsoft's BSM Express, which builds on the company's monitoring heritage, aims to help businesses monitor and aggregate performance and availability metrics in order to correlate them with specific business objectives. The IT organization can view and measure the business impact of poor performance and downtime, make adjustments to the network and potentially improve the company's bottom line."

  "Organizations are starting to realize that they have spent too much time, money and people on BSM solutions that promise the world but rarely deliver," said Gary Read, president and CEO of Nimsoft. "At Nimsoft, we’ve eliminated the complexity that legacy providers have created by building the first feature-rich BSM solution that is affordable and easy to use, yet highly functional. We are taking a discipline that previously could only be afforded by organizations with lots of spare IT budget and we are making it available to the mass market."