Business Service Management Tools
Analysis By: Debra Curtis; Will Cappelli
Definition: BSM is a category of IT operations management software products that links the
availability and performance status of underlying IT infrastructure and application components to
business-oriented IT services that enable business processes. To qualify for the BSM category, a
product must support the definition, storage and visualization of IT service topology via an object
model that documents and maintains parent-child relationships and other associations among the
supporting IT infrastructure components. This service model can be created through “drag and
drop,” import, automated discovery or manual methods. BSM tools can also leverage the service
model in a CMDB, if one exists. The BSM product must gather real-time operational status data
Publication Date: 22 June 2007/ID Number: G00148631 Page 24 of 46
© 2007 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
from the underlying applications and IT infrastructure components using its own services or
established monitoring tools, such as distributed system and mainframe-based event
management, job scheduling and, in some cases, application performance monitoring. BSM
products must then process that status data against the object model, using potentially complex
calculations and weightings, rather than straightforward inheritance, to communicate real-time IT
service status. Results are displayed in various graphical business service views, sometimes
referred to as dashboards.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Every company wants to assess the impact of IT
infrastructure and applications on its business processes to help match IT to business needs.
However, only 10% of large companies have “matured” their IT operational processes to the point
where they’re ready to successfully deploy a BSM tool to achieve this. Adoption speed will be
slow, but steady, as IT organizations improve their IT management process maturity. BSM is
starting to sink toward the Trough of Disillusionment, as IT organizations learn that deploying a
BSM tool is not easy, because it requires manual effort to identify the IT service relationships and
dependencies, or it requires a CMDB to already be in place, which is not the case in most
companies.
User Advice: BSM is a natural evolution from previous market requirements for event
management and IT component monitoring as IT organizations attempt to become more
business-aligned in their service quality monitoring and reporting. Clients should choose these
tools when they wish to present a real-time, business-oriented dashboard display of service
status, but only if they already have a mature, service-oriented IT organization; a good
understanding of the logical linkages between IT components and the IT services they enable;
and good instrumentation and monitoring already in place for those components.
Business Impact: BSM tools help IT present to its business unit customers a business-oriented
display of how well IT services are performing in support of critical business processes. BSM
tools identify the IT services affected by IT component problems, helping to prioritize operational
tasks and support efforts relative to business impact. By following the visual representation of the
dependencies from IT services to business applications and IT infrastructure components
(servers, storage, networks, middleware and databases), BSM tools can help IT determine the
root cause of IT service problems, thus shortening the mean time to repair.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: One percent to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: BMC; CA; Compuware; HP; IBM Tivoli; Indicative; Interlink Software;
Managed Objects
Archive for October 25th, 2007
Firm adds a dash of Mercury Interactive to OpenView
Shaun Nichols in California, vnunet.com 22 Oct 2007
HP released an updated to its Business Service Management (BSM) suite that promises to diagnose problems before they can impact business performance.
BSM software allows IT departments to gauge not only the technical performance of a service, but also its importance to employee productivity and customer service. Knowing a system’s impact then lets departments prioritise upgrades and repairs.
HP claims that the new BSM offerings will allow businesses to not only prioritise IT elements, but also pick out potential problems before they affect end users.
The company points to an IDC study which found that 41 per cent of IT professionals had not been aware of network issues until they were reported by end-users. This, said HP, is getting IT staff in hot water.
“You’re using end-users to do your network monitoring, and a lot of CIOs are coming down on their staff,” explained Ramin Sayar, senior director of products for HP’s Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) branch.
Sayar told vnunet.com that the new software for the first time offers an ‘end-to-end’ picture of the entire IT organisation. This makes it possible to fully understand how different components impact users and pinpoint problems before they affect end users.
HP credits many of the new capabilities that comprise the ‘end-to-end’ BSM system to its recent acquisition of Mercury Interactive. HP purchased the troubled company for $4.5bn late last year and meshed its products with HP’s own to create the BTO program.
“There was very little overlap between the HP and Mercury portfolios, so by bringing these two together we were able to combine top-down and bottom-up solutions,” Sayar explained.
Sayar said that the beefed up CSM offering is now altering the way in which HP pitches its BTO products.
“In the previous strategy, our software was used to sell more hardware,” he said.
“Now, the opposite is true.”
CRN: Over that last few years there has been a fair amount of talk about autonomic computing in the server management area, but very little of that technology seems to be taking hold. Why do you think this is the case?
ITTYCHERIA: The reality is that not many companies today are building data centers and using tools to do autonomic functions. The reason for that is that there’s so much chaos right now so to go from this world of chaos to an autonomic environment is somewhat unrealistic. What people are trying to do is first just have much more visibility and control over what they have by starting to centralizing knowledge and define policies. Basically, they are imposing order and control. The next stage is moving to what we call the notion of service-oriented management, which is being able to manage and align your IT infrastructure and operations to the needs of the business. Then the third phase would be moving to more of a policy-based automation environment, such as a utility computing environment.
CRN: Could you build those tools today?
ITTYCHERIA: Customers don’t want it. We have a prototype of a policy engine. But the reality is that if you don’t have tires on a car, you know, you don’t need a jet engine strapped onto the car. You need tires, you need a wheel, you need brakes and so forth before you go and use a car.
CRN: What kind of momentum are you seeing this space?
ITTYCHERIA: The company was founded in 2001. In the last four years, we’ve grown the business on a compound annual basis of about 175 percent a year. We were basically breakeven last year and today we have about 100 customers across a variety of different vertical industries.
CRN: How big a market opportunity do you think this area represents?
ITTYCHERIA: We think that the market is conservatively at $10 billion. These are IDC numbers, not ours. To get that number, IDC says that there are about 20 million servers in production today, going to about 30 million in about two to three years. If you discount 20 million because they are small shops that will never need a sophisticated solution, then there are 10 million servers. Then you apply a price per server of roughly $1,000 per server. That’s $10 billion. And then if you discount that by 50% again, just to be safe, that’s $5 billion. And you’re seeing it grow at roughly 60 to 70 percent compound annually, so you still see a $10 billion market in a couple of years. The market’s huge.
CRN: When will this market take off?
ITTYCHERIA: This whole notion of change and configuration is going to start getting a lot of buzz this year. Two years ago, the buzz was on utility computing. Then people realized that was still a lot of vapor and not much reality. Then last year, the talk was about patch management because of Microsoft’s security problems. I think the pendulum has kind of found its happy medium now, where the problem is around configuration management for servers. This is probably one of the last places in technology where there’s still a lot of manual process. I think you’re going to see a lot of emphasis and focus on building a lot more automation and the management process of the data center.
CRN: Why is this whole area more important today?
ITTYCHERIA: Ten or 15 years ago, machines were viewed as expensive and people were viewed as cheap. You spent millions of dollars on computing gear and the labor, especially management infrastructure, was the rounding error. Today, it’s actually the reverse. For anyone who has 100 servers or more, the inherent management costs of managing those servers is so high, with the labor that you need to service and support that infrastructure, it makes far more sense to use some automation tools to do that for you, rather than having to do it with just people. And if you do nothing, you’re just going to have to add staff, which we just recognize is just cost prohibitive.
CRN: What is your go-to-market strategy?
ITTYCHERIA: Reach is our biggest problem. We use our partners where appropriate to expand our reach and footprint. Once you get the right person who has this problem, invariably we win a lot of business. Our average deal size is north of $300,000. We have about six or seven partner today and we’re just kind of building out a channel organization. We need a distribution channel that can go out and create demand.
News release
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 10, 2007
HP today announced that independent industry analyst firm IDC has named it the No. 1 or No. 2 market share leader in several IT management software markets.
Related Links
» Software
The IDC reports cited HP as No. 1 in the distributed system management,(1) automated software quality (ASQ),(2) and network change and configuration management software(3) markets. Additionally, the company ranked No. 2 in the server provisioning(4) and IT project and portfolio management software markets.(5)
These markets are served by solutions from the HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software portfolio, which help customers drive better business outcomes, such as lowering the cost of IT by automating key processes across IT domains, better align IT with the business, and speed service delivery to support strategic business initiatives.
“With so much of business today relying on technology, our customers depend on HP BTO software to bring IT into full alignment with the business and ensure IT investments deliver maximum value,” said Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager, BTO products, Software, HP. “We are committed to delivering the best BTO software in the industry, and it is a strong endorsement to be so highly ranked by IDC in these key markets.”
No. 1 in distributed system management software
According to IDC, the distributed system management software market segment includes software tools that are routinely used in IT operations or by end users to manage system and application resources for distributed systems. This market is composed of six major constituent functional markets,(1) and HP was named first or second in revenue in three of these sub-markets.(6,7)
According to the reports:
- HP achieved first place in worldwide software license revenue in the overall distributed performance and availability management software market in 2006.(6)
- The market leader for 2006 in worldwide distributed event automation software revenue by a wide margin was HP, which was able to take first place in this market for the fifth consecutive year.(6)
- HP moved up sharply to reach second place overall in worldwide system management software market revenue in 2006 and continued to grow at substantially faster rates than the overall system management software market.(7)
“HP’s revenue leadership in these markets was boosted by the acquisition of Mercury Interactive in 2006,” wrote Tim Grieser, program vice president, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC, and author of three of the reports. “The acquisition combines Mercury’s BTO solutions and messaging with HP Software’s long established enterprise management software for systems and networks.”(7)
HP Software offerings for the distributed system management market help IT gain visibility into operations from a business perspective so it can better align with business priorities. These offerings include:
- HP Operations Center allows IT to consolidate availability, event and system performance management across existing IT domains to increase staff efficiency and streamline operational processes. It provides a comprehensive perspective on infrastructure services and leverages a combination of intelligent agents and agent-less technology.
- HP Network Management Center automates the essential lifecycle tasks of operating a network, including network discovery and continuous monitoring, root-cause analysis and deployment of configuration changes. Integrated with HP Operations Center, it provides a cross-domain infrastructure management solution.
- HP Business Availability Center enables IT to monitor the health of applications and business services from a user’s perspective. It includes capabilities to manage end-user experience, deliver on service level expectations and accelerate problem isolation and resolution.
- HP Service Management Center automates and streamlines the delivery and support of IT services to the business. It provides capabilities to orchestrate and automate key IT processes across process domains, manage the full lifecycle of IT assets, enable the complete financial management of IT and drive rapid tactical and strategic decisions based on quantitative business intelligence.
No. 1 in automated software quality
According to IDC, HP Software “remains by far the most dominant vendor in the ASQ arena,” and IDC expects to see significant growth for HP moving into 2007.(2) IDC defines ASQ (automated software quality) to include tools which support software unit testing or system testing or both; they also support software quality assurance.(2)
“We expect HP to build on its existing strength with core improvements to its testing product line,” said Melinda-Carol Ballou, program director for the Application Lifecycle Management Service and principle analyst, IT Management Service, IDC, and author of two of the reports. “HP Software’s strength in SOA, opportunities in information lifecycle, and operations for service quality management and governance are potentially fertile areas for growth.”(2)
HP’s offerings in this space include HP Quality Center and HP Performance Center, which help customers ensure that their applications deliver the right functionality and performance to meet the requirements of their business.
No. 1 in network change and configuration management software market
In addition, HP data center automation software (from the recent Opsware Inc. acquisition) was the market share leader and “saw the largest gain, more than tripling its revenue share from 2005 to 2006” in the network change and configuration management software market, according to IDC.(3)
IDC identified Opsware Inc. as the fastest growing vendor in the worldwide network change and configuration management market for the period 2005-2006. Opsware saw the largest gain, more than tripling its revenue share from 9.4 percent in 2005 to 27.1 percent in 2006.
According to IDC, the network is becoming a key component in the execution of the business model and, in some cases, it is the business model. Network change and configuration products are one way to reign in the chaos that can exist when changes are made in a manual ad hoc fashion. Network change and configuration products provide a framework that gives detailed insight into the network devices and thereby greater understanding of the network environment.(3)
No. 2 in server provisioning software market
IDC also identified Opsware Inc. as the No. 2 vendor in the worldwide server provisioning software market for the period 2005-2006, in terms of software revenue. Opsware achieved this ranking with $82 million in revenue and 24.4 percent market share.(4)
Opsware is recognized as one of only two vendors to increase its market share from 2005-2006, securing more than double the market share of the other vendor. The combined market share of HP and Opsware in the server provisioning market would place HP first in the market.
The server provisioning market is centered on the deployment, configuration and management of server system and application software stack images. The HP Data Center Automation solution provides capabilities from initial provisioning of servers, networks and storage devices to managing ongoing changes and compliance requirements.
No. 2 in IT project and portfolio management software market
In a separate IDC report, HP Software was noted for its second place in total revenue in the worldwide automated IT project and portfolio management (IT PPM) software market.
PPM applications are used for defining, estimating, tracking and optimizing the tasks and resources required to plan and complete a project as well as to manage the portfolio of an enterprise’s body of projects, including “what if” analysis on proposed projects.
IT PPM tools facilitate joint business/IT planning. These products provide portfolio visibility into IT projects, programs and resource allocations and costs in conjunction with expected business value to help enable effective prioritization.(5)
HP’s offerings in this area include HP Project and Portfolio Management Center, which standardizes, manages and captures the execution of project and operational activities. It optimizes overall IT portfolio decision-making by providing critical real-time information.
Data center Stock analysis
Mixed 3Q Results for Data Center Stocks
Virtualization was hot, while CDNs were not. That was the story for data center stocks in the third quarter of 2007, as VMWare (VMW) and BladeLogic (BLOG) surged higher after their IPOs, while content delivery network specialists Akamai (AKAM) and Limelight Networks (LLNW) took a nasty beating. The data center builders had a mixed performance in the middle, ranging from a three-month gain of 15 percent to a loss of 22 percent in a period in which the Dow rose just 3.63 percent and the NASDAQ was up 3.77 percent.
Here’s a look at the performance of the data center stocks we track in the third quarter of 2007:
VMWare has been a story unto itself, benefiting from the enormous buzz around virtualization as a transformative technology in the enterprise data centers. BladeLogic, which provides data center automation software, got a boost from exceptional timing. The company’s IPO came just days after one of the company’s rivals, Opsware (OPSW), was bought by HP for $1.6 billion.
Among data center operators, Navisite (NAVI) and Terremark (TMRK) had the strongest percentage gains in the third quarter. Both companies added revenue through acquisitions, as NaviSite bought netASPx, Alabanza and Jupiter Hosting while Terremark acquired Data Return in May. Rackable (RACK) and Digital Realty (DLR) also beat the Dow, while Internap (INAP), Equinix (EQIX), Switch and Data (SDXC) and Savvis (SVVS) saw their shares lose ground in 3Q. Growing competition in the CDN market has battered the stocks of former high-fliers Akamai and Limelight Networks (which was a hot IPO back in June).
What does the big picture look like for data center stocks for 2007? Here’s a look at cumulative performance for the first three quarters of the year:
For the year to date, Equinix and Digital Realty are beating the Dow, which is up 11.5 percent in 2007. Savvis and Terremark are in the black but trailing the broader market, while Switch and Data is off 4 percent from its IPO in February. Internap and Rackable, which have seen their share prices retreat after strong gains in 2006, join the publicly-held CDNs in the deep red.
Just for fun
God & Opsware …
God was deciding whether whether opsware should go to hell or heaven:
God> why do you deserve heaven?
Opsware> I helped mankind by reducing the amount of work they do
God> did you cause pain and suffering
Opsware> Some, but mostly to help
God> were you faithful to your spouse
Opsware> i had many suitors, but I was faithful to HP
God> Did you have any enemies
Opsware> only one, Bladelogic
God> did you help your friends
Opsware> yes I did, some like Solidcore, more than others
God> Were you good to your parents
Opsware> I took care of Mr. Andreessen
God> OK. anything else before I announce my decision
Opsware> If i went to hell, they would become too powerful, you wouldnt want that
God> yes, but if I sent you to heaven they would become lazy because you will do all their work for them
Opsware> that is true, i am really good at reducing work
God> well its done then, I am not ready for you, go and serve mankind
BMC is very intelligently piecing things together!
Posted by on 10 Oct 2007 at 07:51 pm | Tagged as: BMC, RealOps, Opsware, BladeLogic, CA, IBM, HP, Symantec, EMC, Peregrine, Remedy, Micromuse, ESM, Opalis, Marimba, iConclude, Emprisa, Voyence, AlterPoint, Intelliden
Remedy then Marimba then their Topology Discovery product (which I’m not sure but may have come from a portion of their Perform acquisition), then RealOps and now Emprisa. Impressive!
BMC has very nicely pieced together a great Data Center Automation or Configuration & Change Management (CCM) offering (depending on how you want to define DCA). Remedy ($350M acquisition in 2002) & Marimba ($240M acquisition in 2004) offer the customer base available for up-sell and the foundation components of process management and system/application configuration/change management. RealOps & Emprisa offer fresh new technologies and approaches. RealOps with innovative process automation and Emprisa with the network (e.g., routers, switch) parallel to Marimba. A very smart buy here on Emprisa as I’m sure it was a “value” purchase, where AlterPoint & Voyence have more mindshare and customers (e.g., this equals higher buyout cost) – Emprisa probably was behind in capabilities – but not far enough behind where it would matter for the price.
BMC in my eyes is the second to pull together the key components to deliver on the hybrid Data Center Automation vision for Configuration & Change Management. Hybrid meaning you must have the products to handle the manual processes bundled and integrated with the products that over time will deliver the promise of automating many of those tasks. A key missing link to this was the RealOps solution. Also, having nothing for the unique “network-side” of the world (it’s more then just a cloud) was a big hole that is now filled. The only question I still have outstanding is if Marimba will be strong enough to compete against Opsware (now HP) and whoever buys BladeLogic (who will be expecting a pretty penny to be purchased as I mentioned in my recent Data Center Automation is Hot post). Marimba has historically been dated in capability comparison to Opsware & Bladelogic.
HP was first to pull everything they needed together but at a significant price as they had to purchase Peregrine ($425M) and Opsware ($1.6B) to take the place of their last effort that didn’t mature as they had hoped (e.g., Service Desk (PROLIN acquisition from 1997), Novidigm and Consera). So while HP has pulled it together a cool $2B, BMC has done it for under $1B. Considering how big the data center dependent buzz of web 2.0, and virtualization is getting I think that is money very well spent.
IBM, CA and EMC are still missing key components. IBM has the service desk & asset management components from their MRO software acquisition, the dependency discovery & mapping automation with the Collation acquisition. They also have something that may be able to compete against the RealOps (now BMC) or iConclude (now HP) if applied properly. I’m speaking of the former ThinkDynamic acquisitions which was well ahead of it’s time. The only things I see them missing is they for sure have an overly outdated application/system product so they are most likely candidate (a.k.a. have the greatest need) to purchase BladeLogic. They also have a hole in the network side (e.g, AlterPoint, Intelliden or Voyence) of the world as Micromuse didn’t really have anything to handle the network side of CCM.
EMC has it’s toes at the edge of getting into this mix with their acquisitions of nLayers and SMARTS. They have to be very, very tempted to jump in – but in doing so I’m sure they realize they are missing quite a few pieces. Unless they go grab BladeLogic, Opalis and either Voyence or AlterPoint. I have to image they really want to with all the data center emphasis in the company around storage management and of course the success and upside of virtualization and VMware.
Same goes with Symantec who has snagged Relicore and now Altiris. Unfortunately I think they are just to focused on security and aren’t giving the necessary focus & energy to automating the data center. I get the impression the Altiris buy was more for end-point security then application/systems configuration and change management. It’s to bad, they are so close to being a force to recon with considering all the former Veritas Storage products. They could really own the data center if they wanted to. At this point, their best bet to do that would be to go and buy BMC. This is not to crazy a thought in BMC has a market capitalization about 33% of Symantec’s. It would be a big bet, but it comes down to how serious are they about owning (or being a big player) in the data center!
While on this topic of making bets, a more likely scenario could be EMC grabbing BMC if they decide they want to rule the data center. They have all the pieces and BMC is only about 15% of their market cap. It would provide almost all the missing pieces AND access to legacy data center management capabilities (e.g., mainframe)
Alright, off my soapbox. It’s just exciting to see all the action within the Configuration & Change Management space, specifically within the Data Center. So much attention over the past 10 years has been on monitoring (e.g., availability & performance). The value of automating repetitive change tasks or mundane tasks is tremendous. And the thought of someday tying all this together – availability/performance to configuration/change equals those utopian dreams of utility, adaptive, on-demand computing! We are still many moons away from the “lights out data center” being a reality but we must continue to dream. In the meantime it’s fun to keep speculating on what everyone will do next, just as I started doing a couple months ago in my post Who will become the next big 4 vendor replacing BMC, CA, HP, IBM, oh the fun!
Recommended Reading: So what about Tripwire, Configuresoft, Ecora, Active Reasoning, Solidcore?
So what about Tripwire, Configuresoft, Ecora, Active Reasoning, Solidcore?
Posted by on 24 Oct 2007 at 10:38 pm | Tagged as: BMC, Opsware, BladeLogic, HP, EMC, Emprisa, Voyence, AlterPoint, Intelliden, Configuresoft, Lumension, Shavlik, Bigfix
Based on some of my recent postings I’ve had some comments and questions come in about these type of vendors. Great question…first up, what are these vendors’ “type.”
These vendors carefully watch a resource (e.g., system, application, network device) for a configuration changes, tracks new vs. older configurations and continuously watches them through established rules, called policies. This is what they excel at, but they also offer various level of configuration change automation. So this is where things get sticky…are they a direct competitor to Opsware or BladeLogic?
Opsware and BladeLogic have a the same capabilities but from my experience their primary focus is that second half of the equation (configuration & provisioning automation) with a secondary or even lower focus on change tracking/monitoring.
So what’s very interesting here is when you look at a base functionality checklist all these vendors for systems/applications/network configuration & change automation/monitoring (aka Data Center Automation) can checkmark the same boxes. The devil is in the details around what type of use cases you wish to solve.
If your primary use case is around automation to streamline and automate the deployment, provisioning, turn-up, turn-down, etc of new applications, databases, operating systems, network services then Opsware, BladeLogic and maybe ConfigureSoft would be the way to go.
If your primary use case is around automated monitoring, tracking, reporting down to very, very specific use cases when a file system, registry setting, network configuration, etc has changed then Tripwire, ConfigureSoft, Ecora, Active Reasoning, Solidcore are probably better choices.
Now it gets trickier then this. It also depends on:
* Size of company (e.g., how big, how many times you need to do something)
* Type of company (e.g., web based vs. brick & mortor vs. telecommunications)
* Geographical distribution (e.g., are you regional, national, semi-global, global
So I guess the point to make here to Enterprises that may be reading this. If you looking for Data Center Automation or more generically IT Infrastructure Management Automation solutions you should figure out your top 5 use cases you hope to solve with automation software then select 3 vendor to talk through how they solve those use cases.
Now one last thing to consider before picking which vendors to engage. If network device automation is important to you Opsware must be on your short list but BladgeLogic or ConfigureSoft won’t be. Meanwhile, Tripwire, Ecora, Solidcore and Active Reasoning all have some capabilities here but depending on how important the network is to the overall project may merit you having to look at two vendors solving the entire problem (if you don’t go with Opsware). To cover the network, depending on how in-depth your use cases are, you may need to look at AlterPoint, Voyence, Intelliden or Emprisa (now part of BMC).
Another consideration is how involved will the security group be in this project and what are their use cases. Of all the vendors ConfigureSoft has some of the best capabilities related to understanding the challenges of security patch & configuration automation and monitoring/auditing. But this muddies the waters even more since if your taking a more security edge now you also have to think about looking at Lumension (former Patchlink), Shavlik and Bigfix.
Oh the complex web we weave…so let me state it again…before you start evaluating a single vendor, do them and yourself a favor. Figure out what are the primary use cases you need to solve, how much money they could save you (this helps prioritize them), determine which organization(s) are going to pay for the solution (most likely their use cases will get weighted higher) and finally engage based on previous guidance. There is no silver bullet here where I can say one vendor is best fit for everyone…the honest truth is each vendor has their appropriate strengths & weaknesses. One way to learn more about what use cases have driven them to this point is ask for a references in your industry or similar type and for someone within that company in a comparable job role or organization structure (e.g. if your a security guy don’t talk to a network engineer).
At the end of the day configuration change automation & provisioning, configuration change tracking and monitoring and security-related patching and monitoring are all important and needed….it comes down to what your group, company needs now.
Meanwhile, IBM, EMC may also want to take a look at some of these other vendors to help them better compete against the HP & BMC moves made recently.
