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
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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