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 the 'BSM' Category
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.”
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!
An assessment report from Yphise Software Assessment on BSM market. Yphise is committed to providing IT Executives and Managers with the best independent research on methods and solutions to optimize IT cost, value and risk. Yphise research results from an open and operational framework of practices aimed at measuring and improving IT efficiency according to the requirements of large companies.
SLM Acceptance 2007
share a report on SLM
SLM Acceptance 2007 An Annual Enterprise Management Associates Assessment August 2007
http://justinche.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/2007-08-ema-slm-acceptance-2007.pdf
share a paper released by Forrester Research.
The SLM/BSM Software Market
Which Services Must Be Managed: Those Of IT Or Those Of The Business?
EXECUTIVES UMMARY
The service management software market is a growth segment within the IT management software
market, thanks to interest in converting IT operations into a services-centric organization and
resulting investments in process automation and service catalog development and reporting. While
most enterprises are still in this transition phase, the goalposts have moved from the measurement
and reporting of IT services to an emphasis on business services and metrics. Successful service-level
management (SLM)/business service management (BSM) vendors should educate their customers about
this trend and provide solutions that enable their customers to report and prove the true business value
of their services.
http://justinche.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/2007-0907-forrester-slm-bsm-market.pdf
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