The State of ESM in 2009

With our feet now firmly in the year 2009 it's time for a look back - way back - to see where we've come from. I like to use a looking back segment like this as a checkpoint on our way as an industry, as organisations, and as individuals, to see if we're on target with our goals we set.

ESM has matured in the past few years with the popular adoption of ITIL/ITSM to move from Enterprise Server Management, to Enterprise Systems Management, and today; Enterprise Service Management. My opinion is that we're on track here at the highest levels and intentions of ESM because the understanding and adoption of ITIL/ITSM principles into ESM gets us where we've always intended to be - managing and monitoring the services that our IT infrastructure provides to our various customer groups.

The challenge is that the software developers providing ESM software solution have gone off in three directions; one group moving too quickly toward monstrous "ideal" solutions, another focusing on very niche solutions, and the third (where I think they have it right) scoping out existing & proven point solutions to become more mature and process-oriented products.

It's always interesting to me that the big software manufacturers and Gartner (et al) feel that they are setting the direction for ESM through their acquisitions and marketing. The reality is that a lot of what they are providing is just irrelevant for 90% of the organisations trying to put an efficient ESM solution in place. It's great stuff for that top ten percent of customers who are process-mature and cash rich. But for the rest of us, we need more focus on the practical and less on where those in their ivory towers feel that the industry should be heading.

From my experience, most people are still just trying to get ESM right, and get it to fit into their processes. The tools, people, and processes (of course) must go hand-in-hand - but just like you need the right number of people (not too many, and with the right skills) and processes that are tailored to fit the way your organisation operates, you need ESM applications (the tools) that fit the people and processes. Ideally you start with the processes that fit the vision; get the right people the skills they need, and then find the right tools. There are SO MANY choices for ESm products these days that doing the tools last shouldn't be a problem, yet, ironically, it seems so often to be the starting position.

Another gap I've found with the ESM industry in 2009 is that there's a lack of information out there on trends in network management. It's not sexy anymore so it's become the red-headed step child of ESM. More's the pity because it's still a critical aspect and great starting point.

With all the hoopla and focus on (not undeserved, but distracting) ITIL, ITSM, and the federated, unified, CMDB attention has been diverted from interesting things that have been going on in the OpenSource ESM world.

Upcoming ITManageCast posts are going to focus on these areas: trends in network management and trends in open source ESM.

Have a fantastic summer.

HPSW - Part 3 - The Software Announcements

HP had three main announcements they were using Wednesday's mainstage session to make:

1. Application Lifecycle: The enhanced integration and development in the Portfolio, Requirements, and Quality products, providing for the ability to manage the application lifecycle from start through to go-live. Maybe I missed a memo, but I didn't think that this was so new to HP Software?
2. The Release Control product, and the claim that it helps with automating operations, and ties into that federated configuration management system; uCMDB. More detail around these includes that the tools have been revisited to accord with ITIL v3 in the sense of federating a Configuration Management System instead of gathering & replicating the config items across several barely linked data-stores. This is far more interesting of an announcement to me (as is the third one discussed subsequently) particularly with the time I have been putting into investigating vendor-based federated CMDBs and the mechanisms used to populate them.
3. Virtualization: HP announced that they have been working tightly with vmware to create better management & operation of virtual environments. This was interestingly reflected on the show floor later . An increasing number of software partners are flogging integrated or at least somewhat coupled virtualization-oriented offerings that connect one way or another to the HP Software Suite. Most offerings are around the management of your virtualized infrastructure or the leveraging of virtualization for the development and quality processes.
   

CMDBs Out of the Box

I've started to evaluate the software CMDB solutions from various vendors - HP, BMC, and IBM to start with. I'll be posting the findings of my research as I go along, but certainly welcome any feedback or input from those of you who may be looking at these products as well, or in fact may have already obtained/installed one.

The products I'm looking at in particular are:

• HP Software uCMDB
• BMC Atrium
• IBM Tivoli Asset Management

Stay tuned for upcoming posts on my research into these, including the hands-on lab work I complete.

Greening Your IT - Power Savings & ROI

Everyone wants to be responsible about their energy consumption, and while from a corporate perspective, it looks great in press releases and marketing materials, it's a hard direction to move in if you can't justify the expense in an objective manner.

So how do you establish the actual return on investment for your energy optimization projects?

The most obvious method, and the best place to start, is by having an objective baseline of your current energy costs related to IT. Make sure not just to include desktop computers and monitors, but any associated peripherals. Include the networked and personal printers. Include the Blackberries and cellphones because of their chargers. How about scanners? Air-conditioning? UPS and power management systems also have a draw and should be measured. Network gear, KVM switches, and the list can go on. For an extensive list contact Tsunami.ca for our whitepaper on Green IT. This audit can take some time (and therefore money), particularly if you don't have a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) in place already.

Incidentally, if you do have a CMDB, or are currently undertaking a CMDB project, have you included energy consumption rates as a CI (Configuration Item)? It's worth thinking about...

Once you have your baseline, you can now consider what initiatives your organization may undertake. Budget the cost of implementing those items, processes, or technologies (and are those costs that can be partially absorbed by budgets other than IT? ) and look at the energy reduction rates to calculate the initial, high-level ROI for the project.

But there's other ways to reduce those costs. In the Province of BC, BC Hydro has joint rebate programs with the Provincial Government that can make significant additions to your ROI calculations. If you are reading this from a location other than British Columbia the odds are that some similar rebates may be available for you as well.

Volunteering - Part 2

Wow, I'm bad at updating this blog. :-) That's got to be annoying for the 2 people who read it.
On the plus side, there's lots to talk about now.
The CSI:Vancouver conference is moving along for May, and just this past weekend the Program team (which I'm on) finished up the conference sessions. We've got a fantastic group of speakers ranging from international ITIL experts to local (BC) organizations who are willing to share their experiences with everyone else.
This week I'm out of town in New Orleans at the HP Partner Galaxy event (post to come on that!) so I'll have some cycles in my evening to work on ITManageCast.

At the same time, I've been working with some folks from Vivit (the former OpenView Forum International, HP Software users group) to put together sessions for this summers HP Software Universe in Las Vegas. We've got some great speakers lined up for those sessions which is great.

Back to CSI:Vancouver & itSMF Canada. With the speaker selection completed, and us having decided the order in which we want all the speakers, we now have sent out all the speaker agreements. Assuming that everyone agrees, and that there are no last minute cancellations we'll be good to go! No-one ever said this was going to be easy! Wait a minute, I think I did in my last post. D'Oh!

Well, the next steps are to get the presentation slide-deck template out to all the speakers, and get them to send us their slide-decks for their presentations. That way, we get to both review those, but also to make sure that the speakers are keeping on track and will be ready. So once that gets underway I'll update the blog with the results!

Managing Your Heterogeneous Environment - Part the First

What is a heterogeneous environment? Well, what it's not is a the place where a really smart straight guy lives. What I'm getting at is really every IT shop. You may say "Hey, we only run Windows" or "Dude, we're purely SUSE here" but stop for a moment and consider those switches, routers, and UPS' in your IT shop. Are they Microsoft? Novell? Yeah, didn't think so.

So what we've established at this time is that we all work in heterogeneous IT environments. And quite likely, certain aspects of them are managed. Probably quite well (I'm not making the assumption that you can't do your job). But what's the big picture? Are you viewing things as storage, servers, networks, applications, et al and each a world unto itself? This is quite likely the situation.

So back tracking again, we've got our IT shop made up of bits and pieces from various vendors, all working together to deliver some sort of service to our end-users. Now we want to manage the whole shooting match. Get all the system stats, performance data, and alarms into one consistent view.

Well, if you go to any of the tier one vendors, they'll tell you this is simple. "Buy our product, some consulting hours, and you're done." You're done alright. You can have the consultants come in and roll out a great solution, that works for the first few weeks. What you really need in place first to underpin this architecture and provide long-term valuable metrics on your heterogeneous IT environment is a baseline, strategy, and process. Tools can come later, and with the toolsets on the market today, can be largely interchangeable & interconnecting. That's not in any way to dismiss the amount of work it takes to set up the tools correctly in the first place, that IS a lot of work.

What I want to stress here is that managing a mixed IT environment; managing all of your systems components; having that BIG picture of IT service delivery needs a good baseline/audit of what's in place today, a top-down strategy going forward, and processes that work with your people & business practises.

ITIL Version 3 - Beat the Rush?

I've been asked recently "What should I do about ITIL version 3?" My first answer is "What did you do about ITIL version 2?" If you've already started down the service improvement path based on version 2 then I would strongly advise not trying to hold any of that work up while researching the delta between 2 and 3. If you have never really considered any kind of ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) work before now then it's probably best if you start with some foundations (or, more formally, "ITIL Foundations") learning and take things from there. Not a lot of education vendors are offering ITIL V3 Foundations courses, the bulk of them are V2 based, but if you're at the point of just getting started either is of enormous benefit.

If you have the time, check into vendors offering a delta course; there are several decent ones available. Better yet, check in with your local itSMF chapter and see what's cooking there. Many of them partner with education providers in your area for member discounts on ITIL v3 upgrade courses, or put on local branch meetings featuring speakers on that topic.

So, "what should I do about ITIL v3" is best answered by taking a look at where you are on the ITIL path today, and where you are planning on being in the next two months. It also matters how much you already know about ITIL. To break into a few simple scenarios...

1. If you are ITIL savvy, and your organization is already underway with an ITIL-oriented service improvement strategy, you should be educated on the changes in v3 and how they can assist with the work underway. Beware the urge to stop any active work; because in my opinion none of the changes are so dramatic that you should rethink any major initiatives.

2. If you are new to ITIL & the concepts therein, and your organization has service improvement initiatives underway, then don't worry about v3 right now - if you have an opportunity to learn more about it, great, take advantage of that. But otherwise don't panic!

3. Assuming you are ITIL savvy but there are no organizational ITIL-oriented initiatives underway, then definitely invest some time in researching and learning about the changes in v3. It is likely they will help in the planning for any initiatives that may be upcoming.

4. Lastly, if you are "ITIL-ignorant" and the organization has no ITSM work planned or afoot, start with an education on ITIL Foundations. If it is inclusive of V3, great, but if it's only V2 based that is not an issue to be concerned about at this time. Get your feet under you first!