Published: May 18 2009, 11:16 AM | no comments
by Pam Snaith

A lean economy creates difficult choices for IT departments. Customers, forced to do more with fewer resources, are demanding greater economies of scale. We see IT managers grapple every day with the challenge of ensuring the health of the services their businesses depend on while keeping the cost of service delivery down. Is it possible for IT departments to achieve optimal results and greater economies of scale while lowering the cost of service delivery? Business and economic realities are telling us - and our customers - that we have to.

The hard reality is that as business challenges mount, the quality of business services must as well - now is not the time to lower expectations for service delivery. With less buying power in the market, it's important to ensure your customers continue to value your services. But you have to be smart about where and how you spend your resources, knowing you have to accelerate your time-to-value and achieve a rapid payback and continuous ROI.

We see customers embracing new solutions that put them ahead of the curve, let them manage technologies top-down according to the services they provide and proactively address issues before they impact their business services. This kind of proactive approach requires service-centric visibility that gives the "heads up" needed to avert developing IT issues that present risk to service delivery and the insight needed to quickly fix issues and regain service quality when it is compromised. A service-centric approach to IT management with keen visibility into service quality impact and risk enables IT to maintain a robust infrastructure that results in significant business benefits that are rewarding for everyone - end users and providers:

• Compliance with OLAs/SLAs
• Faster MTTR (mean time to repair)
• Elimination of unproductive troubleshooting for lower OPEX and increased IT staff productivity
• Greater insight for capacity planning and capital investment decision-making

The bottom line is that with a better view of its services, IT can improve service quality while operating more efficiently as a lean organization. To learn more about the challenges a lean economy presents and strategies you can employ to meet these challenges more effectively, take a look at: Innovations in Managing IT Service Quality: Managing Service Quality and Risk to Service Delivery in a Lean Economy.

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Published: May 12 2009, 10:57 AM | 4 Comment(s)
by Bill Ahlstrom

It's the best of times; it's the worst of times  according to representatives of service providers the world over who met last week at TM Forum Management World in Nice, France. They came to assess not only the current recession but also the changes sweeping through the industry, challenging old -- and holding out promise for new -- business models.

Two main themes were pervasive:  managed services of all kinds, and "cloud".

Roger Pilc moderated a well-attended panel session on cloud computing that included senior representatives from BT, Amazon, Microsoft and VMWare.  Roger kicked off the discussion by drawing a parallel between the "network cloud" of the 1990s that morphed into the IP-everywhere environment spawned by the Internet and the World Wide Web, and the current focus on "cloud" environments that presage "computing everywhere" environments where applications and computing resources are easily and cheaply available "on-demand" from multiple sorts of end-user devices.

J P Rangaswami, BT's Managing Director of Strategy and Innovation, quickly picked up this theme and reminded everyone that "clouds" are already delivering applications as SaaS, with consumers attracted by simplicity and convenience of the services.  Small and medium enterprises are attracted by the ability to use large-scale computing resources at inexpensive pay-as-you go pricing and no need for large capital spending.  Large enterprises are experimenting with all sorts of "cloud" services, ranging from common ones like SalesForce.com, to prototyping and application development and testing.  They, too, are attracted by low-cost utility pricing, but lurking fears of data security and privacy issues impede a rush.  And many enterprise applications require re-architecting, as their behavior in clouds will be different from that in internal data centers.

Virtualized data centers, in effect, are internal or private clouds, while those offered by Amazon or Microsoft are external in the sense they are not under an enterprise's direct control.  Hence the concerns about data security and privacy.

In a keynote address earlier in the week, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels had provocatively challenged attendees to rethink all their assumptions about data centers and computing.  Using Amazon EC2 customer examples, he noted that a user can bring up and provision server resources in a cloud-provided environment in as little as 2-3 minutes, while in a large enterprise environment it may take as long as 6-7 weeks.  But perhaps more importantly, the cloud-based server can be released in a single minute, where in an enterprise environment it may never be released.  With many heads nodding agreement, Vogels concluded:  "The business, cost and operational advantages of the cloud far outweigh all the disadvantages."

In many of the formal sessions and countless informal discussions with senior execs from SPs all over the world, cloud and managed services themes were related.  Echoing the "worst of times" theme, a senior European SP executive noted that "the problem for incumbent operators is their incumbency."  With other more agile providers able to innovate rapidly and experiment with new services and let the market quickly decide winners and losers, many traditional providers are hampered by the weight of their legacy services and unable to keep up.  In this environment, a range of "cloud-based" services seems compelling because "it's all about creating new markets with new services that are attractive to new audiences."  Google applications and the Apple iPhone application development and distribution network were cited multiple times in this context.  An executive from outside the SP industry laid down a clear challenge:  "Your (SP) future will be based on the relevance of your services  --  not bundle pricing!"

It's in that context that SPs are considering what sorts of hosted apps could be offered on SP platforms as managed services.  And some SPs are considering offering "pure cloud" computing services, whether bundled with apps or not, and still others considering extensive cloud computing offers as part of their outsourcing business models.

And so we return to Roger's image of two clouds:  The Internet cloud of the 1990s, and the "new cloud" we are now beginning to understand.

Eric Pulier, a serial entrepreneur and current CEO of ServiceMesh, is  marshalling an impressive consortium of global enterprises and financials to focus on business models and standards that will enable the extension of interoperable cloud services reliably and rapidly.  He argues that cloud computing is driving everything toward an "a la carte menu with elastic capacity," embracing infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, and application development and test as a service.  In his view, IT groups will morph into Platform Services Groups, buying and providing everything as a service.  Cloud empowers diverse users, with access to unlimited suites of applications, supported by Internet-linked federations of developers.  This, he believes, will feed a firestorm of creativity and agility unlike anything seen before - even more than the wave of creativity spawned by the Internet itself.

For SPs and enterprises alike, cloud-based services offer new ways of rapidly prototyping, developing, testing, deploying, and taking to market new services while limiting costs.

There was considerable interest in CA's virtualization and cloud initiatives, and what CA can do in managed services and virtualized environments.  As we follow up with customers and partners, CA's role in these two interlinked major trends will become both clearer, and more important. 

Well worth watching, the TMW keynotes are at:  http://www.tmforum.org/KeynoteSpeakers/6730/home.html?catid=6730.

The video of Roger's cloud panel will be posted as soon as it's available from TMF.

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Published: May 11 2009, 09:00 AM | no comments
by Stephen Elliot

Most of our customer discussions surround how we can lower costs for customers, enable them to be more efficient, and help them deliver more services at higher quality.  Customers recognize that it's not just technology, but people, processes, and technology that is the winning recipe for business success. 

What we are starting to see in many of our accounts is the evolution of this statement, notably how the codifying or encapsulation of run book processes are encoded into our technology management solutions.  For example, many customers using CA Spectrum Automation Manager are planning to reduce the costs of application release management, from testing and staging to production deployment.  Many of these customers are excited that CA is innovating with virtualization management in mind as more and more applications are becoming virtualized.  CA Spectrum Automation Manager, which manages physical and virtual infrastructures, integrates with VMware Stage Manager, enabling the automation of change, configuration, and release management processes.  By encapsulating these processes into the product's engine, customers can execute agreed upon processes automatically, triggering an action to remediate a problem that might cause business interruption.  This automation has customers excited that CA is delivering business outcomes for them. 

Many of our customers are using ITILv2 as their process standard methodology.  The most common processes standardized are problem, change, incident, and configuration management.  Release management is surging in adoption as customers realize the gains and business value of early ITIL successes.  What's interesting is the recent surge in interest in ITILv3 that essentially evolves the process discussion from the definition and building blocks, to the business impact and end-to-end service perspective.  We believe this is a by-product of the rise and deployment of virtualization. 

As automation and process integration start to show business outcomes, we are entering a perfect storm for IT to become the utopian profit center.  While this evolution will take many years, it's important to recognize that measuring the business and technology metrics will help establish the business case for future technology purchases that enable process and technology integrations.  With proper planning, IT will deliver well beyond cost reduction and containment, to driving and being the core delivery system for any company's business strategy.

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