What about BSM?

Mon, 05 May 2008 03:55:00 GMT

What about BSM? I’ve had a few persons asking where the BSM blog is. If you are like me, it’s been quite a challenge keeping up with the definitions in the Industry these last few years. Take the industry’s twists and then talk to several customers that have been blasted by vendor interpretations and you’ll even be more confused.

Last year Quest purchased Magnum Technologies and almost immediately we had integrated the two products. This created a solution that customers could use to gather low-level technical metrics and alarms and then, using internal models, seamlessly roll up those details to higher level services that the application owners could use to measure IT’s positive effects on the business. This was our BSM solution.

Quest is company that has always focused on building and supporting great products that truly help our customers move forward. We spend more in R&D and less in Marketing than most software companies because we feel that great products speak for themselves. Unfortunately when markets are being defined, it’s generally the loudest voices that do the defining. Over the last 18 months we’ve seen the definition of BSM shift significantly to a point where, today, it encompasses the entire IT Lifecycle, I.e. service desk, CMDB, the various ITIL disciplines, availability, performance, run book automation, etc... I doubt we’ll ever see an agreed upon definition of BSM.

In speaking to our customers one thing has become clear – this mega-BSM definition is just too big, too complex, and too difficult to reliably implement. Customers have told us their actually scared of what BSM may mean to the IT systems and processes that they’ve built up over the past 20 years. So we’re offering them a pragmatic approach to BSM. The goal is rapid time-to-value: IT is the backbone of many businesses and taking two years out to completely retool every system and process in IT just isn’t a realistic option. So we’re seeing an emerging division in the market:

1) IT lifecycle process automation which seeks to use a suite of service desk, CMDB, event console and other tools in combination with large-scale process changes to create an ERP for IT

2) IT performance dashboards and service level management which aims at time-to-value by leveraging currently effective IT services and processes and augmenting them with improved measures, policies and a greater ability to get real time and historical information on how those services and processes are working. Customers use this information to laser-target those areas of IT which require more substantial changes.

Quest has a long standing leader position as an application management vendor. Our expertise is in the instrumentation and measurement of the applications and their supporting infrastructures (databases, operating systems, virtualization servers, network and user interactions). The natural next step is building on that foundation of expertise with the goal of linking IT to the business via operational and business reporting and dashboards. This linkage has been created yet another term in the Industry, Business Service Level Management (BSLM).

In my next posting I will drill down on SLM and discuss what it is, and why it’s the cornerstone for a pragmatic approach to IT and Business alignment. See you then.