Posts tagged ‘BSM’
Cloud Requires a New IT Employee (Hint: MBA May Be Required)
We've come a long way since the IBM 3270. Or have we?
By Russell Rothstein
December 6, 2010
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
Cloud computing is heralding the most significant shift in IT skill sets since we displaced the armies of punch card operators with the IBM 3270. Cloud is a realization of utility computing, where whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand. As Gartner says in a recent report, private cloud services “will require a cultural and political change inside of IT to see the role of operations move to being more proactive — requiring predefined policies, service levels and automated actions to take on the runtime environment, as opposed to the manual initiation of scripts or workflows. This requires very different skills over time — a shift away from rote work toward more planning, service analysis and a better understanding of service users in order to continually improve how the service is ultimately delivered.” (Source: Gartner “Key Considerations in the Development of a Private Cloud Architecture”, August 23, 2010).
The key phrase used by Gartner is that IT personnel will require “a better understanding of service users”, which means a better understanding the business which is what’s driving the users to consume those IT services. In essence, cloud will necessitate IT to be more business focused. We have been talking about Business/IT alignment for too long now without sufficient progress; with the emergence of cloud models, this is no longer a choice – either IT upgrades to a business-centric service delivery function, or is ultimately to be replaced by outsourced cloud service providers that can provide utility computing services with greater cost efficiencies. That’s why Business Transaction Management, or BTM, must be at the center of your cloud management capabilities, in order to effectively plan for and manage cloud services from a business perspective. In an upcoming blog post, we’ll get the opinions from CIOs in the industry to understand their plans to address this rapidly changing environment.
To close up, it’s interesting to understand the new roles in IT that Gartner sees as emerging in order to support the delivery of new private cloud services:
- Cloud service architect (new role): Designs and documents the end-to-end cloud platform
- Portal developer: Develops interfaces that cloud consumers use to requisition services
- Workflow specialist: Defines requirements for instantiating automated processes
- Configuration management specialist: Develops consistent packaging and policy-conflict-free service deployment methods
We trust you are already filling these roles in your IT organization. And while these may not be the best the job in the world, but they most certainly beat a career as a roustabout.
December 6, 2010 at 3:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
Building a next generation BTM UI
by Anonymous, 20th April 2010.
It’s the day after we put the finishing touches to a brand new BTM UI and I feel like I’ve gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s true what they say though, No Pain No Gain. I’ve been on the ropes, been knocked down several times but like Elton John says “I’m still standing”. A new baby is born and its certainly not an ugly one. I am expecting a few tears though when our field organization and customers gets their hands on it and start to shake it for the first time.
To be precise or wily it’s taken 18 months, 125 pages, 50+ detailed designs, 65 flights (most to Tel Aviv), 50+ customer meetings/webex’s, thousands of emails, hundreds of arguments, thousands of beers (5 beers per argument) and a good few hundred bugs. All for the sake of Business Transaction Management. Has it been worth it? Absolutely.
About 18 months ago OpTier made a decision to build a next generation BTM user interface. It was becoming increasingly clear from customers and prospects that the value of BTM touched many stakeholders in the business and IT. Our previous GUI was more focused towards the technical audience being application support teams and application developers. When you track all transactions across all tiers all of the time and provide response time, SLA and resource consumption metrics by Application, Transaction, User, Location and Tiers you end up collecting a lot of valuable information. The problem is how do you show all this information to the right user in the right context? What is relevant for an application owner isn’t always relevant for an application support team or a capacity planner. Showing a technical view to a business stakeholder is like an English person receiving an Hebrew menu in an Israeli restaurant (not good when you’re hungry). Therefore one of the first decisions we made was to make our BTM GUI role based so we could support a variety of users and use cases. Simply put, a user logs in and is presented with a series of “activities” relevant to their role. Each activity (e.g. problem isolation) has a series of tailored views which allows the user to perform that activity using information which is only relevant to that user. For example, a business user is typically interested in business transaction volume, activity and SLA compliance – they don’t really care about CPU usage, tier chattiness or how many I/O operations happen when a business transaction is executed.
The second key decision we made was to make the GUI extensible from both an architecture and user perspective. It’s obviously good to provide out of the box roles, activities and views for our customers. However, the needs of every customer and user is different no matter how hard you try to support every use case. Therefore users can simply create their own roles, activities and views to make BTM information more relevant to them incorporating their own context, terminology and processes. With 13 dimensions (application, transaction, users, locations, tiers, …), 100+ available metrics, 3 working modes, 10 different visualizations (table, charts, clouds, GoogleMaps, …) and a slick graphic design built on top of Flex technology the possibilities to our users are now endless. In the current beta release we support 10 BTM activities with over 75 different BTM views, if users want something different they can go right ahead and create whatever activity and view they wish. Over the next 18 months we’ll be adding more dimensions, metrics and visualization that will help customers truly manage IT from a business perspective, the future is bright.
The last key decision was to outsource the whole usability and graphic design aspects of our GUI. OpTier specializes in tracking transactions across tiers, it does not specialize in designing user interfaces. BTM is our business, usability is someone else’s business (Puzzlehead in this case). I can tell you right now though usability is a political hot potato. Get 2 people in the same room and you’ll get two different opinions on what is intuitive, get 25 people in the room and you’ll get 25 different opinions. You’d be surprised how many times I heard the words “When I used to develop GUI we did it like this…”. As Einstein once said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. When you work with a usability company you’re implicitly trusting them to do the right thing based on your inputs and feedback. Unless your open minded with usability experts you’ll always look to the past instead of looking into the future. What was relevant 10 years ago in GUI might not be relevant in 2010. GUI from my perspective is more art than science, it has to capture the imagination and invite the user to play. Larry Ellison once said “When you innovate you’ve got to be prepared for people to tell you you’re crazy.”
Like anything which is brand new though, we’ll have our issues. I’m not naïve enough to think that our new GUI will be perfect from day one, it’s a significant improvement and departure from our existing GUI. We’ll be able to show more value than we could have possibly imagined 18 months ago with our previous GUI. Our users can access BTM value in a single click depending on what they are trying to accomplish. You want to see your application CPU consumption over time? Click on this view. You want to understand the business impact of the release you’ve just released to production? Click on this view. You want to see the individual transactions user X executed? Click on this view.
I see this GUI as the start of something new and exciting rather than the end of just another GUI project. GUI’s should evolve and provide users with something fresh, unique and exciting. Innovation isn’t about standing back and admiring what you’ve delivered in the past, it’s about constantly listening to what your customers want and coming up with killer ideas so you can deliver that competitive edge to your business and your customers business.
Transaction Madness
This article will compare the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament with BSM challenges that are met by Business Transaction Management (BTM).
Continue Reading March 22, 2010 at 6:33 pm Andy Wetzel 2 comments
Virtualized in Vancouver
By Russell Rothstein
February 22, 2010
We’re fascinated by what’s going on in Vancouver this month. Sure, there’s a lot of drama, action and suspense going on over at the Winter Olympics (such as the valiant efforts of the Jamaican Freestyle Skier to be the first to restore the pride of winter sports to his homeland since the 1988 Jamaican Bobsled team) but we’re even more intrigued by the less mesomorphic young singles cross-town in Vancouver engaging their social skills in a flittering party – flirting virtually with one another through the twitter platform.
For those of you not previously familiar with flittering, it means sending a flirtatious tweet to someone that interests you in the room. And while having the option of flirting online is generally a good thing as it provides a new way for people to find their match, it presents a management challenge – keeping up with the fast pace of the tweets and achieving the visibility to link the virtual (witty tweets) with the physical (cute guy or gal – hopefully).
We find these issues remarkably similar to the management challenges companies face when deploying virtualization. While virtualization presents huge benefits in efficiency gains, it also creates three application management challenges:
- Lost Visibility: Applications become more difficult to manage because virtualization masks the underlying infrastructure layers. It becomes difficult to isolate the problematic tier when a problem occurs, or even understand that a problem is starting to occur before users are impacted. Likewise, it is difficult to determine the impact of VM changes on performance.
- Dynamic Environment: If becomes difficult to keep up with speed of changes in virtual infrastructure. As the folks at EMC call it – “VMotion Sickness”. Then when application performance begins to degrade, people tend to first blame the VM administrator, even if the problem lies elsewhere.
- Overprovisioning: Due to lack of visibility, enterprises often overprovision infrastructure in order to assure performance. Overprovisioning physical hosts (e.g. extra CPU) reduces the cost savings of virtualization.
Virtualization-aware Business Transaction Management addresses these challenges. With OpTier BTM you can regain the visibility lost from virtualization, keep up with changing VMs, and rightsize to maximize cost efficiencies. And while that last sentence would fit into a 140-character tweet, we’re not sure it would get us any dates at the next flittering party.
February 22, 2010 at 2:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
Business-IT Alignment: When the Saints Come Marching In?
By Russell Rothstein
February 8, 2010
We are delighted for the residents of greater New Orleans who deserve a celebration after their Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts last night in Super Bowl XLIV. The people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, still recovering from Katrina, have been waiting to take home a Vince Lombardi trophy for the first time since the Saints began to play in 1967.
And while it took the Saints forty-three years to achieve their goals of success, back here in the IT industry it has taken about that long to achieve our version of a Super Bowl win – true business-IT alignment.
There is a lot of talk in the industry about the importance of “aligning IT to business”, “managing IT based on business priorities”, and “monitoring IT infrastructure performance from a business perspective”. The concept of aligning IT with the goals of the business is not new – we’ve been talking about it ever since the first time a computer was used for a business application (by a food manufacturer in the UK!) back in 1950.
Yet, the vendor community has not been able to enable CIOs to meet their goals of B/I alignment. A key factor is that application teams, the folks in IT that liaise with the business and are in the best position to align with their LOB counterparts, are still using infrastructure-based tools to monitor and manage their environment. However, transactions are where IT and the business meet, and only with a transaction-based management approach can IT start to manage services from the business perspective. Business transaction management enables application teams to manage their environment, for the first time, from the perspective of business transactions, rather than from infrastructure metrics. (Many of you will recognize these as the still-unrealized goals of BSM – business service management; see a recent Forrester report on how BTM delivers on the promise of BSM.)
BTM answers the following questions to support B/I alignment:
- Resources: How will moving to the cloud help reduce customer churn or improve employee productivity? What is the business impact of a consolidation project? How will adding new servers or VMs change service levels?
- Process: What is the IT cost per business transaction? Is investment in new infrastructure going towards the most business-critical services? Is business impact factored into decisions for change management and release management?
- Language: Does the LOB care about the performance of silo metrics (e.g. JVM, database) or do they care about the performance of a business transaction — for example, what is the time for a submit order transaction, how long the transaction took to verify the credit card, authorize the user, check inventory, etc., and what will the performance look like when transactions increase by 100%?
Without BTM, you lack the transaction-centric information to answer these questions and are left about as helpless as defending against a Peyton Manning pass. And while the Saints achieved success with 340-pound linemen on their side, all you need is to make the move to BTM.
The Top Ten List of the Decade We Didn’t See on the Net
By Russell Rothstein
January 4, 2010
During the final week of our still-nameless decade (if it won’t be called “the zeros” or “the double-naughts”, we’ll vote for the “pre-teens” or the “naughties”) we spent too much time perusing through a plethora of Top 10listsofthedecade. And while we found much to learn from the fact that the top athlete of the decade is off the endorsement circuit thanks to a poorly placed fire hydrant, our attention was piqued by the selection for the top business application of the decade by CIO magazine senior editor Thomas Wailgum.
As a company that is focused on assuring the performance and availability of business applications, we spend a lot of time thinking about the critical applications that drive business for our customers. So we were intrigued to read that the top business application of the decade was not SAP, not salesforce.com, and not event something bought by Oracle. The winner for business application of the decade was Microsoft Excel. This came to us as an epiphany a few days early this year as Wailgum nailed it on the head by identifying that Excel delivers value in every nook and cranny of an organization. The ongoing success of the application is due not only to its feature set but also to its high availability and performance (as long as your PC is working fine ). As more and more applications, including business productivity applications, get served in the cloud, availability and performance become a greater IT challenge.
What’s even more significant to us is that Excel is one of the few applications that is used on a regular basis to share information (e.g. metrics, KPIs, costs) between IT and the business and enable collaboration between these two groups. Which brings us to the Top 10 list of the decade that we didn’t come across. If we had found a list of the decade’s top unfulfilled strategic IT initiatives, near the top would surely be Business/IT alignment. In fact, alignment with business goals has been at the top of the CIO’s New Year’s resolution list since well before the third millennium began.
Ever since Henderson and Venkatraman’s seminal article in the 1970’s, B/I alignment has been recognized as the holy grail in the IT management industry. We here at OpTier believe that our new decade (“the tens?”, “the teens?”, “the aughts?”) will see huge progress in this area thanks to business transaction management. OpTier pioneered BTM back in 2004 and in the past year we have seen IT managers and industry analysts acknowledge the central role that BTM plays in enabling management of services from a business perspective. At the start of this new year, we are well positioned to extend our technological and market share leadership in the BTM market, and we are committed to enable enterprises in the coming decade to fully align IT with their overall business goals.
Happy 2010!
January 4, 2010 at 8:11 am Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
BTM what is it for me?… really
While on my spinning bicycle in class this early morning on a cool New York day, I was cycling and grooving alon
g on Diana Ross “if there’s a cure for THIS, i don’t want it”….. Being thankful I have time to do things I love. It reminded me of discussion I had with people working in IT multiple times; we IT have it though there is very little time for personal life:
we know our users are complaining, we know we are losing business, we have been trying to identify the issue for days, I am losing credibility, I missed several friends dinner, I work every weekends, I have to leave the office now because I have to jump on a change management conference call while driving with the kids screaming in the back of the car. I have other things on my plate, like launching our new private banking services, budgeting for new servers to address our merger with ABC company, I need to grow my business, we can’t even have a feel on how our services behave nor identifying simple problem such as one out of five times the browser hangs when entering employee badge number. The assumption I made last week on where the problem might have been are now wrong, the change management team applied a patch against that specific application and the problem didn’t go away. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired….
IT experts would say: “I have tools several, several, several, several tools, and it is true after triaging all the alerts, the tools were able to isolate issues but I really just care about what impacted my users in company ABC. What is the behavior of my most revenue generating transactions today and what will it be after we merge the two companies’ systems next week, how would I know if it improves or degrades the overall business service?”Familiar with THIS? What if you would take a peek at introducing Business Transaction Management (BTM) into your IT process?
You would finally see at this moment the IT consumers and IT producers of business transaction information, knowing whom and what is impacted, focusing only on the most important services. What if you knew the exact flow of the information and the behavior of your special revenue generating credit card application transactions? BTM is a source of rich IT information. It is much more than incident management, you can not only understand the current behavior and plan for growing your business you can see the impact on your services of an unplanned or planned change.
This is the cure to resolve the “THIS”, today, tomorrow, next week, on a constantly changing fluid IT environment. Really who could have predicted that you would transact business via text messages? With this information on hand feel free to use those specialized tools and apply them appropriately to isolate granular application components issues but change the way you think about managing IT, It is not always about technical components. Now, I won’t cure all your stress and fatigue as there always be screaming kids, traffic, lines at the coffee shop but one less thing to worry about, getting a little more of your personal life back, one more thing to proudly walk to your management and really feeling good that you know the “THIS” at every moment of the day and I guarantee you will be grooving along a Disco song….
What’s Clear About Net Neutrality
By Russell Rothstein
October 12, 2009
The debate going on in Washington and the blogosphere around Net Neutrality is reaching fever pitch. If you haven’t been following the issue (no doubt due to spending too much time following your local gas station on twitter), it boils down to whether ISPs have the right to control what flows over their pipes or whether Internet users have the right to get unencumbered access to anything out on the Net. We’re especially intrigued by the debate going on in the Network World blogs between Johna Till Johnson and the dynamic duo of Sevcik and Wetzel. (Disclaimer: OpTier is a member of the Apdex alliance led by Peter Sevcik.)
Which brings us to our point that we can’t wait until someone buys the assets of Clear Corporate and restores the service. Clear is the company that created the speedy security lanes in the airport for those of us who hate to stand in long lines. Bidding is currently on to buy Clear’s assets from Morgan Stanley who took possession of the company when it went bust. (Note to our CFO: Don’t use money invested by Morgan Stanley in OpTier to make bid for Clear.)
You may be asking what Net Neutrality has to do with Clear. The answer, of course, is prioritization. Prioritization of data flowing over the network. Priority of people in airport security lines (very busy and important businesspeople, mind you). We here at OpTier think a lot about prioritization – prioritization of troubleshooting activities when outages occur, prioritization of infrastructure spending to maintain service levels, prioritization of virtualization deployments, and in general, prioritization of IT management in order to best support the goals of the business.
We believe prioritization is at the heart of the BTM approach and that’s what sets OpTier apart from the traditional APM vendors, even as they start to talk about business transactions in their pitches. While these vendors are cobbling together a group of silo monitoring tools using correlation techniques, we believe that true BTM means complete visibility into how every single business transaction executes from the end-user across all IT components with a complete breakdown of latency, resource consumption and SLA compliance.
Now that’s even worth waiting in line for.
October 12, 2009 at 8:57 am Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
Another “Less is More” Blog for ITSM and BSM Solutions
I’m jealous and in denial with several of my colleagues at work. It may have the “compare the meerkat” ring tone but my mobile phone was replaced last week with a new model of berry and I have to report I still feel inferior. It’s like I just traded a Porsche Boxster for a Boxster S, sure it’s a nice upgrade but everything is relative and unfortunately everyone around me is driving a 911 Turbo at the moment in the form of an iPhone.
Still, I’m not bitter. I think the introduction and innovation of the iPhone was exactly the kick up the ass that the mobile phone market needed. Think different is what Apple did and I think many IT vendors today should be following the same type of attitude for IT service management solutions. If I rewind the clock back just 5 years I owned a Sony Ericsson phone to make calls, a canon 2MegaPixel camera to take photos, an iPod “brick edition” to listen to music and a Dell laptop (also Brick Edition) to surf the web and do email. Today, I can get all that from an iPhone. The good news according to all my smug friends is that this iPhone thing actually works and is also quite sexy or something. The fact the camera, ipod, phone and browser are all integrated into the handset with an intuitive user interface is what is most impressive. If I owned an iPhone I wouldn’t need to buy 4 products from 4 different vendors.
ITSM & BSM - Lots of pieces integrated but not the picture you expected.
Now try comparing with what I just said against the IT service management landscape today. Customers are buying ten to twenty point products to manage the different functions and components of IT. Most of which were never intended to work with each other from day one and have so many customisations that migrating to new versions is like moving house rather than redecorating the one you already own. Customers buy separate tools to manage end users, networks, servers, JVM’s, CLR’s, databases, storage and that is just a short list. That’s a lot of GUI, in fact that’s a lot of user logins and products to physically deploy, train and support across your IT organisation. And yet so often we hear the words “Less is More” used in conversation and sales pitches despite many vendors being responsible for most of this huge complexity in the first place. The key issue isn’t so much the number of products, it’s the way in which real users can navigate and perform real use cases to exploit the information across multiple products so they can manage IT more effectively. Dashboards in my opinion do not solve this issue, they provide a quick fix and band aid which is often used by a sales team to try and promote “single pane of glass” views and “OOTB integration” yet in reality dashboards often limit navigation and task orientated use cases where you need to go from high level to low level data using a common context.
We announced a new product at OpTier last week which helps customers understand and manage their end user experience. Rather than create a new standalone product we listened to customers right from the start and did what they asked. We built the new product using the same framework we used to build our first product CoreFirst. Customers get all the benefits and features of a new product but they get it without all the drawbacks of buying yet another product to manage their IT services and components. They have a single GUI, a single data repository and a single user login to access both our products. Customers now get visibility of their end user experience with a complete profile of the business transactions that constructed those experiences all in a single click. We hid the technical complexity just like Apple did with the iPhone and on top of the integration we also decided to make the GUI more sexy in the process.
I may not own an iPhone but that doesn’t stop me appreciating what can be learnt from such innovation.
Business Service Management – well what can I say
I’ll be honest “Business Service Management” as a phrase has never sounded exciting for me. It sounds generic, woolly and uses words that generate flashbacks of my university lectures delivered by people with red jumpers and beards. Needless to say I did some digging recently on the internet and was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of information and vendors who have a story in this space. As you might guess the definition of BSM varies, which is ok until you begin to think “Do I just make up my own definition of BSM or do I work with someone else’s?”.
BSM opinions talk a lot about managing IT from a business perspective. To be honest I haven’t seen an enterprise software pitch that doesn’t talk about aligning the business with IT these days. For me though, the aligning bit is more of a mindset than a killer enabling technology, process or methodology. The way an employee approaches things or thinks has a lot to do with how they manage or work. IT exists solely to deliver a competitive edge to the business that funds it. If every person in IT thought “What impact am I having on the business” once or twice a day then its my belief that the business and IT would be closer aligned, more efficient and more successful. I’ve never been a fan of IT outsourcing for this exact reason – do the people working for a 3rd party IT outsourcer ever think or care about the business they are supporting or impacting? A few do but most probably don’t I’d imagine.
Here we are in a gloomy recession where business performance is all that matters. Huge losses and decreased revenue for many businesses have resulted in cost cutting and a focus on re-prioritizing business functions and services. How much do businesses spend on service X, Y and Z and how much do they make from X,Y and Z. It would be foolish to think that businesses would continue to invest in services that didn’t generate a return. The next bit is then figuring out where all these business services exist within the world of IT. If you’re going to focus on service X, Y and Z and de-commission A, B and C then you absolutely need to understand where X, Y, Z, A, B and C exist and what dependencies they have with each other and the applications/infrastructure that underpins them.
If businesses are going to start changing people’s mindsets in IT then they need to provide them with the right tools so they can start to learn how the business runs on IT. I bet most DBA’s have no idea which business transactions or services are executing against their schema’s these days. You might be sceptical and say why is this important? Should a DBA tune the top 10 slowest SQL Statements? or should they tune the SQL statements that relate to the top 10 business services? This is where BSM technology like Business Transaction Management (BTM) comes in handy. When you can track all business services and transactions across your entire infrastructure you gain this visibility of how the business runs on IT. With intelligence into business transaction latency, resource consumption and SLA across all tiers you begin to see first hand the real impact IT has on the business. Business services have been running across IT for decades, with BSM and enabling technology like BTM its only now IT is beginning to see the bigger picture.
I know it sounds simple but if you work in IT try thinking once or twice a day what impact will you have on your business. If you don’t know then its worth exploring what BSM and enabling technology like BTM can do for you.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
