Can we have a single unified model to describe all IT "assets", everything IT cares about? The idea is certainly appealing, and excites any IT management geek, this one included. Cote has a post where he articulates the advantages of having one standard model to model everything in IT and argues one of the big 4 open sourcing their CMDB solution may be the fastest way to get there. Can this happen? Stranger things did happen but I'd put likelyhood of this one as very low. It would certainly shake things up if a major CMDB became open source and if (this is a big if as well) the model used by it gained traction. One can only hope, not much more we can do.  read more »

The problem is well known and stated over and over again throughout the last decade. Most IT organizations are structured around functional silos of expertise and too focused on technology, hence there is a gap between IT organizations and the business. It is mostly agreed that IT organizations need to move toward service management, but there are different schools of thought on how to get there.

My personal journey in this realm started over a decade ago when I worked for a very large system integrator/outsourcing company that was organized in very distinct, geographically dispersed silos.  read more »

I'm excited to announce that iFountain has decided to go down the road not so less traveled and embrace the open source model. Being open has always been in our DNA, and we've agreed that embracing the open source model is the best manifestation of this objective.

As part of being open and transparent, I'll try to journal the road to open source for us. We'll try to get this done right. No doubt that it would not be difficult to post all the source code somewhere, stick on the GPL license, make a press release and declare the mission accomplished. But outcome of that alone would be no good for anyone. It takes more than declaring a license to turn closed source products into useful open source projects. Based on lessons learned from other projects, here is what we intend to do:

Open development infrastructure  read more »

OK I admit that only a few people would use the words "IT management" and "cool" at the same sentence, but here I go! You can now work with your managements systems from your IM client. The latest release of RapidInformer now supports AOL IM, Google Talk, Jabber and IBM Sametime. You no longer have to be glued to the glass to stay informed or have a console running to interact with your management systems. Via the bidirectional IM interface, notification come to where you are and you can execute commands directly from your IM client or email. "ESM via IM" so to speak.

Let's review what this thing can do:

Notifications: Notifications can be send via email, SMS, instant messaging, or any system that has an API or command line interface. Not much new here other than Sametime support, moving right along.  read more »

Netcool is one of the most popular (if not the most) manager of managers in the market, and it has been for quite some time. I still remember the first time I started using it 8 years ago. I was hooked at once. I could not believe how much better than Unicenter and TEC it was.

Through the years, number of different products were released to provide web based access to Netcool as it was a common requirement in the marketplace, but they did not live up to the quality of the core Netcool (Omnibus) product. Some customers (and consultants) became Webtop gurus, making the best of it, others rolled out their own solutions, almost everyone hoping a better version would come along “soon”.  read more »