ITManagement

IT infrastructure needs to be managed holistically. Its a given. How do we do that? It's been a painful
journey.

First there was the “frameworks” (Tivoli/CA). The idea of building all management tools on a common
framework so that they would all be integrated, have common user interface, etc. was very appealing. But the execution did not match the promise.

A single framework to manage the entire IT infrastructure turned up to be a pipe dream. Too costly, too difficult and too painful to buy, implement, and maintain. After spending hundreds (millions?) of thousands of dollars, many IT organizations abandoned the framework projects or significantly scaled them down. Most people who worked on framework implementation projects can still feel the bad taste left in their mouth.  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 »

IT services more and more consist of services provided by external providers. Significant portions of the infrastructure are not directly managed by the IT departments. The latest trends in the enterprise space, Shared services, SaaS, SOA, outsourcing, etc. suggest that this is not a temporary phenomena.
IT organizations (as well as IT management vendors) need to adjust to the new requirements introduced with this new landscape.

So the question is: how can you do end to end management of a service when the infrastructure for the service depends on combination of multiple internal and external service providers?  read more »

I think it's safe to say that blogging is no longer limited to the techie realm. There are now blogs about anything and everything. Technorati is currently tracking more than 57 million blogs, 100,000 new blogs per day. Amazing numbers!

Yet I find myself struggling to find blogs about IT that are written by IT folks. To be sure, there are many blogs about IT, written by vendors, analysts, consultants, etc. but very few blogs by the people who are in the field. I've gone through the blogrolls, searched google, technorati etc. and found only a handful blogs (granted it may be my search skills). Not only that there aren't many blogs by IT people, the participation in the existing blogs via comments, etc. is also quite low. Why is that?

As I reflected on before, blogging as a communications tool is invaluable for us, but I think blogging as a means to connect with others would be even more valuable for the people in the trenches. Share experiences, exchange stories, learn from one another, find out what works and what does not, etc.  read more »

Last month, I've read a post by James Governor of RedMonk (an analyst firm specialized enough to actually know what they are talking about :) where James talked about the “best practices” vs “best infrastructure” inquiring whether SMBs would be better off using infrastructure provided by large service providers like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. and if SMBs do choose to use these services more and more what would be the impact of this in the industry.

In the comments, I had pointed out the differences between the “best infrastructure” and “best service (support)”. I keep running into this theme so I wanted to write more about it, if for no other reason to clarify my own thinking.  read more »

Doug McClure has an insightful post where he describes the landscape most of us face when trying to implement a BSM solution.  read more »

In a previous post, I discussed different management systems integration types: data layer integration, functional integration, event integration and presentation layer integration. RapidInsight provides presentation layer integration functionalities as described in the post.

Problem:
You have number of different management tools for different management disciplines (fault mgmt, configuration & change mgmt, service desk, etc.), and technologies (Unix, Windows, LAN, WAN, Applications, etc.). Yet services you provide span multiple technologies and platforms, and you need to provide information to internal/external customers about the services they use. We'll consider can think about the scenario described in this post to understand what type of information you may need to provide to your users.  read more »

The IT management software market looks quite grim these days. There are number of trends that has a negative impact on software companies.  read more »

In the last couple of posts, I've talked about a scenario and some concepts to lay out the framework to discuss the integrations between tools used for different management disciplines.

I should note that I don't intend to talk about the integration between specific management tools (though I may use specific tools as examples), rather, I'll attempt to analyze integration requirements between tools used in different management disciplines. Although tools from different vendors each may have their differences, we should be able to talk about the functional areas in more generic terms, hence I hope that the discussion will be useful for a broader audience.

In this post, I'll start going through the process flow described in our scenario and focus on the integration between the event management and the trouble ticketing systems which is probably the most common integration implemented in the field.  read more »