Forrester’s Jean-Pierre Garbani wrote a short report last month about the current offering and future plans of Oracle’s IT management group (where I work).
As the report points out, Oracle’s IT management products don’t always enjoy a level of industry attention commensurate with the value they deliver. This report will hopefully help fix this.
Forrester: “Oracle Focuses On Business Value”.
Two months ago, HP announced the acquisition of EDS.
One month later, HP Software announced a slew of new service management products, including an updated version (7.5) of Universal CMDB (from the Mercury acquisition).
One month later (today), according to BMC (with supporting quote from an EDS exec), “EDS Asia Pacific Standardises on BMC Software Atrium CMDB to Improve Service Delivery”.
As an ex-colleague pointed out to me, the acquisition isn’t closed yet. Still.
Another BMC acquisition today: ITM Software. Their software suite is designed to help drive IT decisions from the point of view of their business impact.
This is important, of course, for all the reasons that BMC, HP, Oracle and others have been explaining for a while (how often have you heard the word “alignment” over the last three years, compared to the previous thirty?). It’s becoming even more important now, as the options for IT sourcing (from the traditional “give it all to Unisys”, to SaaS, to running your own apps in a utility computing environment…) are multiplicating. Choosing between Intel and AMD CPUs in your datacenter is a technical decision, but choosing between an on-premise application, a SaaS application and running your application on EC2 is driven by business considerations of cost, risks, control, flexibility, etc. And it’s not just a one-time decision, it’s the day to day management that follows these decisions.
I don’t know much about the current ITM offering, but it was never clear to me how much they could deliver as a narrow layer, separate from the heavy-duty IT management stack (I can see how they would deliver financial and project management tools, but what about *really* linking day to day IT administration decisions to the business impact). Being part of BMC, presumably allowing deeper integration into real IT management operations, seems to make sense.
I just wish they didn’t make it sound so easy: “BMC’s purchase of ITM Software creates a unique, integrated solution that provides customers with a single comprehensive view into…”. So just signing the check creates the integration? Now I am going to get calls from our execs asking why it takes so much work to integrate acquired products, if BMC can do it the same day they sign the deal…
While I am at it, here is the press release that HP put out to list the announcements at their Software Universe conference this week. I notice that it’s all about new versions of ex-Mercury products. No OpenView, Peregrine or Opsware content, as far as I can tell. Without looking at it in more details I don’t know how different these new versions really are. What appears pretty new is the SaaS offering (also based on Mercury products) at the end of the press release. On the nitpicking side, can anyone tell me what these “static configuration management databases” are that are “unable to support the real-time needs of today’s complex technology environments”? I can see how a “static” database would be hard-pressed to help, but I haven’t noticed any vendor selling read-only config stores.
[UPDATED 2008/6/18: More details about the HP announcement at InfoWorld. Including quotes from my ex-boss Ramin. Congrats on getting UCMDB 7.5 out of the door!]
Our esteemed competitors at IBM Tivoli are organizing a BarCamp focused on the use of ITM for BSM. Should be very interesting if they manage to convince a good group that this is a valuable way to spend a weekend. BSM on Tivoli seems like an ambitious topic for a “getting your hands dirty” kind of session since by definition BSM involves managing complex systems and solving the needs of the kind of people who don’t necessarily attend BarCamps. Very different from the more typical BarCamp environment in which people bring code (typically open source) they know in and out and try to get these projects to do things that they themselves plan to make use of.
Just setting up a realistic (even if fake) environment to get your “hands dirty” on can take a lot of time. Long downloads and complex installation procedures aren’t your friends when you only have a few hours (and when participants don’t have to stay in the room if they’re bored). It will be an interesting challenge for the organizers to decide how much (if anything at all) to prepare ahead of time while keeping the whole thing open and participant-driven.
My guess is that even if they don’t get a lot in terms of BSM insight per se, they will learn a lot about the ease of installation, integration and extension of the various products involved and how to increase it, which will be beneficial all the same. Good luck to Doug, John and the other participants, I think you’ll do well and I hope you’ll achieve even more than I predict. Kudos for the initiative.
Of course the real challenge only starts after the BarCamp: it is to take the lessons back to the mothership…
And for those who say I only speak critically of IBM on this blog, this post is the proof that you are as prejudiced as a WebSphere architect. ;-)
[UPDATED on 2008/01/17: Make sure to read John's clarifications in the comments section, including the link to BarCampESM which is happening this coming weekend in Austin. I hadn't heard about it before.]
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