When Salesforce.com had an outage earlier this year, Paul Rubens at ServerWatch wrote that the response from the community was ridiculous and that just about all enterprise applications are unavailable occasionally. He also adds that the moment things do go wrong, CEO Marc Benioff cracks the whip and unleashes a truck-load of techies to scurry around and fix things as quickly as they can. I don't know if Paul is an IT guy but his post reminded me of a friend - a typical technology focused IT operations guy. Let's call him "Joe the (Server) Plumber"! Almost every IT organization today has their own equivalent of Joe the (Server) Plumber who is usually an expert on technology. However Joe never understands why the CEO gets worked up and angry whenever an enterprise application fails. Meanwhile the CEO hopes that someday people like Joe understand that the business is losing money and the trust of customers and that it's not just a Hard-disk read error or a MS-SQL cache problem that was promptly fixed in 6 hours! This is exactly what Business Service Management (BSM) is all about and it is pretty easy to see the benefits if BSM can indeed solve the problem. But how ? The first step in addressing this problem is visibility. Joe needs to see the problem the way the CEO sees it. See the two charts below The chart above shows what Joe is seeing today. CRM Server availability is around 30% in a week. The chart below tells Joe that the company is losing $242K per week because of the failure of CRM. At ManageEngine we believe that if we empower Joe by giving him visibility into the Business Impact of an IT failure, Joe will be able to do different things to improve the efficiency of IT Operations. (Update : Thanks to Doug McClure who was the first person I came across with a clear understanding of the goal of BSM. ) And with ManageEngine IT360 you can get started with what is now known as "Common Sense BSM". If you have a Joe in your organization you can empower them by downloading ManageEngine IT360. You can also see a live demo here. Even after all this, Joe still needs to understand that when everything is working fine, nobody is going to call him and thank him. Welcome to IT, Joe :)

In recent times there has been a lot of discussion on Business Service Management and the need to Align IT operations to Business Goals. The increasing popularity of ITIL indicates that CIOs and IT managers realize the importance of Aligning IT to the Business. While ITIL has been a big hit in the Service Support area, the progress has not been so great in the IT Operations side. The ground reality today is that most IT organizations are still focused on monitoring the Network and Server infrastructure for availability and performance. One of the main challenges in implementing BSM today is the number of tools that you need to buy and integrate (think of the big Professional Services bill with the army of "consultants") and in today's economy who do you think has the courage to take a proposal for a $1,000,000 BSM project (or even $100,000K  for that matter)? With ManageEngine IT360 we hope to enable an easy and evolutionary approach to BSM. What does IT360 offer ? Traditional IT Management Features - The Foundation Network Monitoring with WAN Traffic Analysis - Everything a Network Manager needs today from up-down availability monitoring to snmp based bandwidth monitoring and Netflow based WAN Traffic Analysis. Server Monitoring - Complete Server Availability and Performance monitoring across Windows, Linux, Unix and IBM AS 400 Servers Application & Middleware Monitoring - including SAP, all kinds of web-servers(IIS, Apache etc.), Middleware(weblogic, websphere, JBoss, MQ Series etc.) and Databases(Oracle, MS-SQL, DB2, MySQL etc.) End-User Transaction monitoring for measuring response time of Business processes like Order Processing etc. BSM Features Business Service Container - The ability to map all of the infrastructure components above into the underlying Business Service Application Dependency Mapping - IT360 allows you to visualize the relationships between the Business Service and the underlying IT Infrastructure Business Level Metrics - IT360 offers the ability to extract IT specific metrics like Server downtime or Response time of an ecommerce application and translate it into Business level metrics like "$ of revenue lost" or "# of Orders processed per hour". This is the fundamental goal of BSM. ie. Enabling  IT operation staff to see how a failure in IT affects the Business. With this visibility IT operations staff will be able to hopefully make different (and better) decisions regarding how they handle these IT failures. IT360 can fetch Business metrics from a variety of data sources. With Support for "database query monitors", "custom script monitors", "JMX adaptors" and a variety of other monitors, information can be pulled from any data source as long as it is out there. IT360 also includes an ITIL ServiceDesk to automate Incident, Problem and Change Management processes - again within the context of a Business Service. There is nothing in the market today that packages all this functionality into one affordable, easy-to-use package. And IT360 allows you to evolve from managing the network to managing the business without requiring any major investments in software purchase or implementation times. And for once your IT operations team will not see it as management pushing some new jargon from the top. Don't take my word for it. View the online demo or download the Beta