Business service management specialist Managed Objects has announced the combination of its two new BSM solutions, Business Service Configuration Manager (BSCM) and Business Technology Insight (BTI), are meeting the vision for BSM Generation II, also known in the industry as the next generation of business service management (BSM) technology.
Lynda Odendaal, CEO of Managed Objects` South African business partner, NSS, says the new technologies - BSCM and BTI - provide comprehensive automated IT service discovery, mapping, correlation and visualisation capabilities. BSCM and BTI enable enterprises to better manage change and thereby lower operational risk within IT infrastructures and ultimately automate previously resource-intensive tasks, which are prerequisites for implementing BSM.
"The achievement of next-generation BSM technology is in direct response to strategic customer feedback and reflects published views of industry research analysts," Odendaal says.
Indeed, market research analysts Thomas Mendel and Jean-Pierre Garbani in their Forrester Research document, said: "The second generation of BSM goes much further than the first generation by adding the following characteristics: auto-discovering layers two through seven (from the network up to the application); providing a more intuitive way of describing layer eight (the business process); creating dependency maps and maintaining relationships between business processes and IT components automatically; and integration into a virtual CMDB."
BSCM integrates IT service topology information, configuration and asset data to map complex IT service relationships and formulate a federated or virtual Configuration Management Data Base (vCMDB). BTI acts as a catalyst to BSCM by discovering enterprise-wide IT service topology information and feeding that information to BSCM. Combined, these new capabilities act to not only reduce overall risk; they act as a vehicle to help companies accelerate ITIL best practice adoption.
"BSM is a paradigm shift in the way enterprises manage IT infrastructures. Instead of thinking about IT as individual components, that is servers, applications or networks, BSM views these as interrelated elements that collectively deliver IT services crucial for business operations. Common IT services include e-mail, supply chain management or online trading," Odendaal explains.
BSM emerged several years ago as a vehicle that enabled IT operations to manage IT as services - however, as IT infrastructures grew, they grew in disparate silos and the software tools that automate the management of this infrastructure - such as monitoring availability, analysing the root cause of outages, or managing help desk tickets - also grew in silos.
Managed Objects provided end-to-end service management to consolidate data from disparate management sources onto a single console, which both simplified this effort and leveraged the investment in management tools the enterprises had already made. In subsequent years, additional offerings provided incremental BSM advancements by providing service level management and automated business service views.
"These new capabilities remove much of the heavy lifting previously required for BSM adoption and enable large organisations to discover and manage IT infrastructure in their entirety," said Odendaal. "This has not been previously possible and this will speed the adoption of both BSM and process maturity models such as ITIL. The net effect is that Managed Objects has moved the BSM goal posts."
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