Service-Centric IT Management

Seven Essentials for a Top-Performing IT Help Desk By Ujjwal Sood, product analyst, ManageEngine The help desk forms the backbone of IT operations for many federal, state and local government agencies. In fact, the cross-functional nature of its operation means the help desk directly impacts productivity and is an essential part of what enables an agency to meet its stakeholder needs. However, owing to increasingly complex IT environments, managers struggle to ensure that their help desks are operating at optimum efficiency. This seven-point guide will help IT managers ensure their help desks deliver exceptional service while maximizing productivity. 1. Create the right structure: Properly structuring an IT help desk can greatly improve its efficiency. Organize help desks into multiple levels or tiers. In a three-tier help desk, for example, tier 0 can be a self-serv... (more)

Gartner & IDC Split on Server Fortunes

Worldwide server shipments were up 1.4% in Q2, according to Gartner, but paid less. Revenues were off 2.9%. HP, which sells more servers than anybody else, was down 5% on both shipments and revenues. Server ships in the US were up 8.4% bringing in revenues up 6.5%. Gartner blames delayed buying ahead of new introduction and spending constraints. IBM, for instance, just brought out its new System zEC12 mainframes this week and new Unix boxes are coming. One can't help but wonder if virtualization is also having an impact. Gartner is expecting a return to single-digit growth. IDC was more negative. By its count vendors shipped two million servers, down 3.6%, the first shipment decline in three years. Revenues were down 4.8% to $12.6 billion. Industry-standard servers were off 7.6% at the high end ($250,000 or more) and 11.2% in the mid-range. Counting all sizes, 1.9 ... (more)

Neebula Promotes Service-Centric IT Management to the Cloud

Neebula Systems, a provider of business-level service modeling, management, and automated full-stack discovery and dependency mapping solutions, invites customers to preview the Neebula ServiceWatch solution in the cloud.  For the first time, IT managers will be able to use a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based product to quickly and effectively discover and map IT resources - hardware and software - that make up a specific business service. This eliminates the long, labor-intensive process of installing on-premise software and then manually discovering and mapping IT resources. Neebula ServiceWatch is a top-down, business-level discovery and dependency mapping product which leverages patented technology to automate the entire service modeling process, requiring no manual intervention. Neebula ServiceWatch employs the service models to assist IT administrators in m... (more)

Red Hat Previews its OpenStack Distribution

Red Hat has released a public preview of its OpenStack IaaS distribution a couple of weeks after Rackspace got the ball rolling and went production with the open source stuff on its own public cloud. Red Hat, the third-biggest contributor to the current Essex release, is being a bit more circumspect about it. Its stuff is unsupported at this point. It says it’s making sure the thing is enterprise-worthy, stable and certified apropos of introducing it as an enterprise subscription product. Whether Essex meets those criteria is reportedly debatable but Red Hat maintains that it will be the “industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution.” Red Hat is betting on the hybrid cloud and expects OpenStack to be an important component of its hybrid cloud architecture by letting an IT organization stand up a cloud at a service provider. Apparently it’s got an early g... (more)

Automating IT Operations Delivers Faster Payback in Existing Investments

Seeking to make existing investments in IT Service Management software more productive and cost-effective, Neebula announces integration of its automated discovery and mapping with ServiceNow's configuration management database (CMDB). "IT managers have invested a lot of time and money into legacy systems but only 1 percent of enterprises has realized the value of business service models," said Yuval Cohen, CEO of Neebula Systems. "Our software addresses this gap providing an immediate return-on-investment that is simply not possible with traditional approaches to discovery and topological service map creation." Neebula's automated approach does in hours and days what typically takes weeks and months. Now, output from Neebula can be used to populate the ServiceNow CMDB. Why not use ServiceNow's existing service modeling capabilities for this? That approach requir... (more)

Webinar: Re-gaining Control over the Change Management Process in IT

A free webinar from Neebula Systems on April 17 will address the issue of how information technology (IT) organizations can minimize the impact of changes on availability of their critical applications. More than 80 percent of incidents and problems in IT result from changes, even when those are approved through an official change management process. Why is this an unfortunate reality in most IT organizations today? What can IT operations managers and executives do to change the status-quo? Ariel Gordon, co-founder and chief technology officer of Neebula, will analyze the issue of change management and offer tips for radically improving the change management process. "It's a great irony that change management is intended to protect the availability of critical applications and a sad reality that so often changes to IT infrastructure actually result in service disrupt... (more)

Companies Step Up Automation of IT Operations

Neebula Systems announced four recent customer implementations as more companies are investing in automated information technology (IT) operations to help improve their availability of IT services. Among them - Amdocs, Bechtel, Raritan, San Antonio Water System - are medium- to large-size enterprises representing a variety of industries. "Neebula is focused on delivering software that helps our customers address the issue of maintaining uptime so that their business operations continue uninterrupted," said Yuval Cohen, CEO of Neebula. "As a result, we're seeing sales momentum building as enterprises recognize that their traditional approach to IT operations doesn't stack up in today's complex, virtualized, cloud-based computing environments." The most recent customers to adopt Neebula ServiceWatch software include: Amdocs with 20,000 employees and headquarters in Mis... (more)

Monetizing Cloud Services Brokerage | Part 3

In a previous blog on Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB), I promised to return briefly to the topic of CSB monetization. The term CSB can refer to both to the activity of brokering cloud services, or to the software application (or suite of applications) used to manage that activity. The activity of brokering cloud services can be carried out within an enterprise, as an internal support function, or performed as a paid-for service by a third party. So just to be clear, the discussion in today's blog is all about the monetization of CSB as a service when provided by a CSB service provider. The scope of CSB need not be limited to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). To provide a complete cloud service, a broker might also offer IaaS and/or PaaS. The CSB service might also include desktop tools to help the customer, and also some good old-fashioned consulting. The CSB may be a ... (more)

HP Expands Converged Cloud Portfolio

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/05/12 -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) today expanded its Converged Cloud portfolio with new offerings that extend the power of the cloud across infrastructure, applications and information, enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation and enhance agility. Today's announcements include solutions for: -- Delivering converged cloud services for the airline industry. -- Building hybrid cloud environments. -- Managing the next generation of cloud applications. -- Increasing office productivity with cloud print solution. -- Closing the IT cloud expertise skills gap. Introduced in April, HP Converged Cloud is the industry's first strategy and portfolio based on a single architecture that combines private, managed and public cloud, as well as traditional IT, to create an environment that can rapidly change based on organizational requirements. Recen... (more)

HP’s VP of Software & Solutions to Present at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley $800 Savings here! The IT industry is on the cusp of a new cloud computing era. The '90s were focused on e-business, the late 2000s on IT as a Service, and we are now entering the era of "everything as a service." IT has become business service centric, a service broker for the enterprise, resulting in a new business model for IT. IT organizations that fail to change the fundamentals of how they get work done risk becoming marginalized. In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Bury, vice president of Software as a Service for the Software & Solutions organization at HP , will discuss why it's imperative for IT to become business service focused and how to ensure risk mitigation, cost optimization and differentiation. Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities ! Speaker Bio: Kevin Bury is vice president of Softw... (more)

The Next Big Leap: Everything is a Business Service

Since the 1970s, authors like Alvin Toffler[1], Daniel Bell[2] and John Naisbitt[3] have predicted the post-industrial society. They forecast the end of the industrial era and the dominance of services and information. This is not a new message; the entire service provider industry has reformed around this idea, and in the USA today non-manufacturing industries account for almost 90 percent of the economy. Virtually every product today has a service component to it and many products have been transformed into services. One of the most interesting examples of this is the Amazon Kindle service which provides an integrated front end to a wide range of Amazon services. The Kindle service optimizes purchases of books plus access to library and new services and automatically synchronizes all the devices the user may use to access the services including the Kindle reader, s... (more)