Acquisitions in IT Management space

Thankfully, I realized that I used to write this blog on change and configuration management and decided to write some interesting events that happened in recent times.

Just to talk about acquisitions would bring names of so many big companies that are fighting to get good share of revenue from this space. Take a look at the data below:

IBM Bought Collation
Symantec Bought Relicore
EMC Bought nLayers
CA Bought Cendura

Now, this is getting pretty interesting. The tall standing players are BladeLogic/Opsware which seems to be well determined in fighting it out singly with the above biggies. Only time will tell if they would also get acquired by some big company.

But the fact remains, that this space is going to see a fair tough competition and Change and Configuration Management is declared IN.

Change and configuration management & SAN

All of a sudden, IT organizations are realising the importance of change and configuration management and their take towards it. Change and configuration management has become the buzz word in the IT service management. CIOs and top level managers are carving out strategies for managing servers, networks etc etc.

So, what is it like understanding change management for Storage Area Network (SAN) for
managers and administrators?

The complexity involved in managing SAN has increased tremendously and is one of the concerns of CIOs and to-level managers because of the cost involved in it. Existing manners such as manual methods and cumbersome spreadsheets are proving to be time consuming and prone to mistakes and thus precluding IT organizations from attaining high SAN stability and application availability -- a priority for CIOs.

The reason for higher complexity is lot of devices to be managed and hence lot of change and configuration to be managed. SAN managers and administrators are involved in managing following:

1. Discovery
2. Redundancy
3. Performance
4. Security
5. Disaster recovery
6. Clustering
7. Backup

In large organizations, thousands of changes relating to adding of servers, alerting zone, consolidation, migration etc, are made each year. Given the complexities of SANs, a change management application can be a useful tool for understanding, managing and fixing logical and physical relationships in an end-to-end SAN.

So, if you are one looking out for managing change and configuration in SAN, it is right time to go and evaluate the change and configuration management tools available in the market today. Visit the following link to evaluate the software vendors.

Change management vendors

To read more on SAN and change management, visit the following link:

Best practices in SAN change management

Change and configuration management @ Configuresoft

Configuresoft is actively working in change and configuration management landscape. It is promoting following tow products:

Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM): ECM is CMDB based technology. It offers management of configuration settings of windows based server and clients with its focus on security and IT standards. ECM also helps in Rule compliance, audits of IT infrastructure and much more. It is striving to deliver software for ITIL, SOX compliance. Some of the companies using ConfigureSoft ECM are Qwest, Clifford Chance etc. Read more about theie case studies.

Security Update Manager (SUM): SUM is aimed to automate security patch management across the enterprise. It helps install the security update patches on many systems with just one click. Not many customes are found to be using ConfigureSoft SUM. However, it is a very promising software.

ConfigureSoft ECM and SUM is aimed to acheive Change and Configuration management demand of an enterprise.

Upcoming events at Configuresoft are following:

UPCOMING EVENTS

5/17 Tuesdays @ 10 Webinar
“ECM Tips & Tricks”

5/24 Tuesdays @ 10 Webinar
“EPAC” ECM Private Assessment Consultation” Personalized on-site technical assistance enabling customers to fully capitalize on the features of ECM.

5/31 Tuesdays @ 10 Webinar
“ECM and AD Migration” ECM can help!

6/7 Tuesdays @ 10 Webinar
“Enforceable Compliance” Ensure operational compliance to standards and best-practice guidelines with ECM.

6/14 Tuesdays @ 10 Webinar
”Reporting with ECM” Over 300 Out of the Box Reports plus Wizard Driven Custom Reporting

6/21 Tuesdays @ 10 Webinar
“ECM Tips & Tricks”

BMC Remedy - ITIL

Pink Elephant, the leader in IT Service Management consultancy, announced BMC Remedy IT service management application suite as ITIL compatible service support solution.

ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library. ITIL, in brief, provides a set of specifications for IT service delivery and support process. It is an integrated set of guidelines and terminology for service management best practices.

Remedy IT service management application suite claims to provide out-of-the-box work-level processes and procedures for all of the following ITIL processes:

Incident Management
Configuration Management
Problem Management
Service Level Management
Change Management
Availability Management

Change and configuration management - Discovery of IT Infrastructure

Discovery of IT infrastructure (hardwares and softwares) forms the important part of change and configuration management strategy. The question to which large companies are puzzled about is "What do I have?" as part of IT infrastructure.

In such a complex environment, it is very difficult to correctly manage the information about all the softwares and hardwares that the companies have. And, even if they somehow accomplish it through manual processes, it is very difficult to then manage the patches, the licenses etc.

Large companies end up buying licenses every year without knowing if they are going to use it. They spend lot of time to confirm that they have the latest patch installed on their systems.

There comes the need of having accurate knowledge of IT infrastructure from time-to-time without errors and failures. And, this need gives birth to the Discovery of IT infrastructure.

Any change and configuration management tool would be incomplete if it does not provide user to know about their IT infrastructure from time-to-time.

So, if you form the part of evaluation team for evaluating change and configuration management tool, do not forget to check if the tool provide the discovery feature.

Change and configuration management - Cendura Corp.

Cendura corporation is one of those cool vendors that is working in change and configuration management landscape. They have been working in this field for quite sometime now.

Cendura claim to have developed CMDB that assists its software namely Cohesion to discover, manage and verify the configurable items of IT infrastructure against the best practises/gold standards provided by the vendors.

As I discussed in my prior blogs that CMDB is not only about storing information related to CI of IT infrastucture, but also a well-thought out strategy in itself, Cendura claims to have been done it.

The customers list of Cendura corp is quite impressive one which includes Medtronic, cars.com, digitalinsight, homestore.com, lastminutetravel.com.

They are showcasing various aspects of Cohesion in Gartner exhibition happening on May 16-18 at booth 127.

They are also presenting webinar from May15-19 on ITIL and SOX.

Configuartion Management Database (CMDB)

Today, when standards such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library is catching attention of IT industry as a whole, many organizations are looking to implement ITIL, or looking out for one of the cool vendors to implement the same for them.

Going forward, CMDB would play critical role in implementation of standards such as ITIL. CMDB is all about managing configuration item (CI) data in a logical manner. It is about sharing CI data in a common data store and ease the complexity related to managing non-critical attribute data in application database. CI data could be easily shared owing to its centralized approach and without the interference of complex setup.

CMDB is a single, centralized source of record that would enable the IT organizations to discover, manage and verify the CI data against the best practices recommended by respective software vendors.

CMDB is not only the storage of CI data but also a well thought strategy of managing CI data across the enterprise.

What is a configuration item (CI)? CI could be a hardware, software, employees that has configurable attributes. A CI is an instance of a physical, logical and conceptual entity that is a part of the environment and has configurable attributes. A hardware’s configurable attributes could be serial number, vendor, IP address etc. A software’s configurable attributes could be port, IP address, vendor etc.

Defining a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

Change and configuration management deals with management of configurable data. The configurable data could be of following kinds:

1. Software configuration settings
2. Hardware configuration settings
3. Relationships
4. Documenetation
5. People information - Business attributes

The above configurable data is also called as Configurable Item (CI). The information about the above mentioned configurable item is stored in a persistent storage also called Configuration management database (CMDB).

CMDB is going to go a long way in managing complex IT environments, says IT analysts. CMDB could help in one of the following manners:

1. Change and configuration management
2. Inventory management
3. Availability and release management
4. Incident management
5. Infrastructure and application management

The above-mentioned use of CMDB conforms to ITIL best practices. It is seemingly becoming evident that every IT company in near future would seek one or the other configuration management tool.

There has to be a couple of winners in the change and configuration management landscape. Lets wait and watch the fun of competition!

Configuration management technology

Change and Configuration management technology has been on upswing since last couple of years. There are 5 to 6 start-up companies that are competing to become leader in this landscape. Some of them are following:

• Cendura : Cohesion
• Configuresoft : Enterprise Configuration Managar(ECM) and Security Update Manager (SUM)
• Cirba : Configuration Audit Tool (CAT)
• Collation : Confignia
• HP Open View : Openview Management software solution
• BMC Remedy

Configuration management is about managing following:

1. Managaing configuration settings of files and environments of enterprise applications, and various other software applications inclusing application servers, database, web servers, messaging systems etc.
2. Managing files and registries for Windows OS

Change management is about managing change across various applications over a period of time.