EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

“Oh, I’m not coming to VMworld this year, we are at Jenkins instead.” This is a sentence I’ve heard quite a few times now from vendors that I’m used to seeing at VMworld and it makes me wonder what’s going on.

According to 2015 research reports published by Ponemon, Mandiant, and others, median intruder dwell time in a target network prior to detection ranges from just under to just over 200 days. That is a little over six months and as everyone agrees, totally unacceptable.

I thought I’d begin the year by making some predictions about what to look for in 2016 in the area of IT service management (ITSM).  For those of you who have been following my blogs with any regularity, and particularly for those who sat in on our webinar for the research report “What Is the [...]

In research done earlier this year, we looked at changing patterns of IT service management (ITSM) adoption across a population of 270 respondents in North America and Europe. One of the standout themes that emerged from our findings was the need for the service desk to become a more automated and analytically empowered center of [...]

Both the “rules” and the “roles” governing IT service management (ITSM) are evolving to support a far-broader need for inclusiveness across IT, and between IT and its service consumers. Recent EMA research, “What Is the Future of IT Service Management?” (March 2015), exposed a number of shifting trends that might surprise many in the industry. [...]

Of course, I always encourage practitioners to carefully study the full EMA research report on the “Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center” or at least read the research study summary or at the very least join the EMA SDDC Research webinar on February 18, but I still want to briefly summarize the key findings here.

As every year, IBM invited the analyst community to Stamford, CT, for a deep dialogue on today's most important topics in enterprise IT. Here is a short overview for everyone interested in IBM's current world view.

When it comes to cloud technologies, discussions often get passionate or even heated. It’s all about the “war of the stacks”, where much Cool Aid is dispensed to get customers to buy into the respective cult. This discussion reminds me of the old days of enterprise IT, where everything was about technology instead of business value. You either bought one thing or the other and then you were locked in for a half decade. Dark times.

OpenStack’s huge momentum is undeniable. IBM, RedHat, NetApp, Rackspace, HP, Dell, Cisco, Intel and even VMware have committed significant funds and human resources to this project. But why would companies, that are otherwise competing rather fiercely, sit on one table to build an OpenSource cloud platform?

Almost one year into the discussion about the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), it is time to take inventory of the state of the discipline. As a reminder, the ultimate goal of the SDDC is to abstract and centralize the
management of compute, network, storage, operating systems, middleware and applications in order to dynamically place workloads where they can run in the most cost efficient, secure and compliant manner.