EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Every March, IBM invites customers and analysts to its annual Pulse user conference. This year, Pulse was all about the more efficient delivery of IT services, a concept that is usually referred to as "cloud". Since cloud has developed into a term that, due to its overuse, is often frowned upon, to say the least, it was great to see IBM try hard to demystify this elusive concept, backing it up with numerous case studies and customer testimonials. The fact that many of these case studies were not as polished as you so often see during this type of show, made the experience actually better. It became clear that these were real customers, implementing "cloud" to solve very specific corporate problems and while doing this, running into very specific IT problems. This is something that just happens when breaking new ground and it speaks for IBM's self confidence to not present only squeaky clean projects at its show.

Why pay $1,500 per virtual desktop, if you can have a physical machine of the same performance-level at half the cost. While the functional and maintenance advantages of virtual desktop computing are evident, the per machine CAPEX often is the key stumbling block for this type of project. It is very hard to convince your CFO to write a check for more money per virtual machine than it would cost to acquire physical desktops.

Why pay $1,500 per virtual desktop, if you can have a physical machine of the same performance-level at half the cost. While the functional and maintenance advantages of virtual desktop computing are evident, the per machine CAPEX often is the key stumbling block for this type of project. It is very hard to convince your CFO to write a check for more money per virtual machine than it would cost to acquire physical desktops.

A friend of mine recently asked why I am even still interested in enterprise computing when all the innovation is happening within the consumer electronics sector. Smartphones, tablet computers, e-book readers, and audio streaming devices have changed the way we live our daily lives. Now that I read the NYTimes on my iPad, I get through a substantially larger part of the newspaper, compared to when I was reading the paper edition. Now that I use "Read it Later," I finally get to actually read all the interesting website articles that I bookmark during my workday, while relaxing in the evening on the couch with my iPad. Since I have Rhapsody on my iPhone, I get to actually listen to my favorite rare albums while driving to work. My Squeezebox streaming music players on my nightstand and in my living room allow me to listen to my favorite global radio stations, or I can create my own custom channels, by entering a number of my favorite bands. My home alarm system is controlled through an online dashboard or an iPad/iPhone app, so that I can turn off specific motion sensors or the entire system remotely.

Welcome to my Blog on the latest trends in systems management. In this Blog, I will look at systems management from a business process perspective. The initial focus will lie on server virtualization management, cloud systems management and workload automation. Within this context, I will analyze and try to quantify the efficiency gains that the organization can realize by implementing systems management tools and processes. However, as systems management does not exist in a vacuum, it is essential to tie these findings together with the latest developments in neighboring disciplines such as configuration management systems, IT service management, process automation, security, networking, applications management etc.