EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

UEM for user experience management and RPA for robotic process automation are two IT acronyms that continue to elude well-understood definitions, albeit for somewhat opposite reasons. UEM goes back decades, first emerging out of primarily network-centric management, becoming a cornerstone of business service management, and later being consumed by application performance management (APM) much to its own detriment. RPA is comparatively recent, evolving out of screen scraping into far richer technical options that are diverse in nature, with many RPA vendors contending with and replacing the more consultancy-driven platforms for business process management (BPM).

Enterprise networking professionals have a cloud problem, even if they don’t know it. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions can help them solve this problem.

Despite what you hear from trolls, bigots, and misogynists, diversity in the technology industry is a good thing. But the philosophy of diversity needs more champions. Tech companies and IT organizations need to expand their workforce beyond the herds of white men that have dominated the industry for decades.

Despite some recent obituaries published by my peers, software-defined networking is not dead. But perhaps certain aspects of it are dead or dying. If that’s the case, I say: “SDN is dead. Long live SDN.”

I admit, “end-user support” sounds kind of old-fashioned. But in many respects just the opposite is true. In the digital age the need for easy access to new services is on the rise, and even with a much ‘hipper’ (and increasingly impatient) end-user population, the need for support and guidance remains. It is just taking different forms than in the past.

What should machine and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) do for IT operations, DevOps and container management? The following table represents my quick outline of the key challenges and specific problem ML/AI needs to address. The table is based on the believe that ML/AI needs to look over the shoulder of IT ops, DevOps, and business management teams to learn from their decision making. In other words, every virtualization administrator fulfills infrastructure provisioning or upgrade requests a little bit differently. Please regard the below table as a preliminary outline and basis for discussion. At this point, and probably at no future point either, I won't claim to know the 'ultimate truth.'

Network Operations and Analytics from CA Technologies has been named a winner of Enterprise Management Associates’ Innovator Award, which recognizes products and services that demonstrate true innovation in the IT industry and address the most critical challenges IT organizations face today.

EMA research has determined that network managers will need to upgrade, expand, and adapt their network monitoring and management tools and practices if they are going to support the Internet of Things (IoT).

I recently presented findings from my Workload Automation (WLA) research and other EMA research on a webinar with Tim Eusterman, Sr. Director Solutions Marketing at BMC in a webinar titled “How Digital Business is Shaping the Next Wave of Automation”. The recording of the webinar is now live here, and the slides are available here.