When a persistent application failure threatened to ruin a business partnership for Zurich Life, IT executive Timothy Hagn turned to a new type of software that manages business services across networks, systems, servers, applications and databases. Now when that application starts going bonkers, Hagn can straighten it out before that business partner knows anything is amiss.

	Beyond technology metrics More than just software Onus on the user A barrel of BIM products Same software, different name? Ask this of business impact management software vendors

When Hagn bought Hewlett-Packard's OpenView Service Navigator to solve the business problem in early 2001, the vice president of IT operations and engineering at Zurich Life didn't realize he was partaking in what has become one of the hottest trends to hit the network management industry. HP's software is among a growing number of tools that fall under the new business impact management (BIM) category. These tools come by their name because they let IT managers incorporate business objectives into their network management software.

Because BIM can ease communication of business needs to IT staff, it promises to help improve a company's partner and customer relationships, and increase employee productivity. BIM proponents even go so far as to say the software can save and make money for companies.

Yet, like anything new, BIM needs polishing. While BIM software can correlate the performance of many elements so they can be managed as a single business service, it can cost a lot and take considerable hands-on configuration to prove its worth in specific business environments.

Still, for Hagn, tracking service levels across what he calls the silos of network management — networks, systems, servers, applications and databases — has become a business strategy. "It's a move from reacting to problems to proactively controlling how we deliver service," he says.

IT managers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg say the same. Since deploying Smarts' InCharge Application Services Manager in May 2001, the IT team there has stopped chasing down "red icons" and started "intelligently isolating problems," says Carl Harris, director of network engineering and operations at Virginia Tech.

"In the past, we found out about problems and who was affected in sort of an ad hoc fashion; there was a lot of guessing and a lot of phone calls," Harris says. "Now we can tell who in terms of applications and what in terms of servers are affected by an outage or device failure."

What's more, the BIM tool has helped the IT team increase its services to students and faculty while maintaining its current staff size. "The short and sweet of it is, Smarts can spot a problem with amazing accuracy, and we didn't have to hire another systems administrator to use it," says Brian Jones, manager of network engineering and operations at the school.

Beyond technology metrics

As Hagn and the team at Virginia Tech will attest, BIM can aggregate and correlate performance data such as response time across network devices, systems, databases, and Web and applications servers. And unlike its first cousin, service-level management software (see story, "Same software, different name?"), a BIM tool can manage across these elements in real time and monitor hardware and software for more than technology metrics.

The earliest BIM product became available in 1997, when Managed Objects released its Formula software as a "business services management" tool. But the BIM buzz really didn't start until this April, when IBM's Tivoli software division coined the phrase with the release of its Service Level Analyzer product.

BIM tools have become a vendor focus this year in the down economy.  Companies are concentrating on return on investment and total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure in response to internal corporate pressures.

"BIM tools have picked up in popularity more recently because the business side of the house is demanding it," says Glenn O'Donnell, a research director with Meta Group.

More than just software

While features vary among vendors, BIM software is an add-on to a network management system. Network managers install the software on a dedicated server usually adjacent to the network management server. Then IT creates models of the business-critical services, such as e-mail, order entry and customer-facing applications, it wants to manage. These models are virtual topologies of all elements, including user desktops, an application must touch to fulfill a user request.

A barrel of BIM products Here's a sampling of business impact management products. Vendor Product BMC Software Patrol for Service Level Management Entuity Eye of the Storm Hewlett-Packard OpenView Service Navigator IBM Tivoli Service Level Analyzer Managed Objects Formula; Service Level Analyzer Micromuse Netcool/SLA Manager Panacya bAware Smarts InCharge Application Services Manager

BIM isn't only about software. IT staff must meet with business leaders to get an idea of how they want to see the network perform. For example, executives at an online trading company might want its application to simultaneously support 100 trades per second. With that request in mind, the IT department then would have to configure the network and prioritize traffic to deliver on that metric. The process would require several components working in concert to deliver the requested service level.

Once the software, loaded with those business requirements, is fully installed, BIM tools collect performance data from hardware devices and other software tools in tracking services across multiple network components. The tools also can be configured to receive filtered events and alerts from the network management system based on service levels network managers wish to meet.

BIM software can then aggregate the data and correlate it against predefined (either out-of-the-box by the vendor or customized by users) performance requirements to spot behavior abnormalities. When a potential problem arises, the software can alert network managers of the probable source, and then IT staff can take action to prevent the problem from affecting business services or users.

Onus on the user

A good BIM product will have hooks into many third-party hardware devices and software applications so it can pull performance data from multiple sources (see "What to ask"),but vendors obviously cannot include data specific to a customer's line of business. Users must be willing to define the services that are to be managed. They must then put into the software the knowledge of how their specific network devices and applications perform.

"The tool is only as smart as you and your applications team are," Zurich Life's Hagn says. "The information is already there; you have to decide how to carve it to best support your business services."

Yet the team at Virginia Tech report it only took an afternoon of meetings with business managers to map out objectives and a few days of software configuration to get Smarts' software up and monitoring the school's business services. "The physical installation was incredibly easy, and the software discovered our entire network in less than three hours," Jones says.

Virginia Tech might be the exception, according to some industry watchers. In truth, the amount of manual configuration required makes others leery of empty out-of-the-box feature promises.

Jean-Pierre Garbani, a director with Giga Information Group, says that while available BIM products are useful, they cannot solve some inherent problems in managing business services with technology.

"It's difficult to translate business objectives into anything that is measurable on an infrastructure," he says.

When vendors and IT departments find a way to convert objectives passed along from business units into understandable and measurable technology metrics, network managers might then be able to achieve accurate business service assurance, Garbani says. For now, IT users can benefit from the real-time discovery of network and application topologies, and the problem isolation these tools offer, he says.

	Is it asset management or inventory management? Configuration management or change management? Service-level management or business impact management? Often in the high-tech industry, users must dissect the language used to describe a product before they can determine if they want the technology. Aligning IT with business objectives to better manage application performance is the latest trend for network management vendors. New products from vendors such as BMC Software, Managed Objects and Micromuse claim to manage service levels across multiple network elements, databases and servers to keep application performance on track.

Meta's O'Donnell agrees. He says the upfront work — and follow-up change management when network elements are added or removed — could deter enterprise users looking for a quick fix to their service management woes. He says the extensive configuration some of these tools require could be even more of a deterrent than the hefty price tag on most of these software add-ons. Prices range from $50,000 to more than $1 million, depending on the vendor and the enterprise implementation.

"Users cannot expect to do this manual effort on a wide variety of services yet, especially services that are very dynamic in how they use the underlying infrastructure," O'Donnell says.

Still, he credits vendors with adequately building models, aggregating data and linking service components to management information such as performance and status. But taking BIM software to the next level is going to be tough, he says.

"Future developments in terms of autodiscovering more complex relationships are necessary for this to work," O'Donnell says. "I see this evolution as being a difficult one."