Management vendors to push best practices

Management software vendors this week are set to release products that promise to help IT managers put to use best practices and the tenets of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library in their day-to-day network operations.

Companies such as HP and Oblicore plan to use the IT Service Management Forum conference in Chicago, which is expected to draw about 1,000 IT service managers, to showcase new features in their product suites.

Forrester Research estimates that 30% of $1 billion-plus companies are experimenting with ITIL and about 13% have implemented it. Vendors such as BMC Software, Managed Objects, Mercury Interactive, IBM and Peregrine Systems also have begun incorporating parts of the ITIL foundation into their service management products, which industry watchers say could help IT managers.

Vendor "use of preconfiguration, templates and best practices will cut users' ITIL implementation costs and hassles in half," says Jean-Pierre Garbani, a vice president with Forrester.

HP offers customers services and software that when used with its service desk and other third-party software could help incorporate ITIL guidelines into incident- and problem-management processes. The HP ITSM Express Pack for Consolidated Service Desk is add-on software that provides IT managers with written processes based on HP's professional services division's experience with managing services as well as the service management baselines in ITIL. The software works with existing service desk implementations to help IT managers more easily draft processes, for example, to respond to problems and deliver services.

"ITIL is not a cookbook that gives detailed direction," says Bill Emmett, chief solutions manager for HP's Management Software Business. "The templates are prescriptive in the processes customers need to use to align their operations with ITIL."

HP also announced that its professional services group now offers a set of four ITSM Assessment Services the company says will help IT managers determine at what stage they should deploy ITIL. Pricing is determined on a customer-by-customer basis, HP says.

Also at the conference, Oblicore plans to detail new features in Guarantee 3.0, software that manages service-level agreements for large companies and service providers to ensure that IT systems are meeting requirements of predefined SLAs. Oblicore says it uses ITIL guidelines to help customers deliver IT service catalogs and incorporates the best practices to manage SLAs.

The company, which has raised more than $20 million in venture funding and boasts former Tivoli chief Frank Moss as the chairman of its advisory board, says it enhanced the third generation of its software to let IT managers more easily create rules and relate them to the underpinning service contract and to determine the root cause when SLAs are missed because of performance problems in IT systems. Now the software enables IT managers to drill down through the Guarantee interface to determine the problematic IT component.