- Is the Cisco MARS mission going to abort?
- First iPhone worm spreads Rick Astley wallpaper
- 10 stunning 3D buildings made with Google SketchUp
- Open source software ready for big business
- Four reasons to buy (and one reason to avoid) the Droid
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.
Partner Content
Blue Stripe Software
www.bluestripe.com/
Improving Application Performance Troubleshooting
Diagnosing why an application is slow is hard, at times taking days or weeks to isolate and resolve. This paper explains the challenges involved using current management tools, provides a 'wish list' for application management and analysis, and explains the need for an application system-wide approach that monitors entire applications, not components.
Download Whitepaper
Virtual Vigilance: Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments
This paper highlights the impact of virtualization on application performance. "Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments" states: "Best-in-Class organizations are predominately taking actions around improving visibility across both physical and virtual systems, assessing the business impact of application performance and understanding interdependencies of applications in virtualized environments."
Download Whitepaper
Application Service Requests: The Missing Link for Pragmatic ITSM
Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell and BlueStripe co-founder Vic Nyman discuss a breakthrough approach to application problem management. Learn the new approach for ITSM problem management, which provides: Rapid isolation of application slow-downs to specific components for quick problem resolution, 24/7 monitoring for proactive notification of potential issues before end users are impacted and much more.
Register for Webcast
Comment