As we wrote in a previous newsletter, ensuring acceptable application delivery is critical to the success of IT organizations. However, IT organizations need to evolve their thinking. Yes, IT organizations need to continue to focus on application delivery, but they also need to start to focus on service delivery. We will use this newsletter to explain what we mean by service delivery.
One of the challenges that are associated with discussing service delivery is that IT professionals use the term service in a wide variety of ways. As pointed out in the 2010 Application Delivery Handbook, our definition of the term service includes the key characteristics of the ITIL definition of service. Those characteristics include that a service is based on the use of information technology; supports one or more of the customer’s business processes; is comprised of a combination of people, processes and technology; and should be defined in a service-level agreement (SLA).
In many cases, we don’t make a distinction between application and service. In those cases, service delivery and application delivery are the same thing. However, a key component of our definition of service is that a service is often comprised of multiple inter-related applications. ERP is an example of a complex, business critical IT service. ERP is comprised of multiple inter-connected business functions, such as product life-cycle management, supply chain management (for example Purchasing, Manufacturing and Distribution), warehouse management, CRM, sales order processing, online sales, financials, human resources, and decision support system.
It would be complex enough if each of these business functions is supported by a single application. However, in most cases each business function is comprised of multiple applications that often run in disparate data centers and that interact with each other over a WAN to support a critical business function. In order to ensure that ERP in general, and one or more of the business functions that comprise ERP in particular, are performing in an acceptable fashion, IT organizations need to manage not just individual applications, but the interaction of multiple applications.
As described in the 2010 edition of the Application Delivery Handbook managing the performance of multiple inter-related applications is a significant challenge for the majority of IT organizations.
Another key component of our definition of service is that a service does not have to be an application or a combination of applications. A service can be one of the key components of the IT function such as storage or computing. In addition, on a going forward basis, a service will increasingly be supported by an infrastructure that is virtual and that on an ever increasing basis, a service will be dynamic. Dynamic is means that the service can be provisioned or moved in a matter of seconds or minutes. The dynamic nature of a service enables IT organizations to become notably more agile. However, the dynamic nature of services also creates design, optimization, security and management challenges that are daunting.
So, while we still believe in the importance of application delivery, we are going to focus a lot of our research and analysis on what IT organizations need to do to support service delivery. In particular, we will focus on the service delivery network. By service delivery network we mean the LAN, WAN and network management that are needed to support effective service delivery.
