BMC touts benefits of managing IT infrastructure for the sake of better application and service delivery.
SAN FRANCISCO — Corporate IT executives that in the past few years adopted a service-centric approach to infrastructure management report the change delivered cost savings, streamlined operations and in some cases greater revenue for their companies.
SAN FRANCISCO-Corporate IT executives that in the past few years adopted a service-centric approach to infrastructure management report the change delivered cost savings, streamlined operations and in some cases greater revenue for their companies.
Some of these users extolled the virtues of aligning infrastructure component management with critical business applications and using industry standard best practices to reduce downtime, become compliant and eliminate the chaos in which many IT departments have operated in the past at this week’s BMC Software’s UserWorld show, which welcomed more than 1,500 attendees.
Business service management (BSM) is an approach to application and infrastructure management that involves identifying critical business services and managing the infrastructure to support those services. Yet industry watchers say BSM should not be viewed as the ultimate goal, but more of an enabler to other IT initiatives such as data center consolidation, enhanced automation and reduced complexity within operations.
A recent report by Thomas Mendel, research director and vice president with Forrester Research, says BSM in the long term will save IT departments money and help them move budget dollars from operational maintenance to more strategic IT projects.
“By hitting all the stepping stones toward BSM, Forrester estimates that companies can save as much as a third of their IT operations budget,” the report reads. “As 76% of the IT budget goes to operations, firms that implement BSM can potentially save 25% of their overall IT budget.”
The premise is to manage as a whole the various network, server, storage, database and other IT components comprising the service-rather than tracking individual uptime and performance metrics on the components. That way, BSM supporters propose, IT shops can more quickly identify the root cause of a performance degradation and prioritize their fixes based on those applications deemed more critical to internal users or customers.
“It could take us two days to find the problem, and then it could have been one of the easiest things to fix,” said Tracy Foy, director of infrastructure systems at HealthSouth in Birmingham, Ala. “We were really in a very chaotic state.”
HealthSouth invested in BMC products and “drank the BSM Kool-Aid,” Foy said, to evolve IT operations from responding to issues in a disparate and reactive manner to a department that used consistent processes and managed services across some 1,200 network devices and 650 production servers. Committed to get results within 90 days, HealthSouth worked with a systems integrator, used processes laid out within BMC’s product sets and dedicated two staff members to making over the department’s approach to infrastructure management.
“It’s a whole culture shift. It was a tools and knowledge transfer,” Foy said. And the BSM implementation is not complete by any means. “It’s an ongoing process, but our executives have started to notice there are fewer calls to them about systems being down.”
For David Colburn, BSM technologies are helping him better manage an ever-changing infrastructure at retailer Coldwater Creek in Sandpoint, Idaho. Colburn, who heads up technology operations, said the company invested in BMC technology to help them be more proactive about systems management.
“The only time we would focus on building capacity into systems in IT was when they broke,” Colburn said. “The business was getting annoyed by repeated incidents. We needed to get control over how we delivered services.”
With about 10,000 employees (6,000 of which are seasonal for the retailer), Colburn said Coldwater Creek needed consistent, repeatable processes in place to quickly provision and de-provision systems to support spikes and lulls in business demands. The company moved from HP OpenView Service Desk to BMC’s Remedy offerings and decided to follow BMC’s processes, which are based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and other industry standards.
“Out-of-the-box became a battle cry for us. It was such a culture change to put new processes in place, we needed to follow those provided by BMC,” Colburn said.
As a result, Colburn said Coldwater Creek has reduced its annual expense budget by $1.8 million and achieved more than $1 million in gross profit by accelerating the opening of new locations – the time of which the IT group reduced from about a week to a few hours. The streamlined operations also saved the retailer $500,000 in annual software licenses and $200,000 in negotiations with hardware vendors.
Accenture is teaming with BMC not only to use its technology in-house to streamline operations, but also to deliver outsourced infrastructure management services to its customers.
“BSM can help deliver a consistent and well-maintained environment in which to operate,” said James Harris, managing director of infrastructure outsourcing at BMC partner and customer Accenture in Reston, Va. “We’re betting an awful lot on BSM transforming our service delivery model.”
Harris said his company invested “just north of $30 million over 24 months” to make the shift, which Accenture expects will help to avoid outages, failures and downtime caused by “self-inflicted wounds.” One goal Accenture laid out involved enabling 75% of the IT workforce to be able to solve Tier-1 problems. That means front-line support workers would ideally solve the majority of day-to-day issues while the company focuses its higher-level engineers on more strategic IT projects. Harris reports the company has seen “up to a 90% Tier-1 resolution rate.”
And while all BSM technology from BMC and others is “not yet fully baked” in his opinion, Harris said the process-oriented approach to infrastructure management will get results.
“If you follow proven technology-enabled processes religiously, that will pay for itself in spades,” Harris said.
