Trying To Clear Up The Business Service Management Confusion

Is one company's performance management simplyemphasis on real-time data).
service management by another name? Does itRead the complete interview: SLM's Star Is Rising
matter what you call it, as long as the end result is aIn his interview, Adding Smarts to System
better business?Management, Sanna explains that companies are
These were some of the questions buzzing aroundshifting their focus from the infrastructure that enables
my head after two interviews I conducted, one withthem to provide services to the services themselves.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, a research director for EnterpriseThe service sits on top of all of those technology
Management Associates, a research firm that focuseslayers. But (companies) are no longer happy with
on infrastructure management, and the other with"green" on the network, "it's not my fault" and so on.
Nicola Sanna, CEO of performance managementBut how am I serving my customers? That I care
software provider Netuitive.about. And make sure you can give me an answer
In her September interview, Erickson-Harris attemptedwhile we are deploying virtualization, which is saving us
to clear up some of my confusion around the termsmoney on the back end.
service level management (SLM), IT serviceTraditional system management approaches (which
management (ITSM) and business serviceSanna calls "brute force") are too labor-intensive to
management (BSM). She suggests that SLM focusesscale well and lack the flexibility needed for virtualized
more on response and resolution times for IT services,environments, which are very fluid. He cites a Gartner
while BSM relates more directly to the broaderreport in which 70 percent of IT executives gave their
business and revenue objectives.current system management tools a grade of C or D.
I didn't feel quite so clueless when she mentioned that...that is based on people managing individual servers. If
many attendees of a Webcast presented by her firmthey are having that much trouble and that much
seemed similarly confused:dissatisfaction managing individual systems, talking
...if you talk to an enterprise user, you'll at least get anabout end-to-end services is a problem that is
answer about what BSM means to them and why it'sexponentially more complex. Now you are talking
important. It doesn't necessarily mean they have BSMabout all of these relationships between the different
implementations under way, but it does mean that theysystems and how they are impacting one another. If
are starting to get a handle on it and starting to putthere is a 70 percent dissatisfaction rate with
some of the supporting pieces in place. I think whenmanaging individual systems, how can you apply that
SLM started out, it was about bringing IT closer to thesame approach to a much more complex model?
business and better alignment, but there was a stepNetuitive's approach, says Sanna, is to add an analysis
missing in between. So there needed to be anotherlayer to system management "to make the data
layer between SLM - rising above the silos - and thenintuitive and to be able to flag exceptions
crossing the bridge to really looking at the business.automatically." The company has won some pretty big
Interest in and increased adoption of the ITclients with this approach, including Orbitz, AT&T
Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has helped promote BSM,and Wachovia.
says Erickson-Harris. Sanna agreed and named BSMOf course, it faces competition from the likes of IBM,
ITIL as one of four megatrends that is driving interest inCA and HP, which just launched a new BSM suite that
his company's software (along with an "explosion" inincorporates technology gained in its acquisition of
distributed systems, virtualization and an increasedMercury Interactive.