Service Management In the Cloud

At the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference in November, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff announced a strategic partnership to deliver BMC SDE solutions on the Force.com platform. Business Management caught up with Dick Stark, President and CEO of RightStar Systems – BMC’s largest Service Desk Express (SDE) solution provider – and Greg Myers, Director for the SDE product line, to discuss the Salesforce/BMC joint service management offering that will be available in the second quarter of 2010.

“What's exiting about this release is that it combines the best of BMC's Remedy and SDE”
-Greg Myers

First of all, can you describe this new Salesforce offering in more detail?
Greg Myers. To date, there has been no cloud computing market leader in the service management space. Software companies that offer service management solutions (like CA, HP and BMC) have tried for several years to launch their own hosted versions with limited success. Salesforce believes that the alliance between Salesforce.com and BMC will accelerate IT management success with cloud computing. Customers can now leverage enterprise-class IT management completely in the cloud with Force.com and BMC Software. In other words, incident management, inventory management and self-service will now be available on the Force.com platform.

Why have these software companies had such limited success in the past?
GM. A traditional software company's pricing model and sales incentive plans are often skewed towards perpetual license sales, not term or on-demand pricing. But more importantly, customers have been slower to adopt service management cloud solutions for several reasons. The first is often the degree of complexity a fully integrated ITIL-based solution may require in an upper-mid market or enterprise market. The second is the perception that a service desk must have 100 percent uptime and that can only be guaranteed if one owns the servers and software.

Where does RightStar see cloud computing going?
Dick Stark. As a long-time BMC elite solution provider and ITIL consultancy, RightStar is very excited about service management in the cloud. We can assist customers looking for strong IT-business integration and rapid time-to-value. For one thing, every chance we get we will push ITIL as the organizational framework for service management. It's much more efficient to begin with an existing process standard (ITIL) rather than fit a service management solution into a customer's existing processes. BMC, with its Alignability Process Model (APM), provides 'ITIL in a box'. It's an easy button for ITIL rollouts that doesn't require a large outlay in terms of time and money. 

How does service management cloud computing simplify things?
DS. The new SDE Salesforce offering allows organizations to quickly and efficiently roll out an ITIL-based service management solution. It comes with detailed process definitions, which can be used to review and determine the necessary processes for an organization to complete a service management implementation in a sharply reduced timeframe. The biggest delay on any service management implementation is not the technology but trying to arrive at consensus on foundation data and processes. The use of the new SDE Salesforce offering means less time is required for process definition and tool configuration. But that assumes that the customer is ITIL-aware. If the customer is not ITIL-aware, we can offer ITIL training classes that will help them better prepare for the rollout.

Is any integration required?
DS. Most customers at a minimum integrate to a lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) so their client or user data is accurately synched up. And customers will normally want to set up a configuration management database (CMDB) for configuration items for inventory management.

Won't this initial release be a 1.0 release lacking many features already built into the BMC SDE product?
GM. Yes and no. What's exciting about this release is that it combines the best of BMC's Remedy and SDE. For example, we took a common data model out of the BMC Atrium CMDB and with very little effort added this to the product's initial release. The result is a SaaS offering with a nearly identical CMDB as BMC's largest Remedy customers. And BMC Solution Providers like RightStar are already working to have their add-on products, like MagicMobile, available on the force.com platform. MagicMobile allows users to mobilize SDE applications to a PDA such as a BlackBerry or iPhone.

Customer story: DJO

DJO, headquartered in Vista, California, is a global provider of high-quality orthopedic devices with a broad range of products used for rehabilitation, pain management and physical therapy. The company employs approximately 4500 people and has annual revenues of nearly $1 billion.

Like most organizations, in 2009 DJO was tasked with reducing IT spending. "Due to the magnitude of the recession, DJO had to figure out a way to use technology to make the company more efficient overall, including the processes that drive revenue and support our customers and employees," explains John Iraci, DJO's Vice President of Enterprise Infrastructure.

RightStar Systems, an IT consultancy and BMC Elite Solution Provider, has partnered with DJO for service management solutions since 2007, when DJO was seeking to make improvements to BMC Service Desk Express (SDE) for incident, problem and change management. In late 2009, DJO improved its ability to accurately track its resources by adopting MagicWand, RightStar's own barcode scanning solution for portable asset management. Upon receipt of new assets such as PCs and laptops, MagicWand scans the asset tag and automatically updates the SDE CMDB. When the item is deployed, the location information is updated in SDE. Warranty information is also recorded and an alert defined as a reminder when it is time to renew the maintenance.

"The end result has been a reduction in the overall cost of inventory and configuration management as a result of better knowledge and more efficient inventory levels," says Iraci.

Data center performance management

DCPM is based on providing integrated visibility and control over data center performance, so that guesswork is removed and results are predictable.

STEP 1: DISCOVER The first step is to collect and centralize all relevant data about your data center - both physical and virtual. This should be an automated discovery and inventory process to unify data and catalog information about servers and other systems.

STEP 2: VISUALIZE The next step is to take these collected assets and virtually walk through the data center, looking at multi-dimensional front, rear and side views of the assets. This is particularly valuable if racks are densely packed.

STEP 3: MODEL Once you have a 3D visualization of the data center, you are ready to manipulate, plan and manage the physical layout of the floors and rooms. This should be viewed for each asset category, such as cabinets, floor standing servers, cage representations, power infrastructure, air conditioning and networks.

STEP 4: CONTROL Optimal data center management requires far more than effective planning and modeling; it also requires that staff work together and consistently leverage best practices to manage day-to-day operations. To consistently implement corrective actions that prevent problems and minimize costs, a single source of data, best practices and management oversight of all assets is required.

STEP 5: REPORT Given the complexities of managing today's large data centers, you need fast access to ad hoc reports, powerful visualizations and sophisticated what-if analysis.

STEP 6: PREDICT Before you plan a data center migration or consolidation, you need to know if capacity is up to the task. With DCPM you can precisely forecast your data center's capacity and analyze the impact of changes so you can plan ahead, instead of just reacting.