hype cycle for it operations 252566

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G00252566

Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management,2013Published: 23 July 2013

Analyst(s): Patricia Adams, Milind Govekar

IT operations management is a mature market overall; however, severaldisruptive and hyped technologies are emerging in the productionenvironment. Infrastructure and operations leaders should use this HypeCycle to set expectations when investing in these technologies.

Table of Contents

Analysis..................................................................................................................................................3

What You Need to Know..................................................................................................................3

The Hype Cycle................................................................................................................................ 4

Retired........................................................................................................................................6

Hype Cycle Overview..................................................................................................................7

Peak of Inflated Expectations......................................................................................................8

Trough of Disillusionment............................................................................................................9

Slope of Enlightenment.............................................................................................................10

Plateau of Productivity.............................................................................................................. 10

The Priority Matrix...........................................................................................................................13

Off the Hype Cycle......................................................................................................................... 14

On the Rise.................................................................................................................................... 15

ValueOps..................................................................................................................................15

Business Value Dashboard....................................................................................................... 16

Business Productivity Teams.................................................................................................... 18

IT Operations Gamification........................................................................................................20

Software License Optimization Tools........................................................................................ 21

IT Operations Analytics............................................................................................................. 23

IT Service Support Management Tools..................................................................................... 25

Social IT Management.............................................................................................................. 27

DevOps.................................................................................................................................... 29



Service Billing........................................................................................................................... 32

Application Release Automation............................................................................................... 33

At the Peak.....................................................................................................................................36

IT Workload Automation Broker Tools.......................................................................................36

IT Financial Management Tools.................................................................................................37

Cloud Management Platforms.................................................................................................. 39

Capacity-Planning and Management Tools...............................................................................42

IT Service Catalog Tools........................................................................................................... 44

Sliding Into the Trough....................................................................................................................46

Enterprise Application Stores....................................................................................................46

COBIT...................................................................................................................................... 47

IT Process Automation Tools.................................................................................................... 50

Application Performance Monitoring......................................................................................... 52

IT Service View CMDB..............................................................................................................54

Real-Time Infrastructure............................................................................................................56

Workspace Virtualization...........................................................................................................59

IT Service Dependency Mapping.............................................................................................. 60

Business Service Management Tools........................................................................................63

Network Configuration and Change Management Tools........................................................... 65

Configuration Auditing.............................................................................................................. 67

IT Management Process Maturity............................................................................................. 69

ITIL........................................................................................................................................... 71

Server Provisioning and Configuration Management................................................................. 73

IT Asset Management Tools..................................................................................................... 76

Service-Level Reporting Tools.................................................................................................. 77

Climbing the Slope......................................................................................................................... 79

Hosted Virtual Desktops........................................................................................................... 79

IT Event Correlation and Analysis Tools.....................................................................................81

PC Application Virtualization..................................................................................................... 83

Network Performance Monitoring Tools....................................................................................84

Mobile Device Management......................................................................................................86

Entering the Plateau....................................................................................................................... 88

Client Management Tools......................................................................................................... 88

Infrastructure Monitoring...........................................................................................................89

Network Fault Monitoring Tools................................................................................................ 91

Job-Scheduling Tools...............................................................................................................93

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Appendices.................................................................................................................................... 94

Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels.......................................................... 96

Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................................97

List of Tables

Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases.................................................................................................................96

Table 2. Benefit Ratings........................................................................................................................96

Table 3. Maturity Levels........................................................................................................................97

List of Figures

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2013..................................................................12

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for IT Operations Management, 2013...............................................................14

Figure 3. Hyper Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2012.................................................................95

Analysis

What You Need to Know

This document was revised on 26 July 2013. For more information, see the Corrections page.

Continuous change is coming at IT organizations from all angles, and infrastructure and operations(I&O) organizations need to remain relevant by adapting to increased change velocity as a way oflife. The business has control over more IT decisions than ever before, and it's influencing CEOs toconsider alternatives that are faster, more agile and responsive so that the business can accelerateits pace, while facing cost pressures in an economically uncertain environment.

Managing IT like a business has always been a goal, but it's even more so now. If it doesn't meetfinancial and timeliness expectations, then services will go into the cloud, or infrastructure as aservice (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) will be implemented. IT operations departments areunder pressure from the consumerization of IT to simplify their IT environments and theconsumption of the services they provide. Furthermore, as enterprises increase their adoption ofdynamic technologies — such as the cloud, social, mobility and hosted virtual desktops (HVDs) —that enable flexible styles of computing, IT operations must become more proactive to deliver onthe promises and opportunities that these technologies and processes are creating. Well-run IToperations organizations take a service management view across their technology silos, and strivefor excellence and continuous improvement.

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The struggle here is that organizations have not matured. After viewing IT data from more than 750companies, we have seen little progress. Although new technologies and approaches to solvingproblems have become available, the people and process investments are not being made.Fundamentally, it comes down to investing in staffing to deliver on the process side. Organizationscan purchase tools to automate, but they need the people to implement them. They can design andbuild the ideal processes, but they need the staff to implement and adhere to the processes. Thus,managing IT operations like a business requires a strong combination of business management,organization, processes and tools. This journey toward business partnership, while managing cost,needs to be managed through a methodical, step-by-step approach.

Gartner's ITScore for I&O (ITSIO) is a maturity model that has been developed to provide thisguidance. According to current ITSIO maturity assessment data, many organizations are not matureenough to take full advantage of dynamic new technologies, and the average organization is self-assessed at a maturity score of 2.29. Knowing where an organization is from a people, process,technology and business management perspective can help I&O leaders understand and definetheir departments' readiness for the technologies listed in the Technology Trigger stage or more-mature technologies that have reached the Plateau of Productivity in this Hype Cycle. Knowing theorganization's ability to handle risk is an imperative in this evaluation scenario as well. Typically,Type A organizations are usually technology leaders and are better able to manage the introductionof adolescent or emerging technologies, whereas Type C organizations tend to be followers thatwait for technologies to near the plateau. Type B enterprises are between the extremes.

From a business perspective, the expectation is that IT operations should be able to deliver serviceswith high quality, agility, low fixed costs and minimal risk. The promise of new technology to deliverthese business expectations continues; therefore, the hype associated with IT operationstechnology used to ensure quality of service (QoS), nimbleness and a high level of customersatisfaction continues. Making the right choices about this technology and investing wisely isimperative. This Hype Cycle provides information and advice on the most important IT operationstools, technologies and process frameworks, as well as their level of visibility and market adoption.Use this Hype Cycle to review your IT operations portfolio, and to update expectations for futureinvestments, relative to your organization's desire to innovate and its willingness to assume risk.

The Hype Cycle

Technology has moved at a rapid pace during the past 20 years, but it's threatening to slow downits cycles of innovation as commoditization gains a foothold. Within the data center infrastructure,major changes are underway with vertically integrated systems (with or without stack software) thatinclude servers, storage and networks integrated in one package, while maintaining a small energyfootprint. Traditional vendors are inhibiting progress to a certain degree to avoid commoditizationand to protect their margins. Although many technologies are evolving toward commodity — hence,the retirement of IT Service Desk Tools from the Hype Cycle this year and the introduction of ITService and Support Management (ITSSM) Tools in 2012 — selecting, architecting, integrating,managing and supporting these new technologies is a significant challenge. Moreover, newtechnologies, such as IT Financial Management (ITFM) and Software License Optimization tools andservices, emerge continuously.




With continued cost pressures, organizations are separating into camps — those that areaggressively investing in IT to gain business advantage and those in a "wait and see" mode. Despitetaking these business stances, organizations are squeezing more efficiency through automation, asevidenced in the ITScore survey results, from their infrastructures and trying to keep up with thepace of new technology. With consumer expectations driving everything toward mobility, this isaffecting the rearchitecting of apps and driving (or forcing) modernization efforts. CEOs, line ofbusiness (LOB) leaders and marketing executives are realizing that the key to their growth isthrough customer empowerment in mobile and context.

As everything becomes "smart," which results in a large postpurchase market for applicationscombined with cloud services and widespread developer support, IT will be challenged to lookholistically at a wider range of devices it may support. With devices ranging from projectors to videoteleconferencing equipment all having Internet access, either directly or through an attached PC, ITwill have to manage, count and patch it. Desk phones, smartphones and voice over InternetProtocol (VoIP) devices are only differentiated by their shape, not the functionality they provide.

Trying to balance productivity, while making efficiency gains, can be a challenge for anyorganization that is looking to manage risk; however, this is critical if your goal is for IT operations toreach the point where it becomes a partner with the business. Simply put, IT operations needs towork smarter to have time to innovate and transform the business. In addition, shadow IT is "up" formost IT organizations, as LOBs and marketing seek to move faster at acquiring IT services than theshared services organization can respond. If procurement is a bottleneck or strategy, and planningrequires endless meetings, the business will look for options outside IT. A Gartner survey in 2012showed that 28% of IT organizations believe that shadow IT is at least 25% of the IT budget.Examples of shadow IT include software as a service (SaaS), PaaS and IaaS acquired by lines ofbusiness, and Hadoop clusters, which are often implemented outside the governance of the sharedservices organization.

Running IT operations like a business requires investments in automation that will drive growth andsupport transformation projects. However, cost optimization continues to be a primary concern formany IT leaders with an increasing spotlight on IT financial management. With a limited budget,access to IT operations analytics can facilitate making decisions quickly in a dynamic environment,thereby enabling more effective planning and better use of virtualization by leveraging cloudmanagement platforms and DevOps. Many technologies and processes are clustered in the Troughof Disillusionment, because organizations are beginning to grasp how they apply them to theproblems organizations are facing. With this technology context in mind, I&O leaders are also facingbudgetary and staffing risks. Most IT organizations don't know the unit cost to deliver a service;therefore, they make uninformed decisions on sourcing.

When CEOs ask why they shouldn't cloudsource all of IT, it's difficult to provide the financial dataneeded to support an argument about capital expenditures (capex) versus operating expenditures(opex). To address this hole in the market, ITFM tools have been added to the Hype Cycle in 2013to supplement IT service billing and IT asset management data. With the right business skills andmetrics from a business value dashboard, IT can do an effective analysis and help make the rightdecisions on technology, and sourcing investments. With factual data and analysis, they will be able




to better communicate the value they provide the business and a reason for a continuingrelationship.

A key challenge facing I&O leaders, which is having a material impact on the ability to mature, isrelated to the implementation of process. Organizations have the technology, but without thecompetent staff to implement it, such technology could become "shelfware." Without skilledversatilists, rather than domain-specific skillsets, that have both business and technical skills, I&Ocan't implement the technology required for automation. Creating a culture of innovation inside yourI&O organization will ensure that talented team members will remain, rather than moving on to otherorganizations.

Every year in the IT operations management (ITOM) Hype Cycle, we introduce several new conceptsand retire a few to reflect the changes occurring in the marketplace. The changes were driven byboth vendors and clients, based on how they thought about technology or how the market movedaway from a particular nomenclature, due to an evolution in the technology. Many of thetechnologies have an underlying commonality, in that they can provide automation that reducescosts or provides visibility that will also lead to cost reductions.

This year we've added five new technology- and nontechnology-related profiles to the Hype Cycle:

■ ValueOps

■ Business Value Dashboard

■ Software License Optimization Tools

■ Enterprise Application Stores

■ IT Management Process Maturity

ValueOps, which is at the Innovation Trigger stage, has been added to help IT operationsorganizations manage rapidly changing and complex IT environments by leveraging Gartner's Pace-Layered Application Strategy to focus operations practices on the needs of the business.

In addition to IT operations having the right focus, IT operations needs to be able to quantify thebusiness value of I&O performance to support business and IT leaders in making key decisions.This capability is provided using Business Value Dashboards, at the Innovation Trigger stage of thisHype Cycle.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) Tools have been used by IT operations for a long time; however,Software License Optimization Tools have emerged to help ITAM correlate software licenseentitlement with installed software, which is not an easy task. Thus, these tools are also on theslope of Innovation Trigger.

Retired

This year, several technologies were retired from the Hype Cycle, because they were subsumed byother technologies, customers and vendors changed the way they thought about them, or theyreached the Plateau of Productivity.




IT Change Management (ITCM) Tools were once a stand-alone market, but all of the IT servicesupport management (ITSSM) vendors are now offering native ITCM capabilities. It no longer madesense to continue that as a separate technology, because there aren't any vendors that continue tosell stand-alone ITCM.

PC Application Streaming was once a stand-alone functional toolset. It has also been retired,because it is has been absorbed into PC Application Virtualization. Companies that are looking forapp streaming should look to the application virtualization vendors now for this functionality.

IT Service Desk Tools has also been retired as a separate technical profile due to commoditization.Although enterprises that are not looking for a comprehensive ITSSM suite still exist, and some areunable to fully utilize all of the functionality, the incident and problem management capabilities arenot positioned in that technology profile.

Hype Cycle Overview

To deliver effective and efficient services, I&O organizations need improved process maturity.Gartner's ITSIO enables organizations to self-assess this maturity to deliver business value. This isin the Trough of Disillusionment, because process management is the lowest maturity discipline,which suggests that, although most organizations have worked on incident and changemanagement to some extent, most have not achieved consistent process alignment nor movedforward into end-to-end service management and integrated IT management processes.

In the Innovation Trigger stage, there are 11 technology profiles that are composed of bothtechnologies and approaches to managing technology. This is the point at which most newtechnologies enter the Hype Cycle. Four of the profiles will take 10 years to reach the Plateau ofProductivity:

■ ValueOps

■ Business Value Dashboards

■ Software License Optimization Tools

■ ITSSM Tools

Although organizations may need these, they may not be able to take full advantage of the valueenabled. What is most noteworthy is the speed with which we expect three technology areas toaccelerate to mainstream by 2018:

■ IT Operations Analytics

■ Service Billing

■ Application Release Automation

IT Operations Analytics is the approach of using complex-event processing (CEP), statistical patterndiscovery (SPD), unstructured text file search (UTFS), behavior learning engines (BLEs), topologymapping and analysis (TMA), and multidimensional database analysis (MDA) to provide insight into




root causes and provide faster resolutions of IT system performance problems, and to assessrelative impact when multiple causes are involved. These tools are sold stand-alone, and thefunctionality can also be embedded in other toolsets. Service cost analysis and predictingperformance-affecting events, continues a modest move up the curve. Meanwhile, Social ITManagement has seen more progress, as organizations become aware of how to take advantage ofinternal messaging systems (e.g., Facebook-style) to communicate with users and collect dataabout outages or problems. Many ITSSM tools are embedding this functionality into the coreproducts now.

Service Billing has moved slightly, progressing toward the peak, because it provides resourceusage data and may offer service-pricing options across the infrastructure components that can beused to calculate the costs for chargeback and aggregate the details to display the cost of aservice.

Peak of Inflated Expectations

As the technologies reach the Peak of Inflated Expectations, changes are happening that reflect thegoal of running IT operations like a business. There are five technology profiles placed at this stage.ITFM is becoming important, beyond just chargeback. It provides IT cost data and analytics thatbest support strategic decision making by collecting cost-related data from a heterogeneous andcomplex IT environment, along with the ability to build a cost model with cost allocation andreporting capabilities. This will support showback and cost transparency. The costing data iscritical, as more organizations attempt to reach a maturity level needed to implement IT servicecatalog tools and populate them with actual cost data. The automated process workflow forordering and delivering IT services will increase IT operations efficiency by reducing errors in servicedelivery, identifying process bottlenecks and uncovering opportunities for efficiency improvements.

Cloud Management Platforms technology has moved rapidly to reach the Peak of InflatedExpectations, and it will become mainstream in two to five years, as the high visibility of these toolsis matched by the high expectations that IT operations departments have for these tools to managetheir private, public and hybrid cloud environments, based on policy-driven automation.

We have seen growing visibility and deployment interest in Capacity-Planning and ManagementTools. These products are increasingly being used for standard data center consolidation activities,as well as the related planning and management of virtual and cloud infrastructures. These tools arealso used to match workload requirements to the most appropriate resources in a physical, virtualor cloud data center. They also provide real-time visualization of capacity in a data center to helpoptimize workloads and associated resources.

The IT Workload Automation Broker Tools will move rapidly through this Hype Cycle to reach thePlateau of Productivity, as the expectations from these tools have begun to match their capabilities.Increasingly, we are seeing interoperability between IT Workload Automation Broker Tools and ITProcess Automation Tools.




Trough of Disillusionment

More than a third of the technology profiles represented in this Hype Cycle are located in theTrough of Disillusionment, which is the second largest in terms of overall spacing on the HypeCycle. Most of them are two to 10 years away from reaching the plateau and their value to thebusiness varies greatly. Many of the tools located in this area of the Hype Cycle have not fullydelivered the benefits expected by the users that have implemented them. There could be manyreasons that these technologies or frameworks have slowed their market penetration, such as theimplementation time, time to value or mismatched expectations. Technologies such as Service-Level Reporting Tools, Network Configuration and Change Management, ITAM, and ServerProvisioning and Configuration Management are poised to advance during the next two to fiveyears.

Enterprise Application Stores, on the edge of the Trough of Disillusionment, offer a similar approachto public stores (such as Apple's App Store), but are private and implemented on internal servers orare delivered through private clouds. IT organizations' demand for private application stores keepsgrowing as mobility adoption rapidly takes place. Although most providers today offer basicenterprise app store functionality (either as software or an as-a-service product), only a few providea comprehensive solution for all scenarios.

IT Process Automation Tools are a key focus for IT organizations looking to improve IT operationsefficiencies and provide a means to track and measure process execution. They will reduce thehuman factor and associated risks by automating safe, repeatable processes. They will alsoincrease IT operations efficiencies by integrating and leveraging the IT management tools needed tosupport operations processes across IT domains.

On the 2012 IT Operations Hype Cycle, the area that had provided a major impact and has hadsignificant movement on this Hype Cycle is Workspace Virtualization, which almost bypassed thePeak of Inflated Expectations in one year.

Some of the technologies that were on the 2012 Hype Cycle will now take a longer time to reach theplateau on the 2013 IT Operations Hype Cycle:

■ IT Service Dependency Mapping

■ Business Service Management Tools

■ HVDs

■ Network Performance Monitoring Tools

This is due to the underestimation of the time and effort needed to implement and gain value fromthese tools. This was also a year that had IT Service Dependency Mapping leapfrogging in front ofIT Service View CMDB.




Slope of Enlightenment

Within the Slope of Enlightenment, which is the largest spacing on the Hype Cycle, there are sixtechnology profiles. Most will be mainstream in less than five years. As we approach the Plateau ofProductivity, three technologies are poised to become mainstream in less than two years:

■ PC Application Virtualization

■ Mobile Device Management

■ Client Management Tools.

HVD and mobile computing have experienced huge demand due to the impact that mobility hashad on so many aspects of IT operations. However, this year, the time frame for HVD to mainstreamwas switched to a two- to five-year horizon. Additionally, server-based computing (SBC) has grownconsistently. Relatively, the HVD movement on the 2013 IT Operations Hype Cycle has beenmodest. The value proposition of these tools is achieved by making desktops more personalizedand enhancing performance. Importantly, they can reduce I&O costs by reducing the number ofservers, the amount of storage, and the number of images that organizations must use to provideusers with a personalized desktop.

Plateau of Productivity

The plateau contains the last three technology profiles:

■ Infrastructure Monitoring

■ Network Fault Monitoring Tools

■ Job Scheduling Tools

These tools are ubiquitous, mature and are approaching the end of the Hype Cycle. Thesetechnologies may be providing proven value to organizations, so the investment decision making isstraightforward. This Hype Cycle should benefit most adoption profiles (early adopters oftechnology, mainstream, etc.). For example, enterprises that are leading adopters of technologyshould begin testing technologies that are still early in the Hype Cycle. However, risk-averse clientsmay delay the adoption of these technologies. The earlier or later the technology is positioned onthe Hype Cycle, the higher the expectations and marketing hype; therefore, manage down yourexpectations and implement specific plans to mitigate any risks from using that technology.

The three important considerations for using this Hype Cycle:

■ Creating a business case for new technologies driven by ROI is important for organizations witha low tolerance for risk. Highly innovative organizations that have increased their IT operationsbudgets are likely to gain a competitive advantage from a technology's benefits.

■ Innovative technologies often come from smaller vendors with questionable viability. Thesevendors are likely to be acquired, exit the market or go out of business, so plan carefully.

■ Although budget constraints are simultaneously easing and tightening, depending on theorganization's business, organizations should consider the risks they're willing to take with new,




unproven technologies, as well as the timing of their adoption. Weigh risks against needs andthe technology's potential benefits.

Figure 1 depicts technologies on the Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2013.




Figure 1. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2013

Innovation Trigger

Peak ofInflated

Expectations

Trough of Disillusionment Slope of Enlightenment


time

expectations

Plateau will be reached in:

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 yearsobsoletebefore plateau

As of July 2013ValueOps

Business Value Dashboard

Business Productivity TeamsIT Operations Gamification

IT Operations AnalyticsSoftware License Optimization

Tools

IT Service Support Management Tools

Social IT Management

DevOps

Service Billing

Application Release Automation

IT Workload Automation Broker Tools

IT Financial Management Tools

Cloud Management Platforms

Capacity-Planning and Management ToolsIT Service Catalog Tools

Enterprise Application Stores

COBITIT Process Automation ToolsApplication Performance Monitoring

IT Service View CMDBReal-Time InfrastructureWorkspace Virtualization

IT Service Dependency MappingBusiness Service

Management ToolsNetwork

Configurationand Change

Management Tools

Configuration AuditingIT Management Process Maturity

ITILServer Provisioning and

Configuration ManagementIT Asset Management Tools

Service-Level Reporting ToolsHosted Virtual Desktops

IT Event Correlation and Analysis ToolsPC Application Virtualization

Network Performance Monitoring ToolsMobile Device Management

Client Management ToolsInfrastructure Monitoring

Network Fault Monitoring Tools

Job-Scheduling Tools

Source: Gartner (July 2013)




The Priority Matrix

The Priority Matrix maps a technology and a framework's time to maturity on a grid in an easy-to-read format that answers two high-priority questions:

■ How much value will an organization receive from a technology?

■ When will the technology be mature enough to provide this value?

In the longer term, the truly transformative impact of technology can be delivered by interlocking itsadoption with people and process frameworks. This is apparent on this Hype Cycle from profilessuch as IT Management Process Maturity, ITIL, ValueOps and Business Value Dashboards, whichhave little to do with technology.

Some technologies that have a high business impact have a short time to plateau — for example,Enterprise Application Store or Mobile Device Management technologies. This also reflects therapid change in adoption and value of technologies, such as mobile and the quest for themanagement tools to provide value quickly.

To further assess your readiness for technology adoption, consider using Gartner's ITSIO maturityassessment to understand the current maturity level of your organization and to chart a course forcontinuous improvement.

Some of the technologies on this Hype Cycle take a longer time to mature, but have a low directimpact — for example, Social IT Management.

Virtualization and the cloud continue to broaden the service delivery transparency for IT operations.Business users are demanding more agility and transparency for the services and the associatedfinancial impact they receive, but they also want improved service levels that provide acceptableavailability and performance. They are looking to understand the fixed and variable costs that formthe basis of the services they want and receive. They are also looking at data security, increasedservice agility and responsiveness. Many business customers have circumvented IT to acquirepublic cloud services. This has caused IT organizations to respond by investing in private cloudservices for some of their most-used and highly standardized sets of services. Technologies suchas Cloud Management Platforms, Application Release Automation and ITFM will help IT operationsaddress some of these challenges by providing higher benefits in the medium term.

Investment in all ITOM technologies should be considered based on their cost as part of a suite orstand-alone. The advantages of implementing ITOM technologies continue to include lowering thetotal cost of ownership (TCO) of managing the complex IT environment, improving QoS, loweringbusiness risk and accelerating service delivery, as is the case with cloud services.




Figure 2. Priority Matrix for IT Operations Management, 2013

benefit years to mainstream adoption

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years

transformational Business Productivity Teams

DevOps

IT Management Process Maturity

ITIL

Real-Time Infrastructure


ValueOps

high Enterprise Application Stores


Mobile Device Management



Configuration Auditing

Hosted Virtual Desktops


IT Operations Analytics

IT Process Automation Tools

Server Provisioning and Configuration Management

Application Performance Monitoring

Capacity-Planning and Management Tools

IT Service Catalog Tools

IT Service Dependency Mapping

IT Service View CMDB

Business Service Management Tools

moderate Client Management Tools


PC Application Virtualization

IT Asset Management Tools

IT Event Correlation and Analysis Tools

Network Configuration and Change Management Tools

Network Performance Monitoring Tools

Service Billing

Service-Level Reporting Tools

Workspace Virtualization

COBIT

IT Operations Gamification


Software License Optimization Tools

low Infrastructure Monitoring



As of July 2013


Off the Hype Cycle

As part of the annual process, we evaluate whether technologies should be retired from the HypeCycle and remove those that no longer belong. This year, we deleted:




■ IT Service Desk

■ IT Change Management

■ PC Application Streaming

On the Rise

ValueOps

Analysis By: George Spafford; Jeffrey M. Brooks; Ian Head

Definition: ValueOps is a perspective for IT operations that leverages Gartner's Pace-LayeredApplication Strategy to focus operations practices on the needs of the business. Using ValueOps,I&O leaders can implement a holistic set of frameworks, methodologies and pragmatic guidance toachieve the right balance of operational risk and agility.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Business processes change at varying rates of speed.At the same time, there is a trade-off in the supporting IT processes between the need forenablement and speed and the need to have risk mitigation that can slow down the implementation.This core conflict creates a great deal of stress in IT and must be surfaced and addressed. Forexample, a change management process that follows a one-size-fits-all approach will either be tooslow for groups wishing to innovate rapidly or will not sufficiently mitigate risks for services withsubstantial governance, risk and compliance (GRC) requirements.

Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, a tiered system that understands the different needs ofeach service class will result in better trade-offs between speed and risk. This approach was setforth by Gartner in the Pace-Layered Application Strategy approach for development to enableinnovation, manage risks and control costs. However, it is only in the last year that the applicabilityof this approach to IT operations has been recognized.

The three pace-layered tiers are as follows: Systems of record (SORs) support business processesthat change relatively infrequently and are risk-averse. This means that I&O processes must havethe proper controls in place to mitigate risks to a level that's acceptable to the business. Systems ofdifferentiation (SODs) change relatively more frequently and there is a greater level of risk tolerance.Systems of innovation (SOIs) are changing very rapidly and the business must be willing to toleratea greater degree of operational risk. Systems of innovation have a need for speed and, therefore,use more agile development practices, including DevOps.

User Advice: Review the pace of business change and tier the supporting IT services accordingly,using Gartner's ValueOps research for guidance. For each tier, review the design of processes,supporting technology and human factors to ensure that they are appropriately designed to supportboth speed and risk mitigation in alignment with the needs of the business. This balance must be abusiness decision and not decided on by IT alone.

Business Impact: By tiering the IT services provided and revising processes to reflect the differingspeed and risk mitigation requirements from the business, IT will be better-positioned to address




diverse customer needs while retaining operational efficiency (for example, by applying externalcompliance requirements only where needed). This, in turn, will enable the business to be morecompetitive and increase satisfaction with IT.

Benefit Rating: Transformational

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Embryonic

Recommended Reading:

"Increase I&O Effectiveness With the ValueOps Perspective"

"Use a ValueOps Perspective to Balance Risk and Agility in IT Operations"

"Use ValueOps to Align Incident and Service Request Management With Changing BusinessPriorities"

"Five Steps Toward a Faster, Better, Cheaper I&O"

"How I&O Can Manage Change at the Pace of the Business"


Analysis By: Colin Fletcher; Jeffrey M. Brooks

Definition: Business value dashboard (BVD) initiatives are used to quantify the business value ofinfrastructure and operations (I&O) performance in a way relevant to supporting business and ITleaders' decisions. BVDs are composed of audience-specific sets of business value metrics(themselves combinations of prioritized business objectives, business performance measures andI&O performance measures) and delivered through a variety of presentation and reportingmechanisms.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: BVDs are a relatively new, transformational conceptaddressing the long-established imperative for I&O organizations to clearly define and communicatethe business value they deliver. The continued rise of cost optimization, business fluency andexternal service provider management (both competitive and cooperative) expectations arecombining to put significant pressure on I&O teams to transition from delivering traditional I&O-focused executive dashboards for performance quantification to BVDs — so much pressure, in fact,that Gartner currently estimates that by 2017, 40% of I&O organizations will replace their executivedashboards with new BVDs.

Despite this building pressure, the fact that BVDs represent a transformation cannot beunderstated, both in the size of their potential positive impact and in the effort required to succeed.Adoption speed will continue to be tempered by BVD initiative maturity requirements; difficulty insecuring adequate investment; and struggles to move away from skill, process and culturalinvestments built around traditional paradigms, performance and productivity measures. Tooling is




mechanistically mature (as BVDs can be built utilizing reporting and presentation capabilities fromany number of IT operations management [ITOM] tools); however, appropriate predefined content isstill nascent.

User Advice: BVDs hold liberating promise for I&O teams willing to break down faulty assumptionsand take the following pragmatic, stepwise approach to start clearly demonstrating their positiveimpact on business priorities:

■ Step 1 — Obtain key IT and LOB executive support for an incremental BVD initiative.

■ Step 2 — I&O leaders should collaborate with LOB partners to determine the right questions toask and the right way to provide the answers.

■ Step 3 — Determine and document the data and analytical techniques required to deliver BVDmetrics.

■ Step 4 — Beta test manual BVDs with a subset of the intended audience, incorporatingfeedback.

■ Step 5 — Opportunistically select, implement and evolve tooling.

As the steps illustrate, the BVD construction process depends on collaboration and broad supportto solely measure the impact of I&O services as defined by its audience, not by what data is easilyavailable or what I&O teams use for technical optimization. It is also critical that BVD initiatives betreated as parts of, not substitutes for, larger strategic business alignment efforts.

Business Impact: BVDs have the potential to positively impact all business services and processesacross all verticals due to their foundational basis in the fundamental business concepts of growingrevenue (or mission fulfillment in the case of nonprofit entities), reducing costs and mitigating risk.At the heart of BVD initiatives is business and IT leaders collaborating to redefine the performancemeasurement of I&O that will result in potentially dramatic shifts of both tactical and strategicinvestments across all dimensions of I&O (people, process and technology). This BVD-initiative-fostered collaboration (in addition to that of similar alignment initiatives) has the potential togenerate the insights needed to discover new ways of doing business and new businessopportunities.


Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Apptio; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Execview; HP; IBM; Mirror42; Plexent;PureShare; Texas Digital; Westbury; Xtraction Solutions


"I&O Value Takes Center Stage With the Business Value Dashboard"




"First Steps in Building an I&O Business Value Dashboard"

Business Productivity Teams

Analysis By: Jarod Greene; John Rivard

Definition: Business productivity teams (BPTs) are a departure from traditional IT service deskteams, which react to user productivity issues. BPTs proactively promote productivity by enablingusers to be self-sufficient, in part, because they are instilled with a broad understanding of businessprocesses so they can quickly identify solutions for business issues.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The traditional IT service desk is not sustainable inthe era of the personal cloud and personal productivity enablement. The costs of IT service desksupport have increased yearly, while performance against traditional key performance indicators(KPIs) has decreased. The original value proposition of the IT service desk was formed arounddetect-and-fix approaches to service support, but the business is now looking to move faster thanthe IT support model can sustain.

Since their inception, IT service desks have been expense reduction targets that justify theirspending with operational metrics not aligned with business objectives. Furthermore, the ability tosupport the needs of the business in real time requires a largely unreached IT maturity level. Thus,business users will look to personal cloud models for new levels of functionality that IT is not in aposition to deliver.

Fifty percent of business users' perception of IT is derived from experiences with the IT servicedesk, which inhibits the productivity of users by not supporting bring your own computer (BYOC)/bring your own device (BYOD) programs. This reinforces the idea that IT is failing to meet the needsof the business. If IT objectives do not shift to personal productivity enablement, then the valueproposition of the traditional IT service desk will continue to diminish.

BPTs will use a business-value-based justification for each performance metric that strategicallylinks the relevant IT service-critical success factors of the IT organization with the goals of thebusiness. In conjunction with IT product managers, BPTs will provide an open communicationchannel that will enable IT to determine the goals of the business. Reported metrics will focus onimproved productivity correlated with increases in business outcomes by each business process forwhich the customer satisfaction overall IT service value has improved.

User Advice: BPTs should be formed only by enterprises that are on the path to becoming service-aligned and/or business-aligned IT organizations. Organizations at lower levels should focus theirefforts and resources on traditional service support management. Mature IT organizations (Level 3ITScore or above) should strategize to transform their reactive IT service desks to a proactive BPT;however, this represents only about 10% of all infrastructure and operations (I&O) organizations.Planning to replace traditional IT service desks with BPTs should align with I&O maturity road mapsfor continual improvement.

BPTs require personnel who have business understanding, technical domain knowledge andcustomer service skills. BPTs demonstrate value to the business as a group of technical advisors




capable of working with users to identify solutions for business issues. IT organizations must alsoleverage mobility and social media to enable BPTs to directly engage with the business on a regularbasis. IT organizations can look to customer support models, such as Apple's Genius Bar or BestBuy's Geek Squad, which focus on customer productivity enablement through education andpromotion, rather than reactive support. Test BPTs using a subset of IT service desk resourcesaimed at supporting a targeted business area (such as VIP or executive support) or applications/services.

No single BPT approach is ideal for all enterprises. Gartner advises organizations to customize themodel to their specific needs and characteristics. We also recommend that a low-risk proof ofconcept (POC) pilot be used to refine the BPT model, prior to wider-scale deployment.

Business Impact: As business user expectations and service complexity increase, CIOs and I&Oleaders will be evaluated on their abilities to foster a self-service culture through the use of BPTs,which have the potential to drive innovation and revolutionize the business model for IT. TraditionalIT service desks maintain productivity by reactively addressing application and system failures.BPTs use proactive approaches, including leveraging mobility and social collaboration for enhancedbusiness user interaction.

The most common form of a BPT has been the formalization of a user walk-in contact channel,staffed by Level 1 IT service desk and some Level 2 desktop support personnel. Less emphasis hasbeen put on the strategic objectives of channel. Therefore, there is less focus on business impactmetrics, such as increases in IT-business engagement and productivity levels.

BPTs collaborate at the grassroots to identify user challenges and opportunities, mine user/systemdata to identify productivity enhancement opportunities, provide training and promote IT services.From these enhanced interactions, BPTs will be better positioned to identify system enhancementsfor future releases and align business requirements to services. To this extent, the objectives of theIT organization can be developed and will become better aligned with those of the business. Forexample, BPTs can help business users make more-informed personal productivity decisions, andwork to minimize the levels of routine support by providing teaching-type support in favor of a flag-and-fix approach.

The potentially larger business impact is focused on an innovation driver. If BPTs can work inconjunction with business relationship managers, they can better understand user sentiment andpain points and be the necessary feedback loop to steer effective change that can have asignificant impact on service delivery. For example, BPTs can go to development teams with usersentiment as suggestions and enhancements to provide productivity gains that would pay forthemselves exponentially. The ramifications of not creating a BPT are likely to exasperate thebusiness, which would increasingly look to consumerization and shadow IT to achieve productivity.



Maturity: Adolescent





"Reinvent Your IT Frontline Capabilities"

"Best Practices for Conducting the Business Productivity Team Proof-of-Concept Plan"

"Four Keys to a Successful Business Productivity Team Implementation"

"IT Service Desks Must Modernize User Experiences or Get Out of the Way"

IT Operations Gamification

Analysis By: Jarod Greene

Definition: Gamification is the application of the same design techniques and game mechanicsfound in all games, applied to nongame contexts. Gamification leverages concepts associated withfeedback loops that reinforce desired behaviors and encourage good habits by turning progressinto rewards. Applied to IT operations, gamification can make IT organizational change activitiesmore enjoyable and benefit IT operations initiatives by garnering a deeper level of committedparticipant engagement.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Gamification is emerging as a trend in I&O used todevelop skills and change behaviors among IT staff and business end users. IT organizations haveused simple contests to engage staff, boost morale and promote participation in tasks deemedundesirable. Simple contests have been manually administered and have been overly focused onextrinsic rewards, Therefore, they have typically produced suboptimal results and undesirednegative outcomes. Gamification shifts the focus to intrinsic rewards (e.g., status, merit andachievement) that are provided to users through real-time analytics and data visualizationtechniques to reinforce or modify behavior. For example, gamification can provide a real-timefeedback loop to collect context data (which analyst/technician/engineer did what and when insupport of which user/service) and can provision the feedback mechanism (e.g., a point, a badge, atrophy).

Automated and accelerated feedback loops provide the mechanism for IT personnel to understandhow they relate to their peers in support of the IT organizations' goals and objectives, while alsoproviding intrinsic rewards, (e.g., status and recognition) as motivation, rather than monetaryrewards. Gamification as an engagement accelerator is being evaluated by a small minority oforganizations, exploring use cases specific to incident, problem, change and configurationmanagement processes, and driving users to lower-cost IT contact channels, fostering peer-to-peersupport, promoting user and IT staff training, and encouraging collaboration and mentoring.

In polling conducted in December 2012, 32% of organizations described their view of gamificationas an opportunity, but they remain skeptical. Forty-five percent of organizations see value, but willwait to implement, whereas 5% are already using game mechanics in their environments.Furthermore, ITSM vendors are beginning to provide layers of gamification within their coresolutions, ranging from affirmation of task orders within structured workflows to real-timedashboard capabilities that provide performance metrics of individuals and teams. Ultimately,gamification will become part of well-designed software, as opposed to a feature or function.




User Advice: IT organizations should not look to gamification to resolve issues specific to a lack ofstandardized processes and low business user confidence. Gamification can provide a powerfulmechanism to motivate behavior, but organizations must first have a clear understanding of thebehaviors they are trying to change, modify or reinforce. IT organizations considering gamificationshould start with small, simple game mechanics and involve IT staff in gamification efforts toleverage their knowledge and gain participation. Rewards should be intrinsic and mixed withinmultiple IT organizational areas to sustain attention and engagement.

Business Impact: During any transformation effort, 80% of the work involves persuading people tochange the way they do their jobs and making the new practices stick. Gamification can create amotivational environment if clear performance expectations are set to appropriately reward anddiscipline performance. Because gamification fosters higher levels of IT staff and business userengagement to perform desired behaviors, IT organizations can more efficiently and effectivelydeliver solutions to the business, reduce onboarding cycles, increase skill levels, promoteproductivity and boost morale without significantly overhauling or modifying IT operationsprocesses. IT operations gamification can also be a pilot group for larger business efforts, providinguseful test data for future initiatives.

Benefit Rating: Moderate


Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Axios Systems; Badgeville; Bunchball; Capita; CA Technologies; ServiceNow


"Engaging Your IT Service Desk With Gamification"

"Driving Engagement of Social IT Support With Gamification"

"Improving IT Service Desk Performance With Gamification"

Software License Optimization Tools

Analysis By: Patricia Adams

Definition: Correlating software license entitlement with installed software is not an easy task. Toaddress this market niche, vendors specializing in software license optimization are providing a levelof detail about product use rights, vendor stock-keeping units (SKUs) and contract terms todetermine license position. Because some of these complex licenses are based on the platform,such as cores, processors and virtualization policies, it is necessary to know hardware attributes.Software license optimization tools are a supplement to an IT asset management (ITAM) program.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The software license optimization vendors thatspecialize in license management are beginning to make inroads into large organizations that may




have implemented ITAM programs, but they are still not getting the data they need to ensurecompliance. This level of detailed data is often not found in an ITAM repository. As a result, theseorganizations are looking to a limited group of specialty vendors to assist with license optimizationand entitlement management, especially with complex server-based license types that are noteasily counted, such as IBM, Oracle, Symantec and SAP.

As OEM vendors move toward licensing models to support virtualization and software in publicclouds, complexity will only increase, and site licenses or enterprise licenses will not be the mostcost-effective for customers. These tools offer some relief to organizations that are suffering from anextensive number of audits by vendors that are evolving their license models to maximize revenueor in response to new delivery channels, such as Adobe and Microsoft, or make it complex to countand keep track of installs for software with reassignment rights. As pirated or "cracked" softwarebecomes prevalent on the resale market, it becomes even more critical for organizations to havetight controls, processes and tools in place to accurately understand their license positions.

User Advice: To achieve the fastest ROI from a software license optimization tool and gain visibilityinto all software, organizations should ensure that the discovered inventory data is accurate andthat sources are reliable. The success of the software license optimization tool is premised on theaccuracy of this data. If there is an existing ITAM repository tool or configuration managementdatabase (CMDB) in place, ensure that out-of-the-box integrations are available with the softwarelicense optimization tool. To ensure this supplementary toolset is successful, integrate it with yourexisting ITAM or CMDB tool so that discovery data can be seamlessly exchanged and normalizedagainst other discovery sources.

Gartner recommends selecting a software license optimization vendor based on its ability tosupport licensing models across the entire software portfolio, not just the vendors that are problemstoday. The vendor software SKU/product identification library will also require constant updating assoftware vendors are acquired or vendors have new releases. Without strong, foundationaldiscovery information, these tools will not be accurate, so set a high standard for data quality.

Business Impact: Regardless of whether or not an organization has an existing ITAM repository, itwill likely benefit from the detailed information in a software license optimization tool. Gartnerexpects that this market will continue as a subset of the overarching ITAM market, and acquisitionswill likely occur as enterprise-class vendors look to plug holes in their product functionality.



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Aspera; Eracent; Flexera Software


"Software License Optimization Vendor Overview"

"IT Asset management MarketScope 2013"





Analysis By: Will Cappelli; Colin Fletcher; Jonah Kowall

Definition: IT operations analytics (ITOA) technologies are primarily used to discover complexpatterns in high volumes of often "noisy" IT system availability and performance data. Providing areal inference capability not generally found in traditional tools, ITOA uses the coordinateddeployment of five capabilities: complex operations event processing (COEP), statistical patterndiscovery and recognition (SPDR), unstructured text indexing, search and inference (UTISI),topological analysis (TA), and multidimensional database search and analysis (MDSA).

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The amount of data available to IT operations teamsfor performance and availability management has increased by an order of magnitude over the lastfive years. This is attributable both to an increase in the number of data types that can be monitoredand the number of devices and logical elements that require monitoring.

At the same time, increased demand for system adaptability and for systems to be capable ofcomputations that are essentially resource-consumptive (NP-complete), they need to have acomplex internal structure; i.e., they must be composed of a large number of moving parts thatmove in relative independence from one another. This, however, means that it is not possible toinfer the behavior of the whole from the behavior of any individual part. This combination ofincreasing data volume, variety and velocity and increasing system complexity is driving thedemand for well-defined and segregated ITOA platforms and services.

ITOA systems tend to be used by IT operations teams for five different purposes. First, the models,structures or patterns are regarded as descriptions — topological, mathematical or verbal,depending on the particular analytics technology deployed — of the IT infrastructure or applicationstack being monitored. This description is then used to correct or extend the outputs of otherdiscovery-oriented tools to improve the fidelity of information used in operational tasks (e.g., servicedependency maps, application runtime architecture topologies and network topologies). Second,and to date this has been the most successful use case, the models, structures and patterndescriptions help the user pinpoint fine-grained and previously unknown root causes of overallsystem behavior pathologies.

Third, when multiple root causes are known, the selected analytics systems output is used todetermine and rank their relative impact, so that resources can be devoted to correcting the fault inthe most time-efficient and cost-effective way possible. Fourth, and this is probably the most widelypublicized use case, since the selected output is effectively a "scientific hypothesis" describing themechanisms that cause system behavior, it can be used to predict future system states and theimpact of those states on performance. Fifth, as a result of the analytics system's ability toformulate plans for action, it can determine how to resolve problems or, at least, direct the results ofits inferences to the most appropriate individuals or communities in the enterprise for problemresolution.

ITOA platforms have their counterparts in the business intelligence (BI) and security information andevent management (SIEM) markets. Gartner does expect some technology sharing and evenconvergence with BI and SIEM technologies, particularly the latter.




User Advice: Users who are at least at ITScore Level 3 or above in IT operations maturity shouldinvestigate where and how they can use ITOA tools to run their operations more efficiently, providedetailed trend analysis of issues, and deliver highly visible and improved customer service. Thesesystems may take the form of stand-alone platforms, independent of technology or processdomain, or they may be tightly coupled with a specific technology domain (e.g., applications) orprocess (e.g., configuration management). It is also important to keep in mind that most of the toolsavailable today take a siloed approach to ITOA, reflected in the fact that most support only one, twoor three of the five ITOA capabilities. IT operations teams can use these tools to make adjustmentsand improvements to the IT operational services they deliver to their business customers. Forexample, they can delay the acquisition of hardware by showing the cost of unused capacity or helpconsolidate and rationalize employing applications based on utilization and cost data.

The ability of ITOA tools to integrate data from multiple vendor sources and process large amountsof real-time data is improving but is still limited. However, the ITOA tools that have emerged fromspecific IT operations areas have the potential to extend their capabilities more broadly. Most ofthese tools rely on manual intervention to identify the data sources, understand the businessproblem they are trying to solve, and build expertise in the tools for interpreting events andproviding automated actions or recommendations.

Investments in these tools are likely to be disruptive for customers, particularly as newer, innovativevendors get acquired. This means that the product must have significant value for the customertoday to mitigate the risk of acquisition and subsequent disruptions to product advancements orchanges to product strategy. A critical requirement for choosing a tool is understanding the datasources with which it can integrate, the amount of manual effort required to run analytics and thetraining needs of the IT staff.

Users should also be aware that these tools have solved, and will continue to emerge to solve,specific IT operations problems; e.g., workload automation analytics, application performancemonitoring (APM), performance and capacity analytics, root cause analysis (RCA), etc.

Business Impact: ITOA tools will provide CIOs and senior IT operations managers with a source ofoperational and business data. The importance of this source will increase dramatically over thenext five years, as more and more business processes become essentially digitized and, as aconsequence, will, in their execution, generate data that is directly captured, aggregated andanalyzed by ITOA platforms.

Benefit Rating: High


Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: AccelOps; Appnomic Systems; Apptio; Bay Dynamics; BMC; Evolven; HagridSolutions; HP; IBM; Loggly; Moogsoft; Nastel Technologies; Netuitive; OpTier; Prelert; Savision;SAS; SL; Splunk; Sumerian; Sumo Logic; Teleran; Terma Labs; VMware; Xpolog





"How to Fit Technologies to Use Cases for ITOA Systems"

"Will IT Operations Analytics Platforms Replace APM Suites?"

"IT Operations Analytics Technology Requires Planning and Training"


Analysis By: Jarod Greene; Jeffrey M. Brooks

Definition: IT service support management (ITSSM) tools offer tightly integrated processes andfunctions that correlate with the activities of the broader IT support organization. ITSSM tools canleverage a business view of IT services, enabling the IT support organization to better prioritize andquickly resolve or escalate issues and problems, and improve root cause isolation.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Having evolved from the IT service desk market,ITSSM tools are a segment of the IT market that IT service support organizations can adopt tosupport the business. ITSSM tool functionality extends beyond traditional IT service desk tools toaddress the changing dynamics of IT service support. The ITSSM tool market is still focused on ITservice support, but with more emphasis on improving root cause isolation and providing higherlevels of business user satisfaction. Using this business view, IT support organizations can manageincidents, problems and service requests throughout their life cycles at more efficient and effectiverates. ITSSM tools enable organizations to automate the workflow of infrastructure and operations(I&O) processes familiar to frameworks such as ITIL. Processes included in ITSSM tools areincident, problem, change, release governance and request management.

These tools provide modules that enable business end users to find knowledge to support/resolvecomputing-related issues, or request an IT service via an IT self-service module. At higher maturitylevels, IT organizations are in the process of deriving higher value from solutions that offer tighterintegration of functions across process modules (e.g., incident, problem and change management),if those processes are implemented and well-established. Because only a few organizations havereached ITScore for I&O (ITSIO) Maturity Level 3, the adoption of ITSSM tools will be slow.

User Advice: IT organizations that plan to reach ITSIO Maturity Level 3, 4 or 5 during the next threeyears should replace IT service desk tools with ITSSM tools, if they have not already done so.Organizations need to understand that the ITSSM tool market alters the stratification of toolscommon to the IT service desk market. Functional differentiators for tool selection in the IT servicedesk stack commonly include:

■ Out-of-the-box best practices

■ Ease of use — graphical user interfaces (GUIs), upgrades, configurations and processconfigurations

■ Ease of integration with infrastructure components

ITSSM tools have a foundational functionality that has been available for some time, but has notbeen taken advantage of in integrating people, process and technology perspectives. I&O maturity




assessments (see "ITScore for Infrastructure and Operations") will better position organizations todevelop road maps to address resource gaps during the completion of these integrations. Inevaluating ITSSM tools, reference the organization's I&O road map to know how and whenfunctional modules will be implemented and integrated, because the acquisition of an ITSSMsolution to leverage only incident and change management modules will result in higher costs (forlicenses, maintenance and professional services) and lower utilization.

ITSSM tools are differentiated from IT service desk tools, because they add additional functionality:

■ A fully functional mobile device interface, including incident update and resolution, authorizationapprovals, and access to reporting and metrics. Also included is location awareness of themobile device, as well as the camera.

■ End-to-end visualization of hierarchical and peer-to-peer relationships of configuration itemsthat deliver IT services.

■ Social capabilities that enable collaboration around a shared purpose.

■ Advanced reporting capabilities focused on business value beyond the traditional productivitymeasures. Advanced reporting includes:

■ Specific reports tied to common critical success factors and key performance indicators(KPIs) for an IT service desk.

■ Multidimensional charts to show how related metrics affect each other.

■ A business value dashboard that shows the impact of critical success factors (financial orotherwise).

■ Process governance and reinforcement capabilities to ensure that optimal desired behaviorsand business outcomes are delivered through the team using the ITSSM tools.

Business Impact: In the past, organizations that needed IT service desk tools could choose fromseveral vendors that supplied robust suites of products promising vigorous integration of functionalprocess modules. However, most organizations now find it difficult to move beyond the simple ITservice desk functionality of incident, problem and change management. The end result is thatorganizations are implementing processes for service management entirely manually, withoutproduct integration. ITSSM tools promise to improve this by capitalizing on the ITIL concept thatprocesses integrate by exchanging information. The automated exchange of information amongprocesses within the tool enables users to be more efficient.

The ITSSM tool market presents IT organizations with a set of solutions that focuses on theintegration of process modules well beyond simple IT service. The market looks at tools thatprovide integrated functionality across several types of IT processes and functions:

■ Service desk — Incident management, problem management, request management

■ Engineering/administration — Change management, configuration management, releasegovernance

■ End user — Self-service, request management




■ Administrative — SLA management, reporting, inventory/configuration repository




Sample Vendors: Axios Systems; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cherwell Software; EasyVista;FrontRange; Hornbill; HP; IBM; LANDesk; ServiceNow


"Criteria for Developing the 2013 Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tools"

"Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tools"

"IT Service Desk Tool Acquisitions Must Be Based on Infrastructure and Operations Maturity"

"How to Decide Whether SaaS ITSSM Tools Make Sense for Your Organization"

"How to Decipher IT Service Support Management Tool Pricing and Packaging"


Analysis By: Jarod Greene

Definition: Social IT management (ITM) involves the use of social collaboration processes and toolsin support of infrastructure and operations (I&O) objectives. Common social ITM use cases includethe use of social communities to foster peer-to-peer (P2P) IT service support, better capturing ofout-of-band collaboration among IT staff members and the use social media to promote the valueof the IT organization to the business.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: I&O organizations are demonstrating an increasinglystrong interest in applying social collaboration processes and tools to the support of theirobjectives. Fifty-four percent of I&O organizations are either well into social ITM initiatives orplanning one during the next six months. Social collaboration provides opportunities for poolingcontributions, expertise location, interest cultivation, relationship leverage and flash coordination —opportunities that I&O organizations recognize can provide significant benefits. Thus far, thechallenge for I&O organizations is to develop a more mature social ITM strategy that helps themgather and identify resources and KPIs, which will reinforce the value of the program to the ITorganization and the business users it supports.

User Advice: Social ITM initiatives should begin with a dialogue with the business to determinewhether the program will be meaningful and relevant to achieving business objectives. Through thisdialogue, I&O organizations can also understand what social collaboration efforts have beeninitiated and determine business communication and collaboration trends and work patterns. If asocial strategy is already in place, I&O can reinforce those efforts, while leveraging established




policies, processes, practices and technologies. One of the primary reasons social ITM initiatives failis uncoordinated social strategies — a dialogue with the business works to mitigate that risk.

I&O organizations must then pinpoint social IT use cases. The following are common, but shouldnot limit the scope of potential options:

■ P2P IT service support — Social collaboration tools provide better and faster connections inpursuit of information to better leverage internal systems and solve frequent technology-relatedissues. Crowdsourcing via social software provides the means for users to become moreproductive in using business technologies and provides the IT support team opportunities tomanage the community to better understand what's important to users and how best to resolveissues.

■ Collaborative operations management — Social collaboration tools facilitate the capture ofinformation among IT staff that would not typically be captured via traditional communicationmethods. The unstructured processes or activities that occur in many IT operationsorganizations represent a potentially rich repository of organizational knowledge that has beendifficult to collect using traditional IT service management (ITSM) products. This capability willbecome increasingly important in the emerging DevOps arena, as development and operationsbegin to work more closely to coordinate planning and build, test and release activities.

■ Social business relationship management (BRM) — Social software can provide the meansfor the IT organization to foster a two-way dialogue with the business. Typically, ITorganizations unidirectionally inform the business of planned and unplanned outages, releasesand new services via email or through an intranet portal. This type of communication is oftendisregarded or ignored. Social media enables dynamic communications whereby users cangenerate conversations within these notifications to understand the specific impact of themessage in a forum open to the wider community of business end users. End users can followthe IT organization's announcements and services, as well as the configuration items that areimportant to them through social media tools.

A social IT strategy should be aligned with the goals, objectives and values of the organization.Failure to develop this strategy will cause end users and IT staff to create often-conflicting socialcollaboration tools and processes themselves, as well as solutions that lack the design and deliveryprinciples associated with mass collaboration.

Mass collaboration differentiates social media from other collaboration technologies and practices,and it is important to distinguish social media from other forms of collaboration (such as email,shared directories, knowledge management systems and Web content management systems) andto design social ITM initiatives with the principles of mass collaboration. Applying the principles tosocial ITM initiatives will increase the chances of maintaining an effective mass collaborationenvironment.

IT organizations should plan on working with management and users to create social ITM strategieswith a heavy emphasis on people and processes, before identifying technical requirements.Depending on which use case is of the highest priority, organizations should identify tools andsolutions that provide the required functionality, rather than letting tools dictate the approach tosocial media. Popular social collaboration tools are abundant, so I&O organizations planning social




ITM initiatives must match solutions to use cases, identify what is technically feasible and estimatecosts for deployment. Many ITSM vendors are beginning to layer social collaboration on top of theirtoolsets. However, options to leverage social collaboration tools already in use by the business, aswell as public social collaboration tools for which the goal is to engage users in the socialcommunities they most frequently visit, present additional options.

Success criteria for social ITM initiatives must consider everything that matters to be measurable (orvisible), and business cases need to layer the benefits that social collaboration provides to theorganization, in terms of improving the ability to manage scale, improve employee morale, andincrease engagement and retention. Because most ITSM vendor approaches to social ITM areimmature, the inability to measure and manage the context (user sentiment, usage patterns,influencers, etc.) has been a deterrent to many initiatives. Third-party social analytics tools canbridge this gap, as well as identify stealth IT or inefficient IT operations processes that might affectthe delivery of IT services.

Business Impact: Applied appropriately, social ITM presents the opportunity to enable the I&Oorganization to achieve their goals in supporting the business, including demonstrating higher levelsof business value. Through improved collaboration, social ITM can help increase business userproductivity, by enabling users to better provide solutions that the IT organization is not aware of,and better promote how IT services should be and can be used.

Social ITM has also proved effective in removing some of the silos that exist between IT operationsdomains, and in collaborating on a common platform around a shared purpose. It can betterconvert ad hoc interactions and other forms of out-of-band communication among IT operationspersonnel into reusable assets, which can be leveraged in support of unstructured IT operationswork patterns and improve the I&O organization's ability to support a highly available infrastructure.

Benefit Rating: Low



Sample Vendors: Axios Systems; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cherwell Software; Hornbill;ITInvolve; ServiceNow


"How to Get Started With Social IT Management"

"Driving Engagement of Social IT Support With Gamification"

DevOps

Analysis By: Ronni J. Colville; Jim Duggan




Definition: The DevOps movement was born of the need to improve IT service delivery agility andfound initial traction within many large public cloud services providers. Underpinning DevOps is thephilosophy found in the Agile Manifesto, which emphasizes people (and culture), and seeks toimprove collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementers alsoattempt to better utilize technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasinglyprogrammable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: DevOps doesn't have a concrete set of mandates orstandards, or a known framework (e.g., ITIL or Capability Maturity Model Integrated [CMMI]),making it subject to a more liberal interpretation. It is primarily associated with continuousintegration and delivery as a means of providing linkages across the application life cycle, fromdevelopment to production, as it relates to the IT services being delivered. This can accelerateadoption, as well as potentially inhibit it.

DevOps concepts are becoming more widespread, spreading within the cloud and in moretraditional enterprise environments (the latter often relates to customer-facing applications). Thecreation of DevOps (or environment management) teams is bringing development and operationsstaff together to manage (more consistently) an end-to-end view of an application or IT service. Forsome IT organizations, streamlining release deployments from development through to productionis the first area of attention, as this is where some of the most acute service delivery pain exists.

Practices associated with DevOps include the creation of a common process for the developer andthe operations teams, formation of teams to manage the end-to-end provisioning and practices forpromotion and release, a focus on high fidelity between the stage environments (development, test,staging and production), standard and automated practices for build or integration, higher levels oftest automation and test coverage, automation of manual process steps and informal scripts, andmore comprehensive simulation of production conditions throughout the application life cycle in therelease process.

Tools are emerging to replace custom scripting with consistent application or service modelsimproving deployment success through more predictable configurations. The adoption of thesetools is not usually associated with development or production support staff per se, but rather withgroups that straddle development and production, and is typically instantiated to address specificWeb applications with a need for increased release velocity. Monitoring and other production-related tools are starting to come into focus to provide, in essence, closed-loop feedbackcapabilities. To facilitate and improve testing and continuous integration, tools that offer monitoringspecific to testers and operations staff are also beginning to emerge. Another aspect of DevOpsadoption that remains a significant challenge is the requirement for pluggablity. Toolchains arecritical to DevOps to enable the integration of function-specific automation from one part of the lifecycle to another.

Due to the lack of formality of how to implement or adopt DevOps, adoption is somewhathaphazard. Many aspire to reach the promised fluidity and agility, but few have done so. While mostof the initial adoption sourced from developers, operations (application support, release managersand environment managers) has also begun various projects tagged as "DevOps." In addition to nothaving a specific playbook, understanding what types of applications are good candidates has alsobeen a challenge.




IT organizations that are leveraging pace-layering techniques can stratify and categorizeapplications and find applications (and development and operations teams) that could be goodtargets for adoption. We expect this bifurcation (development focus and operations focus) tocontinue for the next two years, but, as more applications or IT services become agile-based orcustomer-focused, the adoption of DevOps (and associated tools) will quickly follow. DevOps doesnot preclude the use of other frameworks or methodologies, such as ITIL, and the potential exists toincorporate some of these best-practice approaches to enhance overall service delivery.

Enterprises adopting a DevOps approach often begin with one process that can span developmentand operations. It is imperative to understand the business requirements for time to market and toevolve accordingly using DevOps and other frameworks where appropriate. Release management,while not mature in adoption, is a pivotal starting point for many DevOps projects.

User Advice: DevOps hype is beginning to peak among the tool vendors, with the term beingapplied aggressively and claims outrunning demonstrated capabilities. Many vendors are adaptingtheir existing portfolios and branding them DevOps to gain attention, and some vendors areacquiring smaller point solutions specifically developed for DevOps to boost their portfolios. Weexpect this to continue. IT organizations must establish key criteria that will differentiate DevOpstraits (strong toolchain integration, workflow, people and application orientation) from those oftraditional management tools.

Successful adoption or incorporation of this approach will not be achieved by a tool purchase, butis contingent on a sometimes difficult organizational philosophy shift. Because DevOps is notprescriptive, it will likely result in a variety of manifestations, making it more difficult to knowwhether one is actually "doing" DevOps. However, the lack of a formal process framework shouldnot prevent IT organizations from developing their own repeatable processes to give them agilityand control.

Because DevOps is emerging in definition and practice, IT organizations should approach it as a setof guiding principles, not as process dogma. Select a project involving development and operationsteams to test the fit of a DevOps-based approach in your enterprise. Often, this is aligned with oneapplication environment. If adopted, consider expanding DevOps to incorporate technicalarchitecture. At a minimum, examine activities along the existing developer-to-operationscontinuum, and look for opportunities where the adoption of more-agile communication processesand patterns can improve production deployments.

Business Impact: DevOps is focused on improving business outcomes via the adoption ofcontinuous improvement and incremental release principles adopted from agile methodologies.While agility often equates to speed (and faster time to market), there is a somewhat paradoxicalimpact, as well as smaller, more frequent updates to production that can work to improve overallstability and control, thus reducing risk.







Sample Vendors: Boundary; CFEngine; Circonus; Opscode; Puppet Labs; SaltStack


"Deconstructing DevOps"

"DevOps Toolchains Work to Deliver Integratable IT Process Management"

"Leveraging DevOps and Other Process Frameworks Requires Significant Investment in People andProcess"

"DevOps and Monitoring: New Tools for New Environments"

"Catalysts Signal the Growth of DevOps"

"Application Release Automation Is a Key to DevOps"

Service Billing

Analysis By: Milind Govekar

Definition: IT operations service-billing tools capture detailed usage records (similar to chargingdata records [CDRs] in the telecommunications industry); apply tariffs, prices and discounts;manage the process of rendering bills and bill delivery; and apply bill adjustments with a view ofmaintaining customer accounts. They provide cost and pricing information for services with someservice cost and price modeling capabilities.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Service-billing tools differ from IT chargeback or ITfinancial management tools in that they use resource usage data to calculate the costs forchargeback and aggregate it for a service. Alternatively, they may offer service-pricing options (suchas per employee, per transaction) independent of resource usage. When pricing is based on usage,these tools can gather resource-based data across various infrastructure components, includingservers, networks, storage, databases and applications. Service-billing tools perform proportionalallocation — based on the amount of resources (including virtualized and cloud-based) allocatedand used by the service — for accounting and chargeback purposes.

Service-billing costs are based on service definitions and include infrastructure and other resourceuse (such as people) costs. As a result, they usually integrate with IT financial management toolsand IT chargeback tools. These tools will be developed to work with service governors to set abilling policy that uses cost as a parameter, and to ensure that the resource allocation is managedbased on cost and service levels.

Due to their business imperative, these tools have been deployed among service providers, in cloudenvironments and by IT organizations that use or deploy applications, such as e-commerceapplications.

User Advice: Although COTS tools exist in the market, many service providers (including cloudservice providers) have custom-developed these tools for their own environments. Service-billing




tools take a life cycle approach to services, perform service cost optimization based on underlyingtechnology resource usage optimization during the entire life cycle and provide granular costallocation information mainly for service pricing.

Vendors and solutions in this area are being challenged by IT financial management vendors andsolutions as they evolve to develop these capabilities. Thus, these tools have emerged fromstartups, as well as from IT financial management, asset management, e-commerce and telcobilling, and software stack vendors.

Business Impact: These tools are critical to running IT as a business by determining the financialeffect of sharing IT and other resources in the context of services. They also feed billing data backto IT financial management tools and chargeback tools to help businesses understand the costs ofIT and budget appropriately.



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Apptio; Aria Systems; ComSci; IBM Tivoli; MetraTech; Transverse; VMware;Zuora


Analysis By: Ronni J. Colville; Colin Fletcher

Definition: Application release automation (ARA) tools offer automation to enable best practices inmoving related artifacts, applications, configurations and even data together across the applicationlife cycle. To do so, ARA tools provide a combination of automation, environment modeling andworkflow management capabilities to simultaneously improve the quality and velocity of applicationreleases. These tools are a key part of enabling the DevOps goal of achieving continuous deliverywith large numbers of rapid small releases.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: As with many processes, IT organizations are oftenvery fragmented in their approach to application releases. In some cases, the process is led byoperations, although it can also be (and increasingly is) managed from the development side of theorganization or a joint venture of the two groups as in DevOps. This predictably results in toolacquisition fragmentation due to different buyers looking at different tools, rather thancomprehensive solutions, to solve similar challenges. The intent of these tools is fivefold:

■ Speed the time to market associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes todeploy and configure across all environments.

■ Eliminate the need to build and maintain custom scripts for application deployments andupdates by standardizing and documenting the deployment processes across variousenvironments.




■ Reduce configuration errors and downtime associated with individual releases within a singleenvironment or across multiple environments.

■ Coordinate and automate releases between multiple people, groups and process steps that aretypically maintained manually in spreadsheets, email or both.

■ Move the skill base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less costly resources.

Adoption and utilization of these tools are still emerging, but they continue to attract a significantamount of attention from large enterprises and enterprises with Web-facing applications. Althoughcurrent use of the tools is typically limited to a small percentage of all applications in an enterpriseapplication portfolio, this percentage is expected to increase in line with the continued adoptiongrowth of agile development and Web and cloud application architectures. The largest competitorsof these tools are in-house scripts and manual processes, which are ripe targets as cost andcompetitive pressures on IT organizations continue to increase.

Additionally, the popularity and market mind share around DevOps continue to grow and bringsignificant attention to improving release and deployment or continuous deployments. This marketmomentum has also resulted in recent, significant acquisition and development activity amongvendors that represents likely continued near- and long-term investment in the market. This focusalso drives the appeal of treating the method of deployment of applications like that of coding theapplication. Some organizations are modeling their application deployments after large cloudproviders and leveraging tools that enable application support teams and system engineers todevelop automated scripts provided by newly commercial tools that have emerged from the open-source community.

User Advice: Keep in mind that processes for ARA are not, and are unlikely to become, highlystandardized. Assess your application life cycle management maturity — specifically around yourdeployment processes — and seek a tool or tools that can help automate the implementation ofthese processes across multiple development and operations teams. Organizational and politicalissues remain significant and can't be addressed solely by a tool purchase. Additionally, the betterunderstanding you have of your current workflows for application release (especially if it is donemanually), the easier the transition will be to an automated workflow, which will increase time tovalue for the tools.

Understand and use your specific requirements for applications and platforms to narrow the scopeof evaluation targets to determine whether one tool or multiple tools from one or more vendors willbe required. Although most vendors provide a combination of automation, environment modelingand workflow management, the strengths, scope (application, platform and version support) andpackaging of these respective capabilities vary significantly across vendors. While we expect thisgap to continue to shrink, it is important to understand current support and future road maps.

Include integrations with existing development and IT operations management (ITOM) tooling inyour product evaluation criteria, with an eye toward building out the niche use of these tools intoyour broader provisioning and configuration environment. Organizations that want to extend theapplication life cycle beyond development to production environments using a consistentapplication model should evaluate development tools with ARA features or ARA point solutions thatprovide out-of-the-box integration with development tools. Additionally, evaluate integration with




existing or planned cloud infrastructures or CMP tools for ongoing application release automationcapability.

Business Impact: ARA tools to date have most significantly and positively impacted businessprocesses and services that must evolve rapidly to remain competitive and often rely on agile-developed, Web-based applications. That said, ARA tools yield agility, cost and risk mitigationbenefits for most application types by improving the quality, by reducing human error, and velocityof releases through increased consistency and standardization.

Business agility is improved by reducing the time it takes to deploy and configure applicationsacross multiple environments, thereby speeding the business's ability to react to market changes.Cost savings are realized through significant reduction of required manual interactions by oftenhigh-skill/high-cost staff. Risk is inherently mitigated by ARA tools' documentation andstandardization of processes and configurations across multiple technology domains.




Sample Vendors: BMC Software; CA (Nolio); Electric Cloud; HP; IBM (UrbanCode); MidVision;Opscode; Puppet Labs; SaltStack; Serena Software; ServiceMesh; UC4 Software; VMware;XebiaLabs


"Cool Vendors in DevOps, 2013"

"Know the Application Release Automation Vendor Landscape to Shortlist the Best Vendors forYour Organization"


"Cool Vendors in Release Management, 2011"

"From Development to Production: Integrating Change, Configuration and Release"

"Application Release Automation Is a Key to DevOps"

"Pursuing Smaller Infrastructure Releases"

"DevOps Toolchains Work to Deliver Integratable IT Process Management"

"Aligning Change to Configuration and Release Management"

"How to Build a DevOps Release Team"

"Best Practices in Change, Configuration and Release Management"




"Magic Quadrant for Application Life Cycle Management"

"Are You Ready to Improve Release Velocity?"

At the Peak


Analysis By: Biswajeet Mahapatra; Milind Govekar

Definition: IT workload automation broker (ITWAB) tools automate mixed workloads based onbusiness policies in which resources are assigned and deassigned in an automated fashion to meetservice-level objectives. These tools use architectural patterns that facilitate easy, standards-basedintegration to automate processing requirements across applications and infrastructure platforms,based on events, workloads, resources and schedules.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Some characteristics of ITWAB were defined in "ITWorkload Automation Broker: Job Scheduler 2.0." ITWAB can emerge in vertical industry segments(such as insurance) where a set of standardized, risk model calculation processes is driven by acommon definition of business policies. Alternatively, ITWAB is emerging in situations wheredecisions need to be made on the use and deployment of computing resources — for example, toensure processing workloads associated with business processes finish by a certain deadline.ITWAB may make decisions to use cloud-based computing resources, as needed, in addition to on-premises resources.

Visibility, discovery and optimization of resource pools across the entire physical, virtual and cloudcomputing environment isn't yet possible. Intermediate solutions based on targeted environments,such as server resource pools that use virtualization management tools, will emerge first. Sometools are integrated with configuration management databases (CMDBs) to maintain batch servicesfor better change and configuration management of the batch service to support reporting forcompliance requirements.

Integration with IT process automation (aka RBA) tools, data center automation tools and cloudcomputing management tools that provide end-to-end automation will also continue to evolve.These tools are also able to facilitate growing or shrinking of shared resource pools to intelligentlyand dynamically manage workloads that need to be managed intelligently and dynamically.Furthermore, critical-path analysis capabilities are being adopted by many of these tools to identifyjobs that may breach SLA requirements.

Some of these tools use built-in or external workload automation analytics to manage workloadoptimization and performance. These tools will also start to develop improved automationgovernance capabilities from this year onward that will provide IT operations with better visibility ofthe various unmanaged scripts (shell, PHP, Windows, etc.) that exist in the IT environment. This willenable IT operations to move from an opportunistic automation environment to a systematicautomation environment.




User Advice: Users should choose these tools instead of traditional job-scheduling tools when theyneed to manage their batch or non-real-time environment using policies. Users should be awarethat not all of the desired ITWAB capabilities have been delivered yet. Tools that have developedautomation capabilities, such as IT operations process automation (aka RBA), and/or are able tointegrate with other IT operations tools should be used to implement end-to-end automation.

Business Impact: ITWAB tools will have a big impact on the dynamic management of batch SLAs,increasing batch throughput and decreasing planned downtime. They will play a role in end-to-endautomation, and ITWAB tools will be required when implementing the service governor concept ofRTI.



Maturity: Early mainstream

Sample Vendors: Advanced Systems Concepts; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cisco (Tidal);Honico; IBM Tivoli; Orsyp; Redwood; Stonebranch; UC4 Software


"Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation"

"IT Workload Automation Broker: Job Scheduler 2.0"


Analysis By: Robert Naegle; Milind Govekar; Tapati Bandopadhyay

Definition: IT financial management (ITFM) tools are IT owned and managed tools that provide ITleaders with IT budgeting, project financial management, chargebacks, cost optimization,performance metrics and benchmarking capabilities. ITFM tools provide the necessary financialtransparency around both cost and value to support strategic IT decision making with dynamicreporting, robust analytics and multiple financials.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: ITFM tools (often referred to by vendors as ITbusiness management tools) provide the means to manage the financial aspects of IT or to "run ITlike a business." These tools have the ability to collect cost-related data from a heterogeneous andcomplex IT environment, along with the ability to build cost models with cost allocation andreporting capabilities. Gartner has seen an increase in interest and in the adoption of these tools,mainly to support showback, chargeback and effective cost transparency.

Interest in ITFM tools has emerged during the past five years, and some of the current tools thathave traditionally been used to provide end-to-end capabilities customized for IT finance andservice functions as users have outgrown traditional spreadsheet approaches. The demand forthese tools has grown due to increased interest in cost optimization and to service-based costing,




the increasing share of virtualization (shared infrastructure) in the production environment, interest incloud computing service delivery models, and the need to provide greater IT cost, financial andvalue transparency.

ITFM tools will continue to gain visibility and capability as the pressure increases on enterprise IT torun IT like a business. Furthermore, increased interest in cloud computing is putting additionalpressure on IT to quickly justify external services sourcing and provide transparency of costs, billingand chargeback information, thus increasing the demand for the tools. Most organizations arebeginning to see the benefits of effective financial transparency and are using these tools to providebetter budgeting, forecasting, cost optimization, performance metrics and benchmarking.

User Advice: Most IT organizations will need to transform themselves to become trusted serviceproviders to the business. That said, aligning IT operations to define and provide services asopposed to managing technologies, understanding cost drivers in detail, and providingtransparency of IT costs and value delivered will be key. Most corporate financial systems lack thegranularity and flexibility IT operations require, while spreadsheets lack the required features,reporting and historical context. ITFM tools that are properly implemented and maintained arepositioned to provide the business with improved cost transparency or showback in a multisourced(internal, outsourced, cloud) IT service environment, and also assist in allocating cost to theappropriate source and help build cost as one of the key decision-making components.

ITFM tools can help with this process, especially in showing where consumption drives higher orlower variable costs. As IT moves toward a shared-service delivery model and external sourcing inan increasingly complex computing environment, these tools will enable more responsible andaccurate financial management of IT. However, users must be willing to invest in the processes andresources required, including dedicated IT financial management capabilities, to maximize thesuccessful implementation of these tools.

Business Impact: ITFM tools mainly affect the IT organization's ability to provide cost transparencyand perform accurate cost allocation, and have an impact on the value of the services provided.When IT organizations move from a cost center to adopt a service mode of operations with a well-defined service catalog, it is imperative to associate cost with each service defined in the catalog orat the portfolio level. Definition of the service and allocation of appropriate cost can happen onlywhen proper costing methodologies are used, backed by effective ITFM tools. The tools enable thebusiness and IT to manage and optimize the demand and supply of IT services.

A major benefit of ITFM tools is that they enable enterprises to provide insights into IT costs and tofairly apportion IT service costs, if needed, based on differentiated levels of business unit serviceconsumption. They also show how the IT organization contributes to business value.




Sample Vendors: Apptio; BMC Software; CloudCruiser; ComSci; HP; Nicus; UMT; VMware





"Best Practices in Implementing IT Financial Management Tools"

"How to Use IT Financial Management to Validate I&O's Relevance to Business"

"IT Financial Management Implementation Model Defines I&O Core Competencies"

"Using IT Financial Management to Improve Business Outcomes"

"IT Financial Management; CIO Desk Reference Chapter 23, Updated Q2 2012"


Analysis By: Milind Govekar; Ronni J. Colville; Donna Scott

Definition: CMP tools have specific functionality that addresses three key management layers:access management, service management and service optimization that enable organizations tomanage public, private and hybrid cloud services and resources.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A CMP must have the top three layers of a cloudservices architecture (see "How to Build an Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture"), but may notinclude all functionality within each layer. The minimum capabilities to be considered a CMP includethe entire access management layer; the service catalog, provisioning and showback/chargebackfunctionality of the service management layer; and the orchestration and abstractions/integrationsfunctionality (for resource management and external service providers) in the service optimizationlayer. As the technologies and their uses mature, we expect additional functionality to be added tothe minimum to be considered a CMP. For example, we are already seeing that most clients want togo beyond physical and virtual machine provisioning and enable provisioning of software andsoftware stacks (internal PaaS). Those clients would also require their CMPs to have configurationmanagement functionality, either embedded or integrated into a third-party product.

Access management tier:

■ Self-service request interface

■ Programmable interface

■ Subscriber management

■ Identity and access management

Service management tier:

■ Vendor/contract/license management

■ Service catalog

■ Service model




■ Service configuration management, including service provisioning

■ Service-level management

■ Service availability and performance management

■ Service demand and capacity management

■ Service financial management, including metering, showback and billing

Service optimization:

■ Service governor (policy management and optimization engine)

■ Orchestration

■ Abstraction layer to external service providers and to resource management tier (internal/external)

■ Federation

In addition to the three key layers of a CMP solution, another important capability needs to beconsidered: integration with external management adapters (or the ability to leverage APIs). CMPsolutions are not islands, nor will any IT organization have a single-vendor environment. Private andhybrid clouds often start as projects focused on improving provisioning cycles for development andtest environments. Most private clouds were originally focused on development and testenvironments; we are now seeing a significant increase in IT organizations moving business(production) applications into these cloud infrastructures. When this happens, the need to connectthe cloud to the traditional infrastructure and existing management and processes becomes thenext step.

These management adapters enable integration with monitoring, performance, configuration,incident, problem and change management tooling. As these integration ties are enabled, itbecomes important to provide access to analytics tools that can show deeper metrics for trending.In addition, for some IT organizations, private cloud has quickly shifted from IaaS to PaaS and, insome cases, desktop as a service (DaaS) for VDI environments. When this is the focus, CMP toolswill need to be augmented with tools focused on service modeling and provisioning (middlewareand database), and, in cases where there is a DevOps focus, application release automation mayalso be required as an add-on.

This mature focus will also drive IT organizations to move from a VM or workload orientation to aservices (multitier) focus. Not all CMP tools offer blueprinting capability that will enable thenecessary mechanisms to define policies, security, costing and SLAs to manage the life cycle of theservice. IT organizations will continue to be challenged to assess CMP solutions that vary greatly inthe depth and breadth of their cloud management platform architectures. Much of the fast-pacedadoption has been due to disparate cloud projects that have no centralized architecture guidingselection. We expect this to continue for the next two to three years. This will keep the pace of CMPadoption growing. CMP consolidation will occur, and it may involve rip and replace or integrationand federation of CMPs.




CMP solutions provide a mechanism to manage the virtual infrastructure, whether private, public orhybrid, and some are now adding integration or connectors to traditional infrastructure provisioningautomation. Some also manage, monitor and control the physical infrastructure. These capabilitiesvary by vendor. The major focus of most enterprise implementations continues to be on demand,utilization and placement of VM workloads. The difficult work of managing any infrastructure(physical or virtual) is the day-to-day hygiene of managing the IT service more holistically. As aresult, we are seeing some of the CMP vendors introduce new adjacent solutions that offer deeper(more traditional) management capabilities (e.g., application performance management monitoring,patch and compliance).

The CMP market is composed of vendors from a wide variety of market segments:

■ Traditional (Big 4) ITOM (BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM)

■ Infrastructure software stack (Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware)

■ Point solutions (Adaptive Computing, Cloudbolt, Egenera, NetIQ, Rightscale, ServiceMesh,Zimory, etc.)

■ Open source (Cloudstack, Eucaplytus, Openstack)

■ Fabric-based infrastructure (Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, VCE)

User Advice: With the number of vendors continuing to grow and the high market volatility, ITorganizations should consider that:

■ Today's investments may need to be tactical, especially with smaller vendors that may exit themarket or be acquired or when investments are made before a complete cloud computingstrategy is developed.

■ No vendor provides a complete CMP solution. Therefore, for some requirements, ITorganizations may need to augment, swap out or integrate additional cloud management ortraditional management tools.

Getting value out of your CMP will heavily depend on the degree of standardization yourinfrastructure, software and services offer. Highly mature organizations implement CMP in arelatively short time period (one to two years). However, less mature organizations may require threeor more years in order to design effective standards and processes that are repeatable andautomatable.

New roles may be required — for example, development skills in the infrastructure and operationsorganization, financial management and capacity management. IT organizations must alsocentralize their cloud projects and develop an architecture that will support current and futurerequirements, or they run the risk of multiple disparate implementations.

Business Impact: Enterprises will require CMPs to maximize the value of cloud computingservices, regardless of whether they're external (public), internal (private) or hybrid. This meansincreasing agility, managing and governing the consumption of cloud services, lowering the cost of




service delivery, reducing the risks associated with these providers and potentially reducing lock-into underlying software infrastructure.




Sample Vendors: Abiquo; Adaptive Computing; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Citrix; CloudboltSoftware; CloudStack; Eucalyptus; HP; IBM; Microsoft; OpenStack; Red Hat; RightScale;ServiceMesh; VMware


"How to Build an Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture"

"How the Cloud Management Platform Market Shakeout Will Affect Buying Decisions"


Analysis By: Ian Head; Milind Govekar

Definition: These tools enable IT to plan, manage and optimize the use of IT infrastructure andapplication capacity for business and IT service life cycles and scenarios. They go beyond trending,providing "what if" scenario modeling, based on business and IT data. These tools also provide areal-time view of the capacity of resources in a physical, virtual and cloud data center. The toolsprovide guidance on matching workloads to resources to optimize the data center environment.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Since 2010, we have seen growing interest in andimplementation of capacity-planning tools. These products are increasingly being used for standarddata center consolidation activities, as well as the related planning and management of virtual andcloud infrastructures. These tools are also used to match workload requirements to the mostappropriate resources in a physical, virtual or cloud data center. They provide real-time visualizationof capacity in a data center to help optimize workloads and associated resources. Some of thesetools are embracing operational analytics functionality to provide performance and capacityinformation for structured and unstructured data and environments. These tools require skilledpeople who may be part of a performance management group.

Capacity-planning tools provide value by enabling enterprises to build performance scenarios(models) that relate to business demand, often by asking what-if questions, and assessing theimpact of the scenarios on various infrastructure components. Capacity also has to be managed(capacity management) in real time in a production environment that includes on-premises or cloudIT resources in a physical or virtual environment. This includes assessing the impact onperformance of moving distressed workloads due to lack of resources to another environment withmore resources, in real time (defragmenting the production environment).




Capacity-planning tools help plan IT support for optimal performance of business processes, basedon planned variations of demand. These tools are designed to help IT organizations achieveperformance goals and plan budgets, while preventing the overprovisioning of infrastructure or thepurchasing of excessive off-premises capacity. Thus, the technology has evolved from purely aplanning perspective to provide real-time information dissemination, and control of workloads tomeet organizational performance objectives.

Increasingly, these technologies are being used to plan and manage capacity at the IT service andbusiness service levels, where the tools permit an increased focus on performance of the businessprocess and resulting business value. Although physical infrastructure and primarily component-focused capacity-planning tools have been available for a long time, products that supportincreasingly dynamic environments are not yet fully mature.

Although adequately trained personnel will still be at a premium, some of these products haveevolved to the point where many of their functions can be performed competently by individuals notassociated with performance engineering teams, and some of the capacity-planning tools requirelittle human intervention at all. These tools are helpful for performance engineering teams andshould not be seen as an alternative.

User Advice: Capacity planning and management has become especially critical due to theincrease in shared infrastructures and enterprises devising strategies to implement hybrid-ITenvironments and where the potential for resource contention may be greater. Users should investin capacity-planning and management tools to lower costs and to manage the risks associated withperformance degradation and capacity shortfalls. Although some tools are easier to use andimplement than others, many can still require a high level of skill, so adequate training must beavailable to maximize the utility of these products. A cautionary example would be virtual-serveroptimization tools, which have enormous potential, but require skillful use to avoid unexpectedperformance degradation elsewhere in the infrastructure.

Finally, determine the requirements of your infrastructure and application management environment— some organizations may only require support of virtual and cloud environments, while others willneed to include support for what may still be a substantial legacy installed base.

Business Impact: Organizations in which critical business services rely heavily on IT servicesshould use capacity-planning and management tools to ensure high performance and minimize thecosts associated with "just in case" capacity headroom excesses. When more accurateinfrastructure investment plans and forecasts are required, these tools are essential, but they areusually implemented successfully only by organizations with high IT service management maturityand a dedicated performance management group.







Sample Vendors: BMC Software; CA Technologies; CiRBA; Dell (Quest Software); OpnetTechnologies; Sumerian; TeamQuest; Veeam; VMTurbo; VMware


"Govern the Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning Process With These 13 Key Tasks"

"How to Create and Manage an Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Plan"

"How to Build Best-Practice Infrastructure Capacity Plans"

"Toolkit: Business and IT Operations Data for the Performance Management and Capacity PlanningProcess"

"Toolkit: Server Performance Monitoring and Capacity Planning Tool RFI"

IT Service Catalog Tools

Analysis By: Jeffrey M. Brooks; Debra Curtis

Definition: IT service catalog tools simplify the documentation of orderable IT service offerings andthe creation of an IT service request portal so end users and business unit customers can easilysubmit IT service requests via a portal. This portal format includes space for easy-to-followinstructions on how to request services, details on service pricing, service-level commitments andescalation/exception-handling procedures. In addition, IT service catalog tools provide a processworkflow engine to automate, manage and track service fulfillment.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: As IT organizations adopt a business-oriented ITservice management strategy, they seek greater efficiency in discovering, defining and documentingIT services; automating the processes for delivering IT services; and managing service demand andservice financials. Although the 2011 update to ITIL put additional focus on IT service catalogs, thetarget market for the tools is IT organizations that have attained the service-aligned level (Level 4) ofthe ITScore maturity model for infrastructure and operations (I&O). Self-assessments indicate this tobe substantially less than 5% of IT organizations, which slows adoption speed and lengthens thetime to plateau.

Some IT organizations at the proactive level of ITScore for I&O (Level 3) that are attempting toautomate the fulfillment of requests that come into the service desk may also be candidates for aservice catalog. Additionally, cloud projects provide another impetus for IT to investigate theconcepts and tools for a service catalog, although, in this case, the catalog tends to focusexclusively on cloud provisioning requests.

IT organizations will proceed through a number of maturity steps, likely first documenting their ITservice catalog in a simple Microsoft Word document, then storing it in an Excel spreadsheet or ahomegrown database. A typical second stage of maturity appears with a homegrown IT servicecatalog portal on the intranet, which is placed under change control. Finally, IT organizations matureto using commercial off-the-shelf IT service catalog tools to present an online self-service portal forcustomers to place orders.




User Advice: Enterprises should have mature IT service management processes, documented ITarchitecture standards and a defined IT service portfolio before embarking on an IT service catalogproject. Some functions of emerging IT service catalog tools overlap with more-mature IT servicedesk tools. There is a high potential for market consolidation and acquisition as IT service catalogfeatures begin to blend with or disappear into other categories. The I&O organization should alsorecognize that subprojects may emerge in private or hybrid clouds, where service catalogs andrequest portals are inherent in the cloud management platform or other similar products.

Business Impact: IT service catalog tools are intended to improve the business users' customerexperience and increase IT operations efficiency. IT service catalogs simplify the service requestprocess for customers and improve customer satisfaction by presenting a single face of IT to thecustomer for all kinds of IT interactions, including incident logging, change requests, employeeonboarding, service requests, cloud provisioning requests, project requests and new applicationrequests.

Once services are described in standardized, orderable IT service catalog offerings, repeatableprocess methodologies for service fulfillment can be documented and automated. This will reduceerrors in service delivery, help identify process bottlenecks and uncover opportunities for efficiencyimprovements. Users of the IT service catalog may have different views and services availablebased on their profile and position in the organization.

IT service catalog tools provide reporting and, sometimes, a real-time dashboard display of servicedemand and service fulfillment milestones for IT analysis and for customers to track their servicerequests. In some cases, IT service catalog tools include financial management capabilities thathelp the IT operations group analyze service costs and service profitability, and communicate pricesfor different IT service options, enabling business unit customers to make better investmentdecisions.




Sample Vendors: Biomni; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cisco; HP; IBM Tivoli; Kinetic Data;PMG; SMT-X; USU


"Critical Capabilities for IT Service Catalog"

"How to Make Selections With the IT Service Catalog Buyers Guide"

"ITSM Fundamentals: How to Construct an IT Service Catalog"

"An IT Service Catalog Is More Than Just Service Request Management"




Sliding Into the Trough

Enterprise Application Stores

Analysis By: Monica Basso; Ian Finley

Definition: Enterprise application stores support application discovery and downloads through alocal storefront client or browser on a smart device or PC. Enterprise application stores are private,cloud-based or deployed on-premises, and they help organizations deploy applications foremployees and partners.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Enterprise application stores offer a similar paradigmto public stores (such as Apple's App Store), but are private and implemented on internal servers orare delivered through private clouds. Unlike consumer app stores, they offer selected applicationsthat meet enterprise requirements. An increasing number of enterprise portals promote applicationsthat employees should or are recommended to download, either by passing through to the store orfrom local storage. Private mobile application stores are critical for organizations with many mobileapps in order to support easy discovery and distribution of applications to the mobile workforce andend customers and to provide additional security controls and management capabilities.

Mobile device management (MDM) vendors, such as AirWatch, MobileIron, Citrix, GoodTechnology, SAP, Fiberlink, Symantec and BoxTone, provide corporate app store capabilities aspart of their MDM offerings. Citrix, with its unified corporate app store for mobile, Web, SaaS andWindows applications, goes beyond mobile devices to support any endpoint client. Private orenterprise application store capabilities can also be found in offerings from mobile applicationmanagement (MAM) vendors such as Partnerpedia and Apperian and mobile applicationdevelopment platform (MADP) vendors such as SAP, Antenna and Kony.

IT organizations' demand for private application stores keeps growing as mobility adoption rapidlytakes place. We expect that it will take less than two years before going to plateau, and manyorganizations already use them as a standard for mobile application distribution. Factors that maylimit a broader adoption in the short term include lack of market maturity, costs and the viability oflegacy business applications in new app stores. However, the pressure to implement safeenterprise app stores will grow as employees increasingly use personal mobile, Web and cloudapps at work, and as IT organizations understand the associated risks. Hence, we expect a growingnumber of organizations to implement enterprise app stores during the next few years.

Although most providers offer basic enterprise app store functionality (either as software or as anas-a-service offering), few (for example, Citrix) provide a comprehensive solution for all scenarios.The current market is quite immature, in fact, but will expand during the next few years. We expectthat more players, including MDM, MAM and MADP vendors, will start offering integratedcapabilities, as will new entrants such as system integrators and service providers that will launchenterprise mobility services that include outsourced enterprise application stores. Application storesfor PC and desktop Web applications may take much longer to mature.

User Advice: Enterprises should evaluate private application stores to support enhancedapplication delivery and management on mobile and client computing devices for their mobile




workforce. They can help improve the modularity, user experience, standards compliance, platformcompatibility, provisioning, security and deployability of the application portfolio.

Business Impact: Private app stores can help to reduce security risks through better managementof application and data assets. Employees are increasingly using mobile and cloud apps available inpublic stores, both on corporate and personal devices that store corporate data and are connectedto corporate systems. Some public apps can threaten IT security threats to the enterprise. Securityleaders can reduce these threats by discouraging the use of unsafe applications and providing asafe enterprise alternative through a private app store that highlights safe public apps and corporateapps.

Private app stores can help software asset managers lower administration overhead and drive costaccountability. An app store can help manage traditional software licensing models, SaaSsubscriptions and other, more elastic on-demand cloud provisioning models by automating thecapture of license, subscription and cost assignment data during check-out. More matureenterprises can use app store data to manage ongoing maintenance and support costs and to drivebetter accountability through more sophisticated and accurate chargeback models.




Sample Vendors: AirWatch; BoxTone; Citrix; Embarcadero; Good Technology; MobileIron;Partnerpedia; SAP; Symantec; VMware; Vodafone; Zenprise


"Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management Software"

"Enterprise App Stores Can Increase the ROI of the App Portfolio"

"Regain Control of Mobile Software Licensing With an Enterprise App Store"

"There's an App for That: The Growth of Enterprise Application Stores"

"Two Foundations of a Successful App Store"

COBIT

Analysis By: Ian Head; Simon Mingay

Definition: COBIT, owned by ISACA, originated as an IT control framework and COBIT 5 hasevolved into a broader IT governance and management framework for the purpose of ensuring thatthe enterprise's investment in IT will enable the achievement of its goals. COBIT 4.1 was andremains used by many midsize to large organizations across a wide range of industries to




implement controls to manage key risks or meet an audit or compliance requirement. This profileconsiders COBIT from an IT operations perspective.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: COBIT 5 is a major initiative by ISACA to bringtogether many of their frameworks into a single governance and management framework. There isvery limited mapping between COBIT 4.1 and COBIT 5 and, most notably, COBIT 5 uses theconcepts of governance and management practices rather than control objectives. No longer isCOBIT an acronym for Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies, but is simply abrand name for the ISACA product. Organizations are being very cautious in their adoption of thenew COBIT 5 released in April 2012, preferring to make use of the more established 4.1 until 5 hasproved itself.

COBIT is having a slow, but steadily increasing, effect on IT operations, as IT operationsorganizations start to realize its benefits, such as more-predictable operations. There are someenterprises that are adopting COBIT and issuing mandates for IT operations to comply with it.However, few operations leaders use it as a broad framework to manage and govern the creation ofvalue and in-depth use of COBIT within operations is limited.

COBIT 5 has the potential to act as a unifying force in the management and governance of the ITorganization and the wider business. As a control framework, COBIT is well-established, especiallyamong auditors and, while its indirect effect on IT operations can be significant, it's unlikely to be afrequent point of reference for IT operations management. As typical IT operations and otheraffected groups become more familiar with the implications of COBIT, and awareness and adoptionincrease, the framework will progress slowly along the Hype Cycle. Gartner again saw a smallincrease in client inquiry calls in 2012, and expects interest to increase as IT operationsprofessionals increasingly understand how to leverage the framework for raising the maturity ofservice, process, risk and governance of IT.

User Advice: Even with the v.5 update and its integration of ISACA's many frameworks, the focusof this high-level framework is on what must be done, not how to do it. Therefore, IT operationsmanagement has typically used COBIT 4.1 as part of a mandated program in the IT organizationand to provide guidance regarding the kind of controls needed to meet the program's requirements.Process engineers can, in turn, leverage other standards, such as ITIL, for additional design detailsto use pragmatically. Despite v.5's expansion, it still complements, rather than replaces, ITIL, andCOBIT 5 has the potential to be the tool used by leaders to identify business and IT needs and isthe most appropriate framework or standard to address those needs.

Because COBIT 5 has adopted the ISO 15504 process maturity model and also incorporates COBIT4.1, Val IT 2.0, Risk IT, Business Model for Information Security (BMIS) and the InformationTechnology Assurance Framework (ITAF), COBIT 4.1 expertise will have limited applicability toCOBIT 5. Consequently, a major training and familiarization exercise needs to be undertaken byorganizations adopting COBIT 5 as a successor to COBIT 4.1, and is part of the reason for the slowadoption of 5.

IT operations managers who want to assess their management and governance to better mitigaterisks and reduce variations, and are aiming toward clearer business alignment of IT services, shoulduse COBIT in conjunction with other frameworks, including ITIL and ISO 20000. Those IT operations




managers who want to gain insight into what auditors will look for, or into the potential implicationsfor compliance programs, should also take a closer look at COBIT, but adoption of COBIT 5 canonly be successful if the wider enterprise embraces the framework. Any operations team facing ademand for wholesale implementation should push back and focus its application in areas wherethere are specific risks in the context of its operation.

In particular, operations leaders should know whether a specific audit is being conducted againstthe COBIT 4.1 or COBIT 5 framework, because there will be significant differences in approach.Successful adoption of COBIT 5 requires a concerted program of effort involving the audit team, IToperations and the other stakeholders to ensure all efforts are headed in the same direction.

COBIT 4.1 is still better-positioned than ITIL in terms of managing IT operations' governance andhigh-level risks; as such, enterprises that wish to put their IT service management program in thebroader context of a management and governance framework should use COBIT. COBIT 5, extendsits scope to the business drivers and stakeholder needs that cascade ultimately to the IT-relatedgoals. The mappings and weightings of the needs to the IT goals are essential to the COBIT 5 viewof the questions that IT must address if it is to be successful.

COBIT's scope is the entire enterprise; therefore, IT operations managers can refer to this source ifthey believe the goals of the enterprise are not clearly communicated and cascaded to their ownfunctional teams. Services and processes and their associated capabilities must now be focused onaddressing the explicit goals of the enterprise and not simply to implement a complete set ofcontrols unless each relates to meeting a specific goal.

If an organization were to be audited using COBIT 5 this may also highlight where business goalsare not well articulated or the goal's implications are not cascaded down into IT operations goals.

These cascading goals can serve as audit trails to justify the IT activities, processes and services,and can help build business cases around each of them at the different levels of detail as required.Each COBIT 5 process is part of a cascade that links directly to business goals to justify what itfocuses on, how it plans to achieve the targets and how it can be measured (metrics).

An additional consideration is that service improvement programs that seek to leverage ITIL all toofrequently set themselves up as bottom-up, tactical, process engineering exercises, lacking astrategic or business context. ITIL encourages and provides guidance for a more strategicapproach, and COBIT can help in achieving that, particularly by drawing business stakeholders intothe organizational change.

Business Impact: Although v.5 moves COBIT toward a broader management and governanceframework, it is seen by most users as a framework for effective governance and reducing risk. Itaffects all areas of managing the IT organization, including aspects of IT operations. Managementshould review how COBIT 5 can be used to enhance governance practices and help better managerisks and, thus, result in improved performance. COBIT's usefulness has moved a long way beyonda simple audit tool. However, the lack of compatibility with earlier versions will necessitate anextensive training program for all those affected by the adoption of COBIT 5.








"Leveraging COBIT for Infrastructure and Operations"

"Understanding IT Controls and COBIT"

"Updates in COBIT 5 Aim for Greater Relevance to Wider Business Audience"

"Market Trends: IT Governance, Risk and Compliance Management, Worldwide, 2013"

"The Executive Guide to Managing Regulatory Change"

IT Process Automation Tools

Analysis By: Ronni J. Colville; Aneel Lakhani

Definition: IT operations process automation (ITPA) tools automate across traditional, virtual andpublic cloud resources, and can be used to integrate and orchestrate multiple IT operationsmanagement tools. ITPA products have three key functional elements: a workflow design studio, anautomation engine and an integration framework. ITPA tools can focus on a specific process (e.g.,server provisioning), replacing or augmenting scripts and manual processes, or can apply toprocesses that span different domains.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Adoption of IT operations process automation toolscontinues to grow as a key focus for IT organizations looking to improve IT operations efficienciesand provide a means to track and measure process execution. ITPA tools provide a mechanism tohelp IT organizations take manual or scripted processes and automate them, as well as providing away to integrate disparate IT operations tool portfolios to improve process handoffs. We expectmany IT organizations to have multiple ITPA tools, acquired to solve specific problems or as anembedded capability in a (larger) vendor enterprise agreement. This in itself, as in many tool spaces,may result in overlapping functionality and the use of multiple nonintegrating tools.

One key driver for ITPA tools (or the ITPA capability) is the uptick in private, public and hybrid cloudadoption. Several cloud management platform (CMP) vendors have integrated existing ITPA toolingas an orchestration layer within their CMP tools. Additionally, some IT organizations are leveragingexisting ITPA tools that they have in place for other automation initiatives (e.g., fault and event,server provisioning, etc.) for basic cloud management provisioning activities or as the glue tyingtogether the various tools used for cloud projects. For example, IT organizations may be using aservice desk tool for service catalog or service requests, and are calling the ITPA tool from theservice desk tool for execution of workflows to provision the appropriate resources (either on- oroff-premises). A key enabler of these use cases is the ability to interact with and orchestrate Webservices and APIs.




In addition to cloud projects, ITPA tools continue to be used to drive efficiencies in automatingincident resolution and closed-loop change management. There has even been an increase inactivity where ITPA tools are linked to workload automation and job scheduling tools to drive end-to-end batch processes and business process automation. ITPA tools drive lower-level automation,replacing manual tasks and scripts, which often cause outages due to misconfiguration orbreakages in scripts.

ITPA tools continue to be enhanced, particularly in the areas of scalability, performance, usability,and prepackaged content and connectors or adapters. Some have added advanced embeddeddecision-making logic in their workflows to allow automatic decisions on process execution. Thereare no signs that the adoption and visibility of these tools will diminish, as they continue to be usedto address some of today's key IT challenges, including reducing IT operational costs; theautomation of virtual infrastructure; and supporting private, public and hybrid cloud initiatives.

The three biggest inhibitors to more widespread adoption continue to be:

■ The requirement for base content that is extensible. While many ITPA tools offer ample content,most IT organizations have unique requirements and have to modify the content to meet theirspecific requirements. This still requires a potentially significant and deep skill set to build andmaintain content. For content or connectors that are not out of the box or extensible, ITorganizations must develop this content, then migrate it as new versions of the tool becomeavailable.

■ A lack of knowledge of the tasks or activities being automated. Many organizations try to usethese tools without the necessary process knowledge, and developing this process designoften requires cross-domain expertise and coordination. IT organizations that don't have theirprocesses and task workflows documented often take longer to succeed with these tools.

■ Replacing of existing automation achieved through scripting may be slightly to very difficult,depending on the level of knowledge about how this automation was achieved. ITadministrators have often used scripting as an opportunistic solution to any automationproblem encountered, thereby creating an unmanaged and fragile environment that is not well-understood. Furthermore, replacement of the ITPA tool itself is difficult as each tends to have itsown semantics and conventions that are nontransferrable.

User Advice: ITPA tools that have a specific orientation (e.g., user provisioning and serverprovisioning) and provide a defined (out-of-the-box) process framework can aid in achieving rapidvalue. When used in this way, the tools are focused on a specific set of IT operations managementprocesses. However, using a more general-purpose ITPA tool requires more-mature, understoodprocess workflows and specific skills to develop, build and maintain unique automation orintegration connector content. Select ITPA tools with an understanding of your process maturityand the tool's framework orientation. Clients should expect to see ITPA tools positioned and sold toaugment and enhance current IT management products within a single vendor's product portfolio.

However, when used to support a broader range of process needs that cross domains and multipleprocesses, or even possibly multiple vendor tool portfolios, clients should develop and documenttheir IT operations management processes before implementing ITPA tools. IT operations managers




who understand the challenges and benefits of using IT operations management tools shouldconsider ITPA tools as a way to reduce risk where handoffs occur, or to improve efficiencies wheremultiple tool integrations can establish repeatable best-practice activities. This can only beachieved after the issues of complexity are removed through standardizing processes to improverepeatability and predictability. In addition, IT operations processes that cross different ITmanagement domain areas will require organizational cooperation and support, and theestablishment of process owners.

Business Impact: ITPA tools will have a significant effect on running IT operations as a business,even with cloud architectures extending to public resources, by providing consistent, measurableand repeatable services at better costs. They will reduce the human factor and associated risks byautomating safe, repeatable processes, and will increase IT operations efficiencies by integratingand leveraging the IT management tools needed to support IT operations processes across ITdomains.




Sample Vendors: Appnomic Systems; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cisco; gen-E; HP;Microsoft; NetIQ; Network Automation; UC4 Software; VMware


"Best Practices for and Approaches to IT Operations Process Automation"

"Run Book Automation Reaches the Peak of Inflated Expectations"

"RBA 2.0: The Evolution of IT Operations Process Automation"

"The Future of IT Operations Management Suites"

"IT Operations Management Framework 2.0"


Analysis By: Jonah Kowall; Will Cappelli

Definition: Gartner defines application performance monitoring (APM) as one or more softwareand/or hardware components that facilitate monitoring to meet five main functional dimensions:end-user experience monitoring (EUM), application topology discovery and visualization, user-defined transaction profiling, application component deep dive, and IT operations analytics.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Gartner has seen a rise in demand from clientsinvesting in these tools, as most enterprises continue their transformations from purelyinfrastructure monitoring to application monitoring. In their journeys toward IT service management,APM tools provide value to multiple IT organizations for the rapid isolation and root cause analysis




(RCA) of problems, understanding user behavior and experience, as well as understanding theperformance changes of an application's components.

The increasing adoption of private and public cloud computing is stimulating the desire for moreinsight into application and user behavior. This journey will require collaboration with, andcoordination among, the application development teams and the IT infrastructure and operationsteams, which don't always have the same priorities and goals. The need to work together and shareinformation is a key delivery of APM solutions, and often requires to support agile development andrelease processes, which are the underpinnings of DevOps. This is critical to better understand thequality of releases versus previously deployed software in support of agile release schedules. Thedemand and importance placed on APM tools has increased significantly during the past severalyears, and will continue as applications and infrastructures become more complex, dynamic, andadditional layers of abstraction are introduced (for example, virtualization, SDN, and APIabstraction). These products are well-adopted, but also maturing to handle the changes presentedby public and private cloud, therefore, the adoption is high. Older APM technologies are beingreplaced by second- and third-generation technologies.

User Advice: Enterprises should use these tools to proactively measure application availability andperformance. These technologies should be evaluated to monitor custom applications andpackaged applications (e.g., SAP, Oracle Applications and Middleware, or vertically alignedapplications), as well as support technologies, such as application servers, databases and datastores, messaging middleware and mainframe components. Converged APM products are creatingeasier deployments, and delivery models leveraging software as a service (SaaS) will continue toallow lower cost adoption of these technologies. This technology is particularly suited for highlycomplex applications and dynamic infrastructure environments. These technologies become evenmore important as enterprises adopt cloud infrastructure, and are critical when deploying in publiccloud production environments.

The requirement of integration to current monitoring systems, including server, network, virtualfabric and storage, is becoming more critical. Some products will integrate, while others will monitorthese components separately. Enterprises should take into consideration that the complexity of thetools varies from very simple deployments to highly complex solutions requiring consultingengagements for those with complex and diverse application environments. Many organizationsstart with end-user experience monitoring tools to first get a view of end-user or application-levelperformance. These buying centers often find the most value in specific dimensions, such as EUM,application topology, transaction profiling, deep dive, and analytics.

Business Impact: APM tools are critical in the problem-isolation process, thus shortening meantime to repair and improving service availability. They provide correlated performance data thatbusiness users can utilize to answer questions about service levels and user populations, often inthe form of easily digestible dashboards. These tools are paramount to improving andunderstanding service quality as users interact with applications. They allow for multiple IT groupsto share captured data and assist users with advanced analysis needs.







Sample Vendors: Absolute Performance; Apica; AppDynamics; AppEnsure; Appnomic; AppNeta;AppSense; Arcturus Technologies; ASG Software Solutions; Aternity; BlueStripe Software; BMCSoftware; Boundary; Catchpoint; CA Technologies; Cedexis; Compuware; Correlsense; Corvil;Crittercism; Dell (Quest Software); eG Innovations; Endace; ExtraHop Networks; Fluke Networks;HP; IBM; Idera; Inetco Systems; InfoVista; ITRS; JenniferSoft; Keynote Systems; Knoa Software;Lucierna; ManageEngine; Microsoft; Nastel Technologies; NetScout Systems; Network Instruments;Neustar; New Relic; Nexthink; OpTier; Oracle; Precise; Progress Software; Riverbed Networks; SLCorporation; SmartBear Software; Splunk; Sumo Logic; Triometric; Virtual Instruments


"Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring"

"Use Synthetic Monitoring to Measure Availability and Real-User Monitoring for Performance"

"Criteria for the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring"

"Will IT Operations Analytics Platforms Replace APM Suites?"

"Cool Vendors in Application Performance Monitoring, 2013"

IT Service View CMDB

Analysis By: Ronni J. Colville; Jarod Greene

Definition: An IT service view configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository that hasfour functional characteristics: IT service modeling and mapping, integration/federation,reconciliation, and synchronization. It provides a consolidated configuration view of various sourcesof data (discovered, manually or documented), which are integrated and reconciled into a single ITservice view.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: For many years, adoption of an IT service view CMDBhas been associated with progressing along an ITIL journey, which usually begins with a focus onproblem, incident and change management and then evolves into an IT service view CMDB.However, adoption over the last five years has been tied more tightly to a broader set of projects(e.g., compliance, asset management, disaster recovery, data center consolidation and enterprisearchitecture gap analysis) to gain insight into and visibility of key peer-to-peer and hierarchicalrelationships in IT services. Foundational to a successful IT service view CMDB are mature changeand configuration management processes. IT organizations that do not have a focus on governingchanges and tracking and maintaining accurate configurations will not be successful with an ITservice view CMDB implementation.

New drivers continue to emerge, including leveraging the IT service view CMDB for serviceassurance correlation (event and incident correlation). As cloud projects continue to expand from




private and public to hybrid, we expect mature IT organizations to extend their IT service viewCMDBs to track and assist in assessing critical changes of IT services that traverse a variety ofcloud resources, especially as the percentage of external sources is increasing from approximately5% to 25% by 2015.

Gartner has seen an increase in successful implementations in up to 40% of midsize and more than60% of large enterprises modeling and mapping three, but oftentimes many more. Smallerorganizations may not need an IT service view CMDB, since their focus is primarily on achieving acentralized view of all assets. Additionally, they may not have the process maturity needed toimplement a successful IT service view CMDB. Successfully mapped IT services improves theability to provide an accurate and trusted view of IT service configurations that can be used for avariety of projects but most often to assess the impact of a change on components in IT services.

Although IT service view CMDB tools have been available since late 2005, the combination ofmaturing tools and maturing IT organization processes, as well as the realization that this type ofproject does not have a quick ROI, has drawn out the planning, architecting and tool selection timeframe. IT service view CMDB implementations can take from three to five years to establish, butthey have no end date because they are ongoing projects in which new use cases for the data canadd new data and new integrations. Even with longer time frames, IT organizations can achieveincremental benefits (for example, data center visibility where there was no prior documentation thatwas accurate or trusted) throughout the ongoing implementation and find that it providesquantifiable benefits to the organization.

ITIL V3 introduced a concept called a configuration management system (CMS). This can be an ITservice view CMDB or a completely federated repository. The concept of a CMS offers a variedapproach to consolidating a view of all the relative information pertaining to an IT service. CMStooling is actually the same as an IT service view CMDB; because federation is still immature, thereality of a CMS is still not technically viable. Without standards of any significance being adoptedby IT service view CMDB vendors, CMSs and the management data repository vendors that aresuppliers of federated information, IT organizations should continue to focus on IT service viewCMDB implementations.

User Advice: Enterprises must have a clear understanding of the goals and objectives of their ITservice view CMDB projects and have several key milestones that must be accomplished for asuccessful implementation. Without the development of specific goals, IT organizations will not beable to demonstrate ROI and will also increase the likelihood of scope creep, in which excess datakept in the CMDB will become obsolete. Enterprises lacking change and configuration managementprocesses are likely to establish inventory data stores that don't represent real-time or near-real-time data records and will have a difficult time maturing to implement a trusted IT service viewCMDB. Establishing trusted data sources and associated reconciliation and normalizationprocesses is a critical success factor.

IT organizations must know what trusted data they have and what data will be needed to populatethe IT service view CMDB models that will achieve their goals. Only data that has ownership and adirect effect on a goal should be in IT service view CMDB configuration models; everything elseshould be federated (e.g., financial and contractual data should remain in the IT asset management




repository, and incident tickets should remain with the IT service desk). If there are key sources thatwill need to be federated (e.g., various discovery tools, IT asset repository, service assurance tools),these should be specifically evaluated as part of the proof of concept for the IT service view CMDBselection.

Business Impact: An IT service view CMDB affects nearly all areas of IT operations. It will benefitproviders (of data) and subscribers (of IT service views). It is a foundation for improving the qualityof service and improving service delivery. An IT service view CMDB implementation improves riskassessment of proposed changes and can assist with root cause analyses. It also facilitates a near-real-time business IT service view.



Maturity: Mature mainstream

Sample Vendors: BMC Software; CA Technologies; HP; IBM (Tivoli); ServiceNow


"Top Five CMDB and Configuration Management System Market Trends"

"Cloud Environments Need a CMDB and a CMS"

"IT Service View CMDB Vendor Landscape, 2012"

"What SMBs Should Know About CMDBs"

"IT Service Dependency Mapping Vendor Landscape, 2012"


Analysis By: Donna Scott

Definition: RTI represents a shared IT infrastructure in which business policies and SLAs drive thedynamic allocation and optimization of IT resources so that service levels are predictable andconsistent, despite unpredictable IT service demand. RTI provides the elasticity, functionality, anddynamic optimization and tuning of the runtime environment based on policies and priorities acrossprivate, public and hybrid cloud architectures. When resources are constrained, business policiesdetermine how resources are allocated to meet business goals.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The technology and implementation practices areimmature from the standpoint of architecting and automating an entire data center and its ITservices for real-time infrastructure (RTI). However, point solutions have emerged that optimizespecific applications or environments, such as dynamically optimizing virtual servers (through theuse of performance management metrics and virtual server live-migration technologies) anddynamically optimizing Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE)-based shared applicationenvironments that are designed to enable scale-out capacity increases. RTI is also emerging in




cloud management solutions, initially for optimizing the placement of workloads or services uponstartup based on pre-established policies.

Many cloud management platform (CMP) vendors have enabled models or automation engines toachieve RTI (for example, through the implementation of logical service models with policies thatare defined for the minimum and maximum instances that can be deployed in a runtimeenvironment). However, these vendors have not yet implemented all the analytical triggers and thedeployment automation to make elasticity truly turnkey. Rather, IT organizations must still writecustom code (for example, automation and orchestration logic) to achieve their overall dynamicoptimization goals, such as to scale a website up/down or in/out to use optimal resources forincreasing or decreasing service demand. Moreover, although virtualization is not required toarchitect for RTI, many CMP solutions only support virtualized environments instead of offeringmore complex alternatives that require integration to physical resources. In addition, RTI may bearchitected for a specific application environment and not as a generalized operations managementoffering.

Lack of architecture and application development skills in the infrastructure and operations (I&O)organization hampers implementation of RTI in all but the most advanced organizations.Organizations that pursue agile development for their Web environments will often implement RTIfor these services in order to map increasing demand on their sites with an increasing supply ofresources.

In another RTI use case, enterprises are implementing shared disaster recovery data centers,whereby they dynamically reconfigure test/development environments to look like the productionenvironment for disaster recovery testing and disaster strikes. This type of architecture can typicallyachieve recovery time objectives in the range of one to four hours after a disaster is declared.Typically, implementation is not triggered automatically but is manually initiated where theautomation is prewritten.

Because of the advancement in server virtualization and cloud computing, RTI solutions are makingprogress in the market, especially for targeted use cases where enterprises write specificautomation, such as to scale a website up/down and in/out. However, there is low marketpenetration, primarily because of a lack of service modeling (inclusive of runtime policies andtriggers for elasticity), standards and strong service governors/policy engines in the market. Forcustomers who desire dynamic optimization to integrate multiple technologies together andorchestrate analytics with actions, a great deal of integration and technical skills is required.

Gartner believes that RTI will go through another round of hype in the market as vendors seize onthe "software defined" terminology that generally has the same connotation as RTI: automation andoptimization. As in the past, we will see individual vendor progress, especially in "software stacks,"but not in largely heterogeneous environments because of the lack of standards and the desire forvendors that build such functionality to benefit their platforms (and not their competitors' platforms).

User Advice: Surveys of Gartner clients indicate that the majority of IT organizations view RTIarchitectures as desirable for gaining agility, reducing costs and attaining higher IT service qualityand that about 20% of organizations have implemented RTI for some portion of their portfolios.




Overall progress is slow for internal deployments of RTI architectures because of manyimpediments, especially the lack of IT management process and technology maturity levels, butalso because of organizational and cultural issues.

RTI is also slow for public cloud services, where application developers may have to write to aspecific and proprietary set of technologies to get dynamic elasticity. Gartner sees technology as asignificant barrier to RTI, specifically in the areas of root cause analysis (which is required todetermine what optimization actions to take), service governors (the runtime execution enginesbehind RTI analysis and actions) and integrated IT process/tool architectures and standards.However, RTI has taken a step forward in particular focused areas, such as:

■ Dynamic and policy-based provisioning of development/testing/staging and productionenvironments across private, public and hybrid cloud computing resources

■ Optimally provisioned cloud services based on capacity and policies (for example, workloadand service placement)

■ Server virtualization and dynamic workload movement and optimization

■ Reconfiguring capacity during failure or disaster events

■ Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Java EE environments for dynamic scaling ofapplication instances

■ Specific and customized automation that is written for specific use cases (for example, scalingup/down or out/in a website that has variable demand)

Many IT organizations that have been maturing their IT management processes and using ITprocess automation tools — aka run book automation (RBA) tools — to integrate processes (andtools) to enable complex, automated actions are moving closer to RTI through these actions. ITorganizations that desire RTI should focus on maturing their management processes using ITIL andmaturity models (such as Gartner's ITScore for I&O Maturity Model) as well as their technologyarchitectures (such as through standardization, consolidation and virtualization). They should alsobuild a culture that is conducive to sharing the infrastructure and should provide incentives such asreduced costs for shared infrastructures.

Gartner recommends that IT organizations move to at least Level 3 — proactive — on the ITScorefor I&O Maturity Model in order to plan for and implement RTI; before that level, a lack of skills andprocesses derails success. Organizations should investigate and consider implementing RTIsolutions early in the public or private cloud or across data centers in a hybrid implementation,which can add business value and solve a particular pain point, but should not embark on data-center-wide RTI initiatives.

Business Impact: RTI has three value propositions, which are expressed as business goals:

■ Reduced costs that are achieved by better, more efficient resource use and by reduced IToperations (labor) costs

■ Improved service levels that are achieved by the dynamic tuning of IT services




■ Increased agility that is achieved by rapid provisioning of new services or resources and scalingthe capacity (up and down) of established services across both internally and externally sourceddata centers



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Adaptive Computing; Amazon; BMC Software; CA Technologies; IBM; Microsoft;Oracle; Red Hat; RightScale; ServiceMesh; Tibco Software; VMTurbo; VMware


"Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2013"

"Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2012"

"Provisioning and Configuration Management for Private Cloud Computing and Real-TimeInfrastructure"

"How to Build an Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture"

Workspace Virtualization

Analysis By: Terrence Cosgrove; Mark A. Margevicius; Federica Troni

Definition: Workspace virtualization tools manage user-specific configurations (profiles, settings,policies and, in some cases, applications) separately from the OS. This allows users to have apersonalized workspace regardless of the platform they use (PC, terminal server or virtual desktop).These tools help maintain consistency and compliance across multiple computing platforms. Someproducts in this category extend application personalization for hosted virtual desktops (HVDs), andserve as an alternative to application virtualization for HVDs.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Workspace virtualization was once a nichetechnology, used primarily to maintain user profiles in server-based computing (SBC) environments.During the past three years, it has entered the mainstream, driven by the growth of SBC, HVDs andmobile computing. Organizations typically develop a need for workspace virtualization when theyexpand SBC and HVD environments and encounter performance and scalability issues withroaming user profiles. The profile management aspect of workspace virtualization is maturing. Manyproducts can now maintain profiles reliably across SBC, physical and HVD environments, and,therefore, pricing for these products has declined during the past 18 months. Large organizationswith a high degree of complexity (e.g., multiple application delivery and client computingarchitectures) may still require best-of-breed products in this space.

As HVD environments have grown, workspace virtualization vendors have added capabilities toaddress other personalization challenges beyond those associated with user profiles, such as




application delivery (including user-installed applications), application privilege elevation and licensemanagement. This area is less mature, and products still must improve scalability and somefunctional aspects to meet enterprise requirements.

While some of the vendors in this space have developed products for mobile device management,mobile application management and file synchronization, the workspace virtualization products arespecific to the Windows environments, and are not applicable to non-Windows platforms (such asiOS and Android).

User Advice: Develop your requirements first, and then look to the market for tools. The mostsignificant factors that affect product choices include:

■ Platform support — Physical, HVDs and SBC, as well as back versions of Windows (i.e., XPand Server 2003).

■ Complexity — Workspace virtualization tools vary in terms of complexity. In general, the mostcomprehensive products require substantial IT staffing to administer. Include your own staffingand administrative expertise in the evaluation.

■ Profile management — Various events can trigger a profile capture (e.g., logoff and applicationclose). More comprehensive coverage of profile triggers can reduce the instances of profilecorruptions and "last write wins" scenarios.

■ Application personalization — Some vendors in the market focus on persisting user-specificapplications, while minimizing image complexity.

Business Impact: Workspace virtualization tools can help improve the user experience by makingthe desktop more personalized and enhancing performance. They can also reduce infrastructureand operations costs by reducing the amount of servers, storage and images that organizationsmust use to provide users with a personalized desktop. Workspace virtualization tools are critical tomaking user-centric computing work.




Sample Vendors: AppSense; Citrix; Liquidware Labs; Microsoft; RES Software; Scense; Unidesk;VMware

IT Service Dependency Mapping

Analysis By: Ronni J. Colville; Patricia Adams

Definition: IT service dependency mapping (SDM) tools discover, document and track relationshipsby leveraging blueprints or templates to map dependencies among infrastructure components (likeservers, networks, storage and applications) in both physical and virtual environments to form an ITservice view. The tools provide various methods to develop blueprints or templates for internally




developed or custom applications. Key differentiators are breadth of blueprints, mainframediscovery, and depth of discovery across physical and virtual infrastructures.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Enterprises continue to struggle to maintain anaccurate and up-to-date view of the system and application dependencies across IT infrastructurecomponents that make up IT services, usually relying on data manually entered into diagrams andspreadsheets that may not reflect a timely view of the environment. Many IT organizations havedeployed discovery and inventory tools (often multiple tools in any given IT organization) to provideinsight about the individual components and basic parent/child information (software-to-hardwarerelationships), as well as license management, but they do not provide the necessary peer-to-peerand hierarchical relationship information regarding how an IT service is configured.

SDM tools continue to fall short in the area of homegrown or custom applications, not actually dueto the tool itself, but because they require multiple stakeholders (e.g., application development orsupport, system administrators, business liaisons) to work together. Although SDM tools providefunctionality to develop the blueprints that depict the desired state or a known logicalrepresentation of an application or IT service, the task remains labor-intensive, which will slowenterprisewide adoption of the tools beyond their primary use of discovery.

The primary use case for these tools is still as a jump-start or companion to IT service viewconfiguration management database (CMDB) projects. Manual modeling of IT services orapplications was too labor-intensive and also fraught with errors; leveraging IT SDM tools as a keysource of relationship discovery provided a more reliable source and reduced (but did noteliminated) the need for manual efforts. An additional use case emerged in the past year specific todata center consolidations and disaster recovery. While the users of IT SDM tools are often theteams that are part of the IT infrastructure and application support, these two newer use cases drivenew buyers.

While we moved the position of these tools along the Hype Cycle curve due to the challenges inadoption and broader use, we feel that the position may decelerate in the coming years based onanother use case. With the expansive growth of virtual infrastructures and cloud projects, there is aneed for IT SDM tools to help discover and track IT services throughout their life cycle of changes.While these tools are scan-based, and not real-time, the view of IT services that can be discoveredwill become more compelling with hybrid cloud deployments that include production applications(versus early adoption for development/test). IT organizations will need to understand whereapplication components are being hosted. Cloud services providers (CSPs) will be driven to moveworkloads based on capacity and rightsizing exercises, while IT organizations will need to beconcerned with maintaining availability and compliance. This kind of understanding and focus willrequire a Level 3 or Level 4 maturity, where change and configuration are also achieved, as well asservice orientation with a strong standards focus.

The vendor landscape is composed of a narrow set of suppliers that acquired point solutionvendors predominantly to complement their IT service view CMDB solutions almost a decade ago.Some IT SDM solutions also have an embedded IT service view CMDB, or have some IT serviceview CMDB functionality (e.g., reconciliation). We have seen very little new vendor activity. Thus far,new tools have some capability for discovering relationships, but fall short in the depth and breadth




of blueprints and types of relationships (e.g., for mainframes and virtualized infrastructures). Whilethey don't compare competitively to the more mature tools, organizations with less complexitymight find them to be sufficient.

To meet the demand of today's dynamic data center, IT SDM tools require expanded functionalityfor breadth and depth of discovery, such as a broad range of storage devices, virtual machines,mainframes and applications that cross into the public cloud. Although the tools are expensive, theycan be easily justified based on their ability to provide a discovered view of logical and physicalrelationships for applications and IT services because, without this information, IT cannot trackrelationship impacts for planned and unplanned changes. The adoption of these tools continues toincrease because the number of new stakeholders (e.g., disaster recovery planners) and businessdrivers with growing use cases (e.g., enterprise architecture planning, data center consolidation andmigration projects, growing virtual infrastructures) have increased. New requirements for hybridcloud will likely take two to three years to mature, because most activity for hybrid clouds is justmoving to production applications.

User Advice: Evaluate IT SDM tools to address requirements for configuration discovery of ITinfrastructure components and software, especially where there is a requirement for hierarchical andpeer-to-peer relationship discovery. The tools should also be considered as precursors to IT serviceview CMDB initiatives. If the primary focus is to build out IT services or applications, be aware that ifyou select one tool, the vendor is likely to try to thrust its companion IT service view CMDBtechnology at you, especially if the CMDB is part of the underlying architecture of the discoverytool. If the IT SDM tool you select is different from the CMDB, ensure that the IT SDM vendor has anadapter to integrate and federate to the desired or purchased CMDB.

These tools can also be used to augment or supplement other initiatives, such as disaster recoveryand data center consolidation initiatives, and other tasks that benefit from a near-real-time view ofthe relationships across a data center infrastructure (e.g., asset management). Although most ofthese tools aren't capable of action-oriented configuration functions (e.g., patch management), thediscovery of the relationships can be used for a variety of high-profile projects in which a near-real-time view of the relationships in a data center is required, including compliance reporting andenterprise architecture gap analysis. IT SDM tools can document what is installed and where, andcan provide an audit trail of configuration changes.

If the use case for these tools is to gain visibility in your virtual or cloud infrastructure, ensure thatthe tool can discover and map virtual-to-virtual relationships (where IT services are within a singlehost or can be across hosts and data centers), as well as virtual-to-physical relationships (e.g.,where the application might be virtualized, but the database might still be physical). If the virtualinfrastructure includes public cloud resources, ensure that the IT SDM tool supports CSPs' APIs(e.g., Amazon).

Business Impact: IT SDM tools will have an effect on high-profile initiatives, such as IT service viewCMDBs, by establishing a baseline configuration and helping populate the CMDB. These tools willalso have a less glamorous, but significant, effect on the day-to-day requirements to improveconfiguration change control by enabling near-real-time change impact analysis, and by providingmissing relationship data critical to disaster recovery initiatives.




The overall value of IT SDM tools will be to improve quality of service by providing a mechanism forunderstanding and analyzing the effect of changes to one component and its related componentswithin a service. These tools provide a mechanism that enables a near-real-time view ofrelationships that previously would have been maintained manually with extensive time delays forupdates. The value is in the real-time view of the infrastructure, so that the effect of a change canbe easily understood prior to release. This level of proactive change impact analysis can create amore stable IT environment, thereby reducing unplanned downtime for critical IT services, which willsave money and ensure that support staff are allocated efficiently, rather than fixing preventableproblems. Using dependency mapping tools in conjunction with tools that can make configuration-level changes, companies have experienced labor efficiencies that have enabled them to managetheir environments more effectively and have created improved stability of the IT services.




Sample Vendors: BMC Software; CA Technologies; HP; IBM; Neebula; ServiceNow; VMware


"Selection Criteria for IT Service Dependency Mapping Vendors"

"Toolkit: RFP/RFI for IT Service Dependency Mapping Tools"

"IT Service View CMDB Vendor Landscape, 2012"

"IT Service Dependency Mapping Vendor Landscape, 2012"

"Seven Steps to Select Configuration Item Data and Develop a CMDB Project That DeliversBusiness Value"


Analysis By: Colin Fletcher

Definition: Business service management (BSM) tools enable business-oriented prioritization of IToperations by supporting the construction of logical relationships between business priorities andthe IT infrastructure and applications that support them. These constructs help define a real-time,end-to-end IT service model against which associated operational-status data is gathered,processed and provided via business-oriented dashboards that are used to support change impactplanning, root cause analysis and other operational processes.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Most, if not all, organizations seek to dynamicallyfocus IT operational resources on issues impacting the most important business functions at anygiven point in time. Very few, however, have been able to embrace and invest in the people,process and technology transformation required to succeed. The upstream, cross-functional nature




of BSM often results in the uncovering of any deficits in subordinate monitoring and operationalcapabilities. This typically causes significant discomfort and slows BSM initiatives, as multipleremedial efforts are spawned that must be addressed before any further progress can be made.

Mature BSM-enabling technologies continue to evolve and improve and are increasingly appearingas capabilities in other toolsets (e.g., IT event correlation and analysis tools), leaving skill deficits(primarily business fluency) and organizational and process immaturity as the most significant, andperhaps most intractable, barriers to widespread adoption. Staring in the face of these difficult andoften long-avoided challenges, many organizations have either slowed or stalled BSM initiatives infavor of smaller, more technology-focused efforts, such as application performance monitoring(APM) or infrastructure monitoring consolidation.

There are real reasons to believe BSM initiatives will indeed traverse the Trough of Disillusionment,primarily due to external forces (increased competition from service providers whose very businessdepends on service alignment, IT recruitment of business-fluent staff, and disruptive technologieslike virtualization and cloud that provide required dependency models as a matter of course);however, this journey will remain a long one.

User Advice: IT organizations should investigate BSM once they have successfully developedsignificant operational maturity across all dimensions (people, process and technology), so that IT isoperating in a service-aligned manner. In constructing BSM initiatives, care should be taken toensure a tightly focused, stepwise implementation that includes appropriately significantinvestments in organizational change and skill development, in addition to technology selection. Thenumber of operational status and model data sources should be kept as small as possible, andplans to provide business service context to other toolsets should be considered a separate effortaddressed only after successful implementation.

Business Impact: By enabling the business-aligned prioritization of IT operational efforts, allbusiness services and processes across all verticals stand to realize:

■ Productivity gains — Via higher-quality service delivery and shorter mean time to repair

■ Cost optimization — Via a clearer understanding of resources required to specifically supporta given service and the ability to compare that cost with the service's value to the business

■ Risk mitigation — Via a clear definition of systems that require specific controls and assignedownership from BSM initiatives

BSM initiatives also provide a level of transparency and business context to the mechanics of IToperations, typically through dashboards and reports, which fosters the level of collaborationbetween business and IT leaders needed to discover new business opportunities and the optimalway to design IT's support of them.







Sample Vendors: ASG; Blue Elephant; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Centerity; Centreon;Compuware; eMite; EMC; Firescope; GroundWork Open Source; HP; IBM (Tivoli); Interlink Software;Kratos Defense; Microsoft; Neebula; NetIQ; SL; Tango/04; USU; Zenoss; Zyrion


"Toolkit: IT Operations Monitoring Assessment and Rationalization"

"Deploy a Multivendor Strategy for Availability and Performance Monitoring"

"Aligning ECA and BSM to the IT Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model"

"Market Definition: Availability and Performance Monitoring"


Analysis By: Vivek Bhalla; Jonah Kowall; Colin Fletcher

Definition: Network configuration and change management (NCCM) tools are focused on setupand configuration, patching, rollout and rollback, resource use and change history. These toolsdiscover and document network device configurations; detect, audit and alert on changes; compareconfigurations with the policy or "gold standard" for that device; and deploy configuration updatesto multivendor network devices.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: NCCM remains primarily a labor-intensive, manualprocess that involves remote access — for example, via Telnet or Secure Shell (SSH) — toindividual network devices and typing commands into vendor-specific, command-line interfaces.These activities are fraught with opportunities for human error, and alternative approaches — suchas creating homegrown scripts to ease retyping requirements — are used to ease effort, asopposed to ensuring accuracy and eliminating inconsistencies. Enterprise network managers do notoften consider rigorous configuration and change management, compliance audits and disasterrecovery (DR) rollback processes when executing network configuration alterations, even thoughthese changes often are the root causes of network issues. However, corporate audit andcompliance initiatives have forced a shift in this behavior.

NCCM tool vendors are meeting these challenges by providing solutions that operate in multivendorenvironments, enable automated configuration management and bring more rigorous adherence tothe change management process, as well as provide compliance audit capabilities. The market hasprogressed to the point where many startups have been acquired, and new vendors have enteredthe market using various angles to differentiate themselves.

NCCM tools are nearing the Trough of Disillusionment, although not because of the tools, whichwork well and can deliver strong benefits to a network management team. The networkconfiguration management discipline is held back by a lack of process maturity that has pushednetwork teams toward taking their own pragmatic approaches to resolving their organization'sspecific requirements. This has frequently resulted in a cultural reluctance to modify standardoperating procedures that have evolved organically as opposed to systematically.




Network configuration management is frequently practiced by router experts who are the onlyindividuals familiar with the arcane, command-line interfaces for the various network devices.Without a sufficient level of process maturity, it is a challenge to transform this status quo,particularly when there is resistance to change by those who may feel their skills are beingundervalued. A top-down effort is required from senior IT management and a change in personnelperformance review metrics is needed to convince network managers of the business importance ofdocumented network device configuration policies, rigorous change management procedures andtested DR capabilities.

User Advice: Replace manual processes with automated NCCM tools to monitor and controlnetwork device configurations to improve staff efficiency, reduce risk and enable the enforcement ofcompliance policies. Prior to investing in tools, establish standard network device configurationpolicies to reduce complexity and enable more-effective automated change. NCCM, although adiscipline unto itself, must increasingly be considered part of the configuration and changemanagement processes for an end-to-end IT service, and viewed as an enabler for the real-timeinfrastructure (RTI).

New pressures are coming from cloud implementations, where policy-based network configurationupdates must be made in lockstep with changes to other technologies, such as servers andstorage, to initiate the end-to-end cloud service. This will require participation in strategic,companywide change management processes (which are usually implemented as part of an ITservice support management toolset) and integration with configuration management tools for othertechnologies, such as servers and storage.

Network managers need to gain trust in automated tools before they let any product perform acorrective action without human oversight. With cost minimization and service quality maximizationpromised by new, dynamically virtualized, cloud-based RTIs, automation is becoming arequirement, because humans will no longer be able to manually keep up with real-timeconfiguration changes.

Business Impact: These tools provide an automated way to maintain network deviceconfigurations, offering an opportunity to lower costs, reduce the number of human errors andimprove compliance with configuration policies.




Sample Vendors: AlterPoint; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cisco; Dell (Quest Software);Dorado Software; EMC; HP; IBM Tivoli; Ipswitch; ManageEngine; NetBrain; SolarWinds; Tail-fSystems; Uplogix; Zenoss


"Take a Four-Step Network Configuration and Change Management Approach to Stem Disasters"




"MarketScope for Network Configuration and Change Management"


Analysis By: Ronni J. Colville

Definition: Configuration auditing tools provide change detection and configuration assessment.Some can also provide reconciliation against approved change requests and/or can remediate to adesired state. Company-specific policies or industry-recognized security configuration assessmenttemplates are used to maintain the fidelity of the system for auditing, hardening or improvedavailability. These tools mainly focus on requirements specific to servers or PCs, but some alsoaddress network components, applications, databases and virtual infrastructures.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Configuration auditing continues to be a top driver foradopting server provisioning and configuration automation in physical and virtual data centerinfrastructures. There is still a heightened awareness of security vulnerabilities and missing patches,as well as the requirement to provide documented change control for internal and external auditors.IT organizations establish policies that are translated to templates with specific configurationsettings. Systems are then assessed against these company-specific policies (for example, the"golden image"), or industry-recognized security configuration assessment templates (such asthose of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Center for InternetSecurity).

Some tools provide change detection in the form of file integrity monitoring (FIM), which can beused for PCI compliance, and to support other policy templates (such as the United StatesGovernment Configuration Baseline [USGCB]). Exception reports can be generated, and some toolsautomatically return the settings to their desired values, or block changes based on approvals orspecific change windows. Reports are generated from these tools that are leveraged by a variety ofstakeholders, including change managers, system administrators, internal auditors, externalauditors and security staff. With the frequency of changes being made across data centers andextending to public cloud resources, IT organizations can use configuration auditing tools as amechanism to track and validate changes, and enforce corporate standards.

Although these tools focus on requirements specific to servers or PCs, some address networkcomponents, applications, databases and virtual infrastructures, including virtual machines (VMs).Access to public cloud resources is driven by visibility into their infrastructures. IT organizationsmust understand how that access and visibility is enabled by cloud services providers (CSPs). CSPswill drive placement of VMs and applications based on capacity, which may fly in the face of theoverall compliance requirements of the business. This conflict and responsibility will fall back to theIT organization; therefore, it will become more important for adoption of configuration auditing(functionality and specific tooling) to become more widespread.

Configuration auditing has two major drivers: external (regulatory compliance) and internal(improved availability). Technology implementation is gated by the organization's process maturity.Prerequisites include the ability to define and implement configuration standards. Although a robust,formalized and broadly adopted change management process is desirable, configuration auditing




tools offer significant benefits for tracking configuration change activity without automating changereconciliation. Without the reconciliation requirement, other tools (e.g., operational configurationtools and security configuration assessment tools) can be considered for configuration auditing, andcan broaden the vendor landscape.

Configuration auditing tools are bought by those in operational system administration roles (e.g.,system administrators and system engineers), and by security practitioners who need to assesssecurity configuration standards. Security administrators often implement configuration auditingcapabilities provided by various security products, while those in operational system administrationroles tend to utilize the configuration audit functions within broader configuration management toolsthat also provide mitigation functions.

The adoption of configuration auditing capabilities within broader operations and security tools willcontinue to accelerate, but point solution tools will sometimes be purchased to address individualauditing and assessment needs. The breadth of platform coverage (e.g., servers, PCs and networkdevices) and policy support varies greatly among the tools, depending on whether they are security-oriented or operations-oriented. Thus, several tools may end up being purchased throughout anenterprise, based on the buying center and specific functional requirements.

User Advice: Develop sound configuration and change management practices before introducingconfiguration auditing technology in the organization. Greater benefits can be achieved if robustchange management processes are also implemented, with the primary goal of becoming proactive(before the change occurs) versus reactive (tracking changes that violate policy, introduce riskand/or cause system outages). Process and technology deployment should focus on systems thatare material to the compliance issue being resolved; however, broader functional requirementsshould also be evaluated, because many organizations can benefit from more than one area offocus, and often need to add new functions within 12 months.

Define the specific audit controls required before selecting configuration auditing technology,because each configuration auditing tool has a different focus and breadth (e.g., security regulation,system hardening, application consistency and OS consistency). IT system administrators, networkadministrators and system engineers should evaluate configuration auditing tools to maintainoperational configuration standards, and to provide a reporting mechanism for change activity.

Security officers should evaluate the security configuration assessment capabilities of incumbentsecurity technologies to conduct a broad assessment of system hardening and securityconfiguration compliance independent of operational configuration auditing tools. Enterprise andcloud architects, as well as cloud administrators that are expanding their computing infrastructureto public cloud providers or those who are creating hybrid cloud infrastructures, must insist onspecific compliance policies and governance capabilities that meet company regulatory andavailability requirements.

Business Impact: Not all regulations provide a clear definition of what constitutes compliance for IToperations and production support, so businesses must select reasonable and appropriate controlsbased on reasonably anticipated risks, and should build a case that their controls are appropriatefor the situation. This is not a "one and done" exercise. Continued review and revision of policiesmust be done to ensure that updates to regulatory standards are kept up to date, as well as




ensuring that new technologies introduced into the computing infrastructure have the appropriatelevel of compliance governance applied. Reducing unauthorized change is part of a good controlenvironment. Although configuration auditing has been tasked individually in each IT domain, asenterprises begin to develop an IT service view, configuration reporting and remediation (as well asbroader configuration management capabilities) will ensure reliable and predictable configurationchanges, and will offer policy-based compliance with audit reporting.




Sample Vendors: BMC Software; IBM; NetIQ; Qualys; Symantec; Tripwire; VMware


"Server Configuration Baselining and Auditing: Vendor Landscape"

"Market Trends and Dynamics for Server Provisioning and Configuration Management Tools"

"Security Configuration Management Capabilities in Security and Operations Tools"

IT Management Process Maturity

Analysis By: George Spafford; Ian Head; Tapati Bandopadhyay

Definition: Gartner's ITScore for infrastructure and operations (I&O) posits that there are fourdisciplines that contribute to maturity, namely, people management, process management,technology management and business management. Users conduct an online, questionnaire-basedself-assessment that indicates maturity for each discipline on a 1-to-5 maturity scale.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: As part of IT organizations' efforts to align themselvesmore effectively with business needs, IT operations departments are being pressured to move froma component orientation (such as managing networks, servers, storage, databases andapplications) to managing business-oriented, end-to-end IT services. Because IT operationsdepartments have been segregated in IT technical silo-oriented organizational structures andmetrics, this transition is usually challenging.

Over 800 organizations have completed Gartner's ITScore for I&O since 2012, with a mean score of2.33. Process management is the lowest maturity discipline, which suggests that, although mostorganizations have worked on incident and change management to some extent, most have notachieved consistent process alignment nor moved forward into end-to-end service managementand integrated IT management processes. Gartner regards the proactive state (Level 3) as the startof maturity, and the ITScore statistics align with Gartner's other client interactions, suggesting thatfewer than 10% of large-enterprise IT organizations have made the transition to achieve the higherproactive, service-aligned or business partnership levels of the ITScore maturity model. To do so




requires incorporating principles of service design, implementing end-to-end IT SLAs and managingIT service delivery to those SLAs.

Thus, Gartner places IT management process maturity as having a market penetration of 5% to20% of the target audience. Based on the challenges that are involved, Gartner estimates that, formost organizations, the transformation from the committed state (Level 2) of IT managementprocess maturity through the proactive state (Level 3) to achieve the service-aligned state (Level 4)will take at least three years and may take five years or longer if commitment is limited. Significantcultural change is required as well as strong leadership and vision. This realization has pushed theconcept of IT management process maturity into the Trough of Disillusionment as the profoundorganizational change it requires becomes abundantly clear to many enterprises. However, thebenefits of improved IT service quality, greater levels of agility, lower costs and reduced risks,especially risk that is associated with innovation, real-time infrastructure (RTI) and cloud computing,will require enterprises to mature and continually optimize their system of IT managementprocesses.

Organizations can be at varying levels of IT management process maturity in different service andtechnology domains. For positioning on this Hype Cycle, however, Gartner is assessing theaggregate measure of process maturity across the IT for I&O organization as needed to implementRTI architectures.

User Advice: Assess your position in the process discipline of the ITScore maturity model. Studythe definitions and descriptions for each level, and set a goal for the level you must reach to supportyour business. At a minimum, you should set a goal to reach the proactive level (Level 3); below thislevel, costs are too high, and service quality and agility are too low. Industry leaders will need toreach the service-aligned level (Level 4) of the model, where they can target sustainable success inprovisioning and maintaining demand-based, cost-effective business services that are dynamicallyoptimized during runtime execution.

All practitioners should define and document integrated and flexible IT management processes thatcan be instrumented and automated to create a service delivery chain, with a focus on improvingthe performance of the end-to-end IT service. Leverage industry-standard IT management processguidance such as COBIT, IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and International Organization forStandardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) 20000 during process designand continual improvement efforts. Those seeking to control risk while raising agility should consultGartner's research on ValueOps.

Improving IT management process maturity will affect your organizational design because itgenerally requires a matrix management approach, with process managers whose responsibilitiescross multiple IT component-oriented technology domains, such as servers, storage andnetworking. In addition to the ITScore for I&O maturity model, specific process maturity modelsprovide a valuable diagnostic tool to aid management to continually improve IT for I&O.Independent frameworks include the ITIL Service Management Process Maturity Framework andthe ISO 15504 Information Technology Process Assessment family.

Establishing the organizational change plans, including the necessary personnel performancemetrics and rewards, will encourage IT operations management and staff to look beyond reactive




"firefighting" modes and devote the time and training that are necessary to document repeatableprocesses, become proficient in their execution and achieve predictable service quality. Clearly,senior management support is essential where significant organizational change programs areundertaken.

Business Impact: Moving to a higher level of IT management process maturity improves servicequality and business value of IT services by enabling greater levels of organizational agility andlower labor costs (personnel costs are on average 40% of I&O operational expenditures), all ofwhich positively affects the efficiency and effectiveness of IT operations, as well as increases IT'scontribution to the business. More mature IT enables the business to take advantage of leadinginfrastructure technologies, including RTI and cloud computing architectures.





"ITScore for Infrastructure and Operations"

"ITScore for I&O Analysis: Take Action Now to Improve Your Organization's Maturity"

"Infrastructure & Operations Maturity: How Do You Compare?"

"Use a ValueOps Perspective to Balance Risk and Agility in IT Operations"

"Successful ITIL and Service Management Projects Avoid These 10 Common Failings"

"Five Steps Toward a Faster, Better, Cheaper I&O"

ITIL

Analysis By: Ian Head; Tapati Bandopadhyay; Simon Mingay

Definition: ITIL is an IT service management framework that provides guidance on the full life cycleof IT services. ITIL is part of a joint-venture between the U.K. government and Capita. ITIL isstructured as five core books: service strategy, service design, service transition, service operationand continual service improvement. Specific implementation guidance is not provided, the focusbeing a set of good practices that an organization should adapt to its needs.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: ITIL has been evolving for more than 20 years. It iswell-established as the de facto standard in service management, and shares many concepts andprinciples with the formal service management standard ISO/IEC 20000, although the alignment isnot perfect, with differences reflecting the different origins and goals of the two bodies of work.




The current release, ITIL 2011, was the first update to the major version 3 (v.3) release in 2007. ITILhas the highest adoption rate of the related frameworks used within IT operations (e.g., COBIT,CMMI, MOF) and is mainstream today. Based on our polls, most organizations worldwide use theITIL framework, but the number of organizations using additional approaches such as continuousdelivery and DevOps is growing. Also, even after the significant improvement to service strategy inthe 2011 update, ITIL is primarily used for guidance in service operation and transition. Theunbalanced adoption is the reason penetration is shown as 20% to 50%.

The current version of ITIL covers the entire IT service life cycle. This includes service strategy,business relationship management, transition planning and support, and design coordination aswell as the essential operational processes such as incident management and changemanagement. ITIL advises on IT strategies to enable the business, processes for the design of ITservices, their transition into production, ongoing operational support, and continual serviceimprovement. In general, service transition and service operation are the most commonly usedbooks and could arguably justify a position higher on the Plateau of Productivity. In contrast, servicestrategy has not gained momentum since the 2011 rewrite and, therefore, could be placed muchearlier in the Hype Cycle.

Integration, defined as the exchange of information, is a key focus, and ITIL 2011 provides muchclearer guidance with respect to integration and the scope of different processes, such as changemanagement and transition planning.

For nearly all IT organizations, ITIL can play a major role in operational process design, even wherecloud, hybrid and Pace-Layered Application Strategy are embraced. ITIL will continue to serve as asource of guidance for those responsible for delivering IT services through their process andorganization design and tool selection and implementation.

Overall, we continue to see a tremendous span of adoption and maturity levels. Some organizationsare just embarking or have stalled on their journey for a variety of reasons, whereas others are wellon their way and pursuing continual improvement. Leaders are integrating ITIL with otherapproaches to improve service — lean and DevOps being notable examples. In fact, a combinationof process guidance from various sources tends to do a better job of addressing requirements thanany framework in isolation.

User Advice: Leverage ITIL as guidance to accelerate adoption of industry best practices, refinedto meet the needs of your specific business goals. Some recent developments, such as the rise inagile methods and Pace-Layered Application Strategy (see Gartner's ValueOps research), have yetto be explicitly reflected in the ITIL body of knowledge. While the core practices are sound, userscurrently need to look for additional inspiration in sources such as ValueOps, lean, DevOps andContinual Integration if they are to keep with changing operational needs.

ITIL is helpful in putting IT service management into a strategic context and providing high-levelguidance on reference processes and other factors in the service life cycle. To optimize serviceimprovements, IT organizations must first define objectives and then pragmatically leverage ITILduring the design of their own unique processes. There is a large pool of ITIL trained staff available,so this requirement should be a part of the development and recruitment process.




Business Impact: ITIL provides a framework for the strategy, design, transition, operation andcontinual improvement of IT services, including the organization, processes, technology andmanagement practices that underpin them. Most IT organizations need to start or continue thetransition from their traditional technology and asset focus to a focus on services and serviceoutcomes as described in this framework. IT service management is a critical discipline in achievingthat change, and ITIL provides useful reference guidance for IT management. Service managementprofessionals must also accept that ITIL is not a standard and, therefore, precise implementationinstruction is not provided.





"ITIL 2011 Service Strategy: An Important Missing Link Between IT and Business"

"Five Ways to Manage IT Service Transitions to Cloud, Leveraging ITIL Processes and ITOM Tools"

"Use Six Sigma With ITIL 2011 to Improve IT Operations Processes and Effectively Leverage theCloud"

"How to Leverage ITIL 2011 and Avoid Three Common Cost Traps"

"Increase I&O Effectiveness With the ValueOps Perspective"

"Running IT Like a Business 2.0: The Service-Optimizing IT Delivery Model"

Server Provisioning and Configuration Management

Analysis By: Ronni J. Colville; Donna Scott

Definition: Server provisioning and configuration management tools manage the softwareconfiguration life cycle for physical and virtual servers. Some vendors offer functionality for theentire life cycle; others offer specific point solutions in one or two areas. The main categories areserver provisioning (physical or virtual), application provisioning (binaries) and configurationmanagement, patching, inventory, and configuration compliance.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Server provisioning and configuration managementtools continue to expand their depth of function, as well as integrate with adjacent technologies,such as IT process automation tools, and, most recently, cloud management platforms — for whichthey often provide a core capability for initial provisioning and virtual machine provisioning.Although the tools continue to progress, configuration policies, organizational structures (serverplatform team silos) and processes inside the typical enterprise are causing them to struggle withfull life cycle adoption. As cloud initiatives progress and mature, there will be a "Day 2" requirement




for configuration hygiene to manage configuration compliance and patching, which will bring thesetools back into the picture.

Virtual server provisioning also offers another option — cloning or copying the VM and makingsubsequent changes to personalize the clone (versus using a tool to manage the overall stack).Initial private cloud initiatives were focused on infrastructure as a service (IaaS), in which thin andstandard OS images were provisioned with the VM, but then additional software was layered on topvia application provisioning and configuration management. More recent private cloud initiatives arealso including a focus on middleware and database provisioning (internal platform as a service[PaaS]), which typically uses application provisioning and configuration management to provide thesoftware stack on top of the standard OS because this method reduces the image sprawl thatcomes with the combinations and permutations of software stack builds.

Most large enterprises have adopted one or more of the vendors in this category with varyingdegrees of success and deployment of the life cycle. As a result, we are seeing an increase in theuptick in adoption of additional life cycle functionality by both midsize and large enterprises to solvespecific problems (e.g., multiplatform provisioning and compliance-driven audits, includingimproving patch management).

Another new shift in the past year is the focus on DevOps, which appeals to some organizationsthat want to build infrastructure via code, as they do with their application development teams.Tools that were previously open source and have shifted to commercial are now becoming analternative to the "GUI-based" traditional tools in this category, especially for Linux. These toolsoffer a programmatic approach to provisioning and configuring software on top of physical andvirtual servers, and some offer bare-metal initial provisioning (and some can also addressnetworking) with a scalable approach. Initially, they offered a different approach (pull versus push)compared with the traditional vendors in this category, but of late, most have also added pushcapability.

Cloud computing trends are encouraging standardization; for that reason, we believe penetrationand broader adoption of these tools will increase more rapidly in the next two to five years.However, these tools are continuing to progress toward the Trough of Disillusionment — not somuch due to the tools, but the IT organizations' inability to standardize and use the tools broadlyacross the groups supporting the entire software stack. There could be a rejuvenation of these toolsin two years as cloud adoption matures, and the subsequent need to manage inside the VMbecomes a renewed priority.

User Advice: With an increase in the frequency and number of changes to servers and applications,IT organizations should emphasize the standardization of server stacks and processes to improveand increase availability, as well as to succeed in using server provisioning and configurationmanagement tools for physical and virtual servers. Besides providing increased quality, these toolscan reduce the overall cost to manage and support patching and rapid deployments and VM policyenforcement, as well as provide a mechanism to monitor and enforce compliance.

Evaluation criteria should include capabilities focused on multiplatform physical and provisioning,software deployment and installation, and continued configuration for ongoing maintenance, as wellas auditing and reporting. The criteria should also include the capability to address the unique




requirements of virtual servers and VM guests. When IT standards have been put in place, werecommend that organizations implement these tools to automate manual tasks for repeatable,accurate and auditable configuration change control. The tools help organizations gain efficienciesin moving from a monolithic imaging strategy to a dynamic layered approach to incrementalchanges. When evaluating products, organizations need to:

■ Evaluate functionality across the life cycle, and not just the particular pain point at hand.

■ Consider physical systems, physical hosts, and VM server provisioning and configurationmanagement requirements together.

■ Conduct rigorous testing to ensure that functionality is consistent across required platforms.

■ Ensure that tools address a variety of compliance requirements.

If private clouds are a focus, it is also important to understand if the cloud management platformcan provide Day 2 server provisioning and configuration management capability or if a separate toolwill be needed to supplement it. If the latter, integration or coexistence will be needed and shouldalso be part of the evaluation.

Business Impact: Server provisioning and configuration management tools help IT operationsautomate many server-provisioning tasks, thereby lowering the cost of IT operations, enforcingstandards, and increasing application availability and the speed of modifications to software andservers. They also provide a mechanism for enforcing security and operational policy compliance.




Sample Vendors: BMC Software; CA Technologies; CFEngine; HP; IBM; Microsoft; Opscode;Puppet Labs; SaltStack; ScaleXtreme; Tripwire; VMware


"Midsize Enterprises Should Use These Considerations to Select Server Provisioning andConfiguration Tools"

"Server Provisioning Automation: Vendor Landscape"

"Provisioning and Configuration Management for Private Cloud Computing and Real-timeInfrastructure"

"Server Configuration Baselining and Auditing: Vendor Landscape"

"Market Trends and Dynamics for Server Provisioning and Configuration Management Tools"

"The Patch Management Vendor Market Landscape, 2011"





"Cool Vendors in IT Operations Management, 2012"



Analysis By: Patricia Adams

Definition: IT asset management (ITAM) is a centralized repository, essentially an information hub,that holds inventory, financial and contractual data that can then be used to manage the IT assetthroughout its life cycle. ITAM depends on robust processes, with tools to automate manualprocesses. This data then enables organizations to effectively manage IT assets, vendors and asoftware and hardware asset portfolio from requisition through retirement, thus monitoring theasset's performance throughout its life cycle.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The ITAM discipline, when integrated with tools, isadopted during business cycles that reflect the degree of emphasis that enterprises put oncontrolling costs, managing and optimizing the use of hardware and software. Both hardware assetmanagement and software asset management are subprocesses of the holistic ITAM discipline.With an increased focus on software audits, configuration management databases (CMDBs), bringyour own device (BYOD), managing virtualized software on servers and clients, developing ITservice catalogs and tracking software license use in the cloud, ITAM initiatives will gain priority andacceptance in IT operations.

ITAM data is necessary to understand the costs associated with a business service, and theresulting data is used to make decisions about standards and demand forecasts. Without this data,companies don't have accurate cost information on which to base decisions regarding servicelevels that vary by cost, or to implement chargeback/showback. Visibility into contract events isalso critical when decisions are being made to extend life cycles or refresh faster. Software as aservice (SaaS) delivery models are having an effect on market adoption growth rates, albeit a slowone. We expect ITAM market penetration, currently at 45%, to continue growing during the next fiveyears.

User Advice: Many companies embark on ITAM initiatives in response to specific problems, suchas impending software audits (or shortly after an audit), CMDB implementations, virtual softwaresprawl or OS migrations. Inventory and software usage tools, which feed into an ITAM repository,can assist with software license compliance and monitor the use of installed applications. Withoutongoing visibility into performance metrics, companies will remain in a reactive position, withoutachieving a proactive position that diminishes the negative effects of an audit or the ability to seewhether the environment is performing effectively.

ITAM has a strong operational focus, with tight linkages to IT service management and end-userclient management by creating efficiencies and effectively using software and hardware assets.Tools are purchased either stand-alone or as part of the CMDB or IT service and supportmanagement (ITSSM) suite, depending upon the customer focus. ITAM data can easily identify




opportunities for the accurate purchase of software licenses, the efficient use of all installedsoftware or identify unused software for harvesting, and to ensure that standards are in place tolower support costs and rationalize the application portfolio.

To gain value from an ITAM program, a combination of people, policies, processes and tools mustbe in place. Begin by focusing on the life cycle and process associated with the current problem,but chart a course aimed at resolving higher-level problems, such as building a service catalog orfacilitating application rationalization processes. As process maturity improves, ITAM efforts willfocus increasingly on financial and spending management related to controlling asset investments,and will provide integration with project and portfolio management and enterprise architecture.ITAM processes and best practices also play a role in how operational assets are managed.Companies should plan for this evolution in thinking.

Business Impact: As more enterprises implement an IT service management strategy, anunderstanding of costs to deliver business IT services will become essential. It is a necessity toensure that external vendor contracts are in place to deliver the specified service levels the businessrequires, especially as more software is put in the cloud. ITAM tools that have bidirectional datafeeds into many systems, such as enterprise architecture, client configuration management,portfolio management, and CMDBs will assist with achieving a holistic view of the organizationsassets. The ITAM discipline will realize value in organizations that undertake these projects as partof an ongoing strategy that evaluates continuous opportunities to achieve savings.




Sample Vendors: BMC Software; CA Technologies; EasyVista; HP; IBM; Provance Technologies;ServiceNow


"MarketScope for the IT Asset Management Repository"

"How to Build PC ITAM Life Cycle Processes"

Service-Level Reporting Tools

Analysis By: Ian Head

Definition: Service-level reporting tools incorporate and aggregate multiple types of metrics fromvarious management disciplines; provide a calendaring function to specify service hours, plannedservice uptime and scheduled maintenance periods; and compare measured results to the service-level targets agreed to between the IT operations organization and the business units to determinesuccess or failure. At a minimum, they must incorporate service desk metrics along with ITinfrastructure availability and performance metrics.




Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Just about every IT operations management softwarevendor offers basic reporting tools that they typically describe as service-level management. Ingeneral, these tools do not satisfy all the requirements in Gartner's definition of the service-levelreporting category. Thus, the industry suffers from product ambiguity and market confusion,causing this category to remain positioned near the Trough of Disillusionment. Most IT operationsmanagement tools are tactical tools for specific domains (such as IT service desk, networkmonitoring or server administration) in which production statistics are collected for component- orprocess-oriented operational-level agreements, rather than true, service-aligned, business-orientedSLAs.

Only the IT organizations that have attained the service-aligned level of Gartner's ITScore MaturityModel for IT infrastructure and operations (see "ITScore for Infrastructure and Operations") have theskills and expectations to demand end-to-end IT service management capabilities from theirservice-level reporting tools. ITScore self-assessments report that well under 10% of ITorganizations are at the service-aligned level, which slows the adoption speed and lengthens thetime to the Plateau of Productivity. Some cloud computing vendors have developed simplisticservice displays for their infrastructures and applications, but they're not heterogeneous and do notinclude on-premises infrastructures and applications.

User Advice: Clients use many types of tools to piece together their service-level reports, includingbasic spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Although service-level reporting tools can beused to track just service desk metrics or IT infrastructure component availability and performancemetrics, they are most valuable when used by clients who have defined business-oriented ITservices and SLAs with penalties and incentives. End-user response time metrics (including resultsfrom application performance monitoring [APM] tools) can enhance service-level reports, and aresometimes used as a "good enough" proxy for end-to-end IT service quality. Service-level reportingtools will increasingly have to deal with on-premises applications and infrastructure, as well as caterto off-premises cloud infrastructures and applications. When evaluating a service-level reportingtool, ensure it can report on all of the various metrics needed to manage multiple SLAs.

In addition to comparing measured historical results to service-level targets at the end of thereporting period, more-advanced service-level reporting tools will keep a running, up-to-the-minutetotal that displays real-time service-level results, and predicts when service levels will not be met.This will forewarn IT operations staff of impending trouble.

Monitoring alone will not solve service-level problems. IT organizations need to focus on changingworkplace cultures and behavior so that employees are measured, motivated and rewarded basedon end-to-end IT service quality, as this affects business goals. Clients should choose SLA metricswisely and move toward measures of business value so that this exercise provides action-orientedresults.

Business Impact: SLAs help the IT organization demonstrate its value to the business. Once IT andthe business have agreed to IT service definitions and, thus, established a common nomenclature,service-level reporting tools are used as the primary communication vehicles to corroborate that ITservice quality is in compliance with business customer requirements. Defining business-oriented ITservices with associated SLAs, proactively measuring service levels and reporting on compliancecan help IT organizations deliver more-consistent, predictable performance and maintain customer




satisfaction with IT services. By tracking service levels and analyzing historical service-level trends,IT organizations can use service-level reporting tools to predict and prevent problems before theyaffect business users.




Sample Vendors: BMC Software; CA Technologies; Compuware; eMite; Grand CentralCommunications; GrandSLA; HP; IBM Tivoli; Interlink Software; NetIQ; VMware


"The Challenges and Approaches of Establishing IT Infrastructure Monitoring SLAs in IT Operations"

Climbing the Slope


Analysis By: Mark A. Margevicius; Ronni J. Colville; Terrence Cosgrove

Definition: A hosted virtual desktop (HVD) is a full, thick-client user environment run as a virtualmachine (VM) on a server and accessed remotely. HVD implementations comprise servervirtualization software to host desktop software (as a server workload), brokering/sessionmanagement software to connect users to their desktop environments, and tools for managing theprovisioning and maintenance (e.g., updates and patches) of the virtual desktop software stack.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: An HVD involves the use of server virtualization tosupport the disaggregation of a thick-client desktop stack that can be accessed remotely by itsuser. By combining server virtualization software with a brokering/session manager that connectsusers to their desktop instances (that is, the OS, applications and data), enterprises can centralizeand secure user data and applications, and manage personalized desktop instances centrally.Because only the presentation layer is sent to the accessing device, a thin-client terminal can beused. For most early adopters, the appeal of HVDs has been the ability to thin the accessing devicewithout significant re-engineering at the application level (usually required for server-basedcomputing).

While customers implementing HVDs cite many reasons for deployments, three important factorshave contributed to the increased focus on HVD: the desire to implement new client computingcapabilities in conjunction with Windows 7 migrations, the desire for bring your own device (BYOD)and device choice (particularly iPads), and the uptick in customers focused on security andcompliance issues. During the past few years, the adoption of virtual infrastructures in enterprisedata centers has increased, making HVDs easier to deploy. With this increase comes a level ofmaturity and an understanding of how to better utilize the technology. This awareness aids HVDimplementations where desktop engineers and data center administrators work together.




Early adoption of this technology has been hindered by several factors, including licensingcompliance issues for the Windows client OS. This has since been resolved through MicrosoftWindows Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) licensing offerings; however, the cost still inhibits adoption.This was only one aspect of the higher total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with implementingHVD on a broad scale. Although many IT organizations made significant progress in virtualizing theirdata center server infrastructures, HVD implementations required additional virtual capacity forserver and storage (above and beyond what was in place for physical to virtual migrations). Evenwith Microsoft's reduced license costs for the Windows OS, which enables an HVD image to beaccessed from a primary and secondary device with one license, there are still other technicalissues that hinder mainstream adoption.

Since late 2007, HVD deployments have grown steadily, reaching around 18 million users by theend of 1Q13. Because of the constraints, the broad applicability of HVDs has been limited tospecific scenarios, primarily structured-task workers in call centers, and kiosks, trading floors andsecure remote access. About 50 million endpoints remain the target population of the total 700million desktops. Throughout the second half of 2013 and into 2014, we expect generaldeployments to continue, albeit at a slower pace than in 2012.

Inhibitors to general adoption involve the cost of the data center infrastructure required to host thedesktop images (servers and storage in particular) and network constraints. Even with the increasedadoption of virtual infrastructures, cost-justifying HVD implementations remains a challengebecause of HVD and PC cost comparisons. Some advancements in leveraging applicationvirtualization make HVD less cumbersome by introducing the ability to layer applications. Thismakes managing the image and maintaining the HVD easier. Availability of the skills necessary tomanage virtual desktops remains a challenge, as is deploying HVDs to mobile/offline users, despitethe promises of offline VMs and advanced synchronization technologies.

The virtual graphics processing units (GPUs) introduced in 2012 will eventually allow a broaderaudience, but will not have much impact until the end of 2013 and into 2014.

HVD marketing has promised to deliver diminishing marginal, per-user costs, due to the high levelof standardization and automation required for successful implementations. However, this iscurrently only achievable for persistent users where images remain intact — a small use case of theoverall user population. As other virtualization technologies mature (e.g., brokers and persistentpersonalization), this restraint will decrease. This will create a business case for organizations thatadopt HVDs to expand their deployments, once the technology permits more users to be viablyaddressed. Enterprises that adopt HVDs aggressively will see later adopters achieve superiorresults for lower costs. However, these enterprises will need to migrate to new broker andcomplementary management software as products mature and standards emerge.

User Advice: Unless your organization has an urgent requirement to deploy HVDs immediately forsecuring the environment or centralizing data management, wait until late 2013 before initiatingdeployments for broader (mainstream) desktop user scenarios. Through 2013 and 2014, allorganizations should carefully assess the user types for which this technology is best-suited. Clientsthat make strategic HVD investments will gradually build institutional knowledge. These investmentswill allow them to refine technical architecture and organizational processes, and to grow internal ITstaff expertise before IT is expected to support the technology on a larger scale through 2016.




Balance the benefits of centralized management with the additional overhead of infrastructure andresource costs. Customers should recognize that HVDs may resolve some management issues, butwill not become panaceas for unmanaged desktops. In most cases, the promised TCO reductionswill not be significant, and will require initial capital expenditures to achieve. The best-case scenariofor HVDs remains securing and centralizing data management, and structured-task users.

Organizations must optimize desktop processes, IT staff responsibilities and best practices to fitHVDs, just as organizations did with traditional PCs. Leverage desktop management processes forthe lessons learned. The range of users and applications that can be viably addressed throughHVDs will grow steadily through 2013. Although the user population is narrow, it will eventuallyinclude mobile/offline users. Organizations that deploy HVDs should plan for growing viabilityacross their user populations, but should be wary of rolling out deployments too quickly. Employdiligence in testing to ensure a good fit of HVD capabilities with management infrastructure andprocesses, and integration with newer management techniques (such as application virtualizationand software streaming). Visibility into future product road maps from suppliers is essential.

Business Impact: HVDs provide mechanisms for centralizing a thick-client desktop PC without re-engineering each application for centralized execution. This appeals to enterprises on the basis ofmanageability and data security.




Sample Vendors: Citrix; Dell; Desktone; Microsoft; Red Hat; Virtual Bridges; VMware


Analysis By: Colin Fletcher

Definition: IT event correlation and analysis (ECA) tools support the processing of events andalarms from IT components; consolidate, filter and correlate events; notify the appropriate IToperations personnel of critical events; automate corrective actions when possible (directly orthrough integrations with trouble ticketing, CRM, or other systems); and often serve as a "managerof managers" for IT operations teams.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: ECA tools have widespread use as general-purposeevent consoles monitoring multiple IT domains such as servers (physical and virtual), networks andstorage, and are becoming critical to processes that analyze the root causes of problems acrossincreasingly diverse and rapidly changing environments. While the tools have reached a level offunctional maturity and consistency across vendors, tool innovation (except the organicincorporation of IT operations analytics technologies in some tools) and adoption have slowed inrecent years as operations teams struggle to make the investments in skills, cultural andorganizational changes, and monitoring coverage needed to fully realize ECA tools' potential value.




Integration of data-providing specialist monitoring tools and consuming upstream tools andprocesses (for example, business service management [BSM], IT service support management[ITSSM] and CRM, for which ECA tools often provide foundational technical service context), whilebecoming dramatically more simple in recent years, still slows implementations and remains amaintenance challenge for most. While vendors are rapidly incorporating advanced IT operationsanalytics technologies (either directly or through additional products) to enhance the tools'analytical prowess, simplification on all dimensions (implementation, UI, and ongoing maintenance)remains the primary opportunity for meaningful innovation.

User Advice: ECA tools are functionally mature, but facilitate an often complex, cross-domain levelof problem identification and diagnosis that requires a significant level of operational maturity(Gartner ITScore for I&O Level 3 — Proactive) across people, process and technology to getexpected value. Irrespective of vendor integration strategies, organizations that have not yetachieved this level of maturity should instead focus on increased standardization, toolconsolidation, and ensuring adequate monitoring coverage first.

Writing and maintaining event correlation rules are nontrivial exercises. Enterprises should, at anabsolute minimum, look for ECA tools that come with a good selection of predefined, out-of-the-box correlation rules that can be modified or updated. Better yet, look for ECA tools thatautomatically adjust rules based on trend analysis, behavioral learning, statistical pattern discovery,or other advanced IT operations analytics technologies (see "How Enterprises Can Avoid EventManagement Overload").

Lastly, as ECA tool value is directly related to the data ingested and provided to upstream tools andprocesses (such as BSM, configuration and ITSSM), enterprises should carefully scrutinize deviceand integration support coverage and policies to ensure they adequately address current and futureneeds.

Business Impact: ECA tools lower IT operational costs and improve the quality of experiencethrough speeding reactive problem resolution (root cause analysis [RCA]) and adding a degree ofproactive, preventative foresight across a heterogeneous IT infrastructure.




Sample Vendors: AccelOps; Augur Systems; BMC Software; Boundary; CA Technologies;Centerity; Dell (Quest Software); eG Innovations; EMC; GroundWork Open Source; HP; IBM Tivoli;Interlink Software; Kratos Defense; Microsoft; Moogsoft; NetIQ; RiverMuse; ScienceLogic;Tango/04; uptime software; Zenoss; Zyrion


"Vendor Landscape for IT Event Correlation and Analysis"

"Toolkit: IT Event Correlation and Analysis RFP Template"




"Six Steps to Event and Network Fault Management Tool Integration and Device Support"

"How Enterprises Can Avoid Event Management Overload"

"Early Stage IT Operations Analytics Could Reduce IT Service Outage Minutes"


Analysis By: Terrence Cosgrove

Definition: PC application virtualization is an application packaging and deployment technologythat isolates applications from each other, and limits the degree to which they interact with theunderlying OS. Application virtualization provides an alternative to traditional packaging andinstallation technologies, and is an important enabling technology for hosted virtual desktops(HVDs).

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: PC application virtualization can reduce the time ittakes to deploy applications by reducing packaging complexity and scope for application conflictstypically experienced when using traditional Windows Installer packaging. PC applicationvirtualization tools are most often adopted as supplements to client management tools as a meansof addressing application packaging challenges.

Organizations continue to use application virtualization to enable desktop centralization throughserver-based computing and HVDs. Applications can be delivered to terminal servers more easilywhen virtualized. Organizations also use application virtualization to deliver applications tononpersistent HVDs. For physical PCs, much of the interest in PC application virtualization is drivenby the promise that this technology will alleviate regression testing overhead in applicationdeployments and Windows migrations (although it generally cannot be relied on to remediateapplication compatibility issues with Windows 7). Other benefits include enabling the efficient andrapid deployment of applications that couldn't be deployed due to potential conflicts with otherapplications, or the time required to test and package the application for deployment.

What continues to impede widespread adoption is that application virtualization cannot be used for100% of applications, and may never work with many legacy applications, especially thosedeveloped in-house where isolation techniques cannot be used. Several vendors offer applicationvirtualization products, including Microsoft (App-V), VMware (ThinApp), Symantec, Spoon, andNumecent. Microsoft App-V is becoming a more dominant product with a strong product andmarket presence. This threatens the viability of other vendors in this space.

User Advice: Implement PC application virtualization to reduce packaging complexity, particularly ifyou have a lot of applications that are not packaged. Analyze how this technology will interface withestablished and planned client management tools to avoid driving up the cost of a new applicationdelivery technology, and to ensure that virtualized applications are manageable. Test as manyapplications as you can during the evaluation, but recognize that some applications probably can'tbe virtualized. Consider application virtualization tools for:




■ Applications that have not been packaged, when the overhead (cost and time) of currentpackaging tools is too high, or the number of users receiving the application is too low to justifypackaging

■ Applications that have not been successfully packaged and deployed using client managementtools, because of application conflicts

■ Nonpersistent HVD deployments

■ Delivering Windows applications to terminal servers

Enterprises must consider the potential support implications of this technology. Not all applicationvendors support their applications running in a virtualized manner. Interoperability requirements alsomust be understood; with some application virtualization products, applications that call anotherapplication during runtime must be virtualized together or be manually linked.

Business Impact: PC application virtualization can improve manageability for corporate IT, and canreduce the amount of infrastructure required to support an HVD infrastructure. By isolatingapplications, IT organizations can gain improvements in the delivery of applications, and reduce(perhaps significantly) testing and outages due to application conflicts. This will improve IT agility byallowing applications to be delivered to users more quickly after users' request.




Sample Vendors: Citrix; Microsoft; Numecent; Spoon; Symantec; VMware

Network Performance Monitoring Tools

Analysis By: Jonah Kowall; Vivek Bhalla; Colin Fletcher

Definition: Network performance monitoring tools provide trend analysis via performance andavailability monitoring for the data communication network (including network devices and networktraffic). These tools collect performance data over time and include features such as baselining,threshold evaluation, network traffic analysis, service-level reporting, trend analysis, historicalreporting and, in some cases, interfaces to billing and chargeback systems.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: These tools are widely deployed and are useful foridentifying network capacity use trends, predicting capacity problems, quality of service (QoS)tracking, end-user experience monitoring and preventing minor service degradations frombecoming major problems for network users. New technologies and approaches continue toemerge in and around these tools, including the application of analytics technologies to deal withthe large dataset collected by these products.




User Advice: The goal of collecting and analyzing performance data is to enable the networkmanager to be more proactive. There are two common methods of monitoring networkperformance:

Polling network devices to collect standard Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)Management Information Base (MIB) data for performance reporting and trend analysis

Using specialized network instrumentation (such as probes, appliances [including virtual appliances]to perform packet capture and analysis, NetFlow, and other flow protocols) to analyze the makeupof the network traffic for performance monitoring and troubleshooting

NetFlow instrumentation has grown in popularity as an inexpensive data source, with details aboutthe distribution of protocols and the makeup of application traffic on the network. However,NetFlow by design is generated by network devices analyzing packet contents and provides asummarization approach to network usage, which normally lacks granularity and critical networkand application performance metrics, latency and response time. Broad NetFlow coverage shouldbe balanced with fine-grained packet capture capabilities for critical network segments. Expect newform factors for traffic analysis, such as virtual appliances and microprobes that piggyback onexisting hardware and interfaces in the network fabric, thus providing the depth of a probe at amuch lower cost while approaching the ubiquity of NetFlow.

Clients should look for network performance monitoring products that not only track performance,but also automatically establish a baseline measurement of normal behavior for the time of day andday of the week, dynamically set warning and critical thresholds as standard deviations from thebaseline, and notify the network manager only when an exception condition occurs. A simple staticthreshold based on an industry average or a guideline will generate false alarms.

Clients looking for the utmost efficiency should link network performance management processesto network configuration management processes so that bandwidth allocation and trafficprioritization settings are automatically updated based on changing business demands and SLAs.

Business Impact: These tools help improve network availability and performance, confirm networkservice quality, and justify network investments. Ongoing capacity utilization analysis enables thereallocation of network resources to higher-priority users or applications without the need foradditional capital investment, using various bandwidth allocation, traffic engineering and quality-of-service techniques. Without an understanding of previous network performance, it's impossible todemonstrate and monitor the current and improving service-level agreements after changes,additions or investments have been made. Without a baseline service-level measurement forcomparison, a network manager can't detect growth trends or be forewarned of expansionrequirements.


Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience





Sample Vendors: 7 Signal; ActionPacked Networks; AppNeta; Arbor Networks; Blue Coat Systems;Boundary; CA Technologies; Cisco; Compuware Corp.; Dell (Quest Software); Dorado Software;Empirix; Emulex; EMC; Fluke Networks; Genie Networks; Heroix; HP; IBM Tivoli; InfoVista; Ipswitch;JDS Uniphase; Lancope; ManageEngine; nPulse; Net Evidence; NetDialog; NetIQ; NetScoutSystems; NetSocket; Network Instruments; Niksun; Opnet Technologies; Orsyp; Packet Design;Paessler; PathSolutions; Prism Microsystems; Procera Networks; Riverbed; Riverbed Networks;ServicePilot; SevOne; Solana Networks; SolarWinds; Solera Networks; Statseeker; Tektronix;uptime software; Visual Network Systems; WildPackets; Zyrion


"Vendor Landscape for Application-Aware Network Performance Monitoring and Network PacketBrokers"

"When Is NetFlow 'Good Enough'?"

"NPM Delivers Improved Network Visibility to IT Operations"

Mobile Device Management

Analysis By: Leif-Olof Wallin; Phillip Redman

Definition: Enterprise mobile device management (MDM) software is primarily a policy andconfiguration management tool for mobile handheld devices based on smartphone or tablet OSs.MDM software helps enterprises manage the complex mobile computing and communicationsenvironment across multiple OS platforms. This is especially important in bring your own device(BYOD) initiatives. MDM can support corporate-owned and personal devices. The primary deliverymodel is on-premises, but MDM can also be offered as software as a service (SaaS) in the cloud.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: MDM has gone through different phases of the HypeCycle because much relies on what the tool is managing. Also, the scope of MDM has broadenedas incumbent management, security and application tool vendors enter the market with broadsuites to compete against the startups. Mobile platforms are still evolving, which affects theplacement of MDM on the Hype Cycle. Many organizations use MDM tools that are specific to adevice platform (BlackBerry or ruggedized equipment) or that manage a certain part of the life cycle(e.g., device lock or wipe), resulting in the adoption of fragmented toolsets.

The increasing adoption of MDM continues to be triggered by the adoption of more consumer-oriented devices. Although IT organizations vary in their approaches to implementing and owningthe tools that manage mobile devices (the messaging group, some other network group, thedesktop group, etc.), few manage the full life cycle across multiple device platforms. Organizationsare realizing that users are broadening their use of personal devices for business applications. Inaddition, many organizations are using different ways to deploy MDM to support differentmanagement styles. These factors will drive the adoption of tools to manage the full life cycle ofmobile devices.

Gartner believes that mobile devices will increasingly be supported in the client computing supportgroup in most organizations (where notebooks and PCs are managed). These devices will become




peers with notebooks and desktops from a support standpoint. Some organizations are alreadyreplacing PCs with tablets for niche user groups. An increasing number of organizations are lookingfor MDM functionality from PC configuration life cycle management (PCCLM) tools, which are alsobeginning to emerge. Also, mobile application development platform (MADP) products providesome basic MDM functionality.

MDM is evolving and broadening its functionality, going beyond what has been traditionallymanaged on a device, adding enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS), mobile applicationmanagement (MAM) and containerization. Although there has been much uptake of MDM, Gartnerbelieves that it is now about to plateau and could emerge as something else entirely as it begins tosupport mobile application development; adds higher levels of security, such as data lossprevention (DLP); and offers enterprise document management capabilities. Cloud-based offeringsare maturing and are increasingly being adopted.

User Advice: Assess the types of mobile platforms, devices and applications you will be supportingduring the next few years. Although MDM features have commoditized with little differentiation, theplatforms are expanding deeper into enterprise mobile software and document managementsupport. Enterprises should look at a vendor's MDM technology, as well as how well it can supportenterprise mobile needs. Match what the enterprise needs will be to what MDM currently offers andwhat it will offer during the next couple years. Strategize where MDM best sits in the enterprise andwho will manage it, but buy tactically (24- to 36-month horizon).

Business Impact: As more users rely on mobile computing in their jobs, the number of handhelddevices and tablets used for business purposes is growing. Therefore, MDM capabilities arebecoming increasingly important. Mobile devices are being used more frequently to supportbusiness-critical applications, thus requiring more stringent manageability to ensure secure useraccess and system availability. In this regard, MDM tools can have material benefits to securecorporate data and reduce support costs while increasing support levels.

In the short term, MDM tools will add additional per-user and per-device costs to the IT budget.Organizations will be under pressure to allocate funds and effort to put increasing numbers ofdevices under management that seem far less expensive than notebooks and may be owned by theuser. The need for security, privacy and compliance must be understood as factors beyond userchoice, and must be recognized as a cost of doing business in a BYOD scenario.




Sample Vendors: AirWatch; BoxTone; Citrix; Fiberlink Communications; Good Technology; IBM;McAfee; MobileIron; Symantec






"Toolkit: Mobile Device Management RFI and RFP Template"

"Critical Capabilities for Mobile Device Management"

Entering the Plateau

Client Management Tools

Analysis By: Terrence Cosgrove; Ronni J. Colville

Definition: Client management tools manage the configurations of client systems. Specificfunctionality includes OS deployment, inventory, software distribution, patch management, softwareusage monitoring and remote control. Desktop support organizations use client management toolsto automate system administration and support functions that would otherwise be done manually.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Client management tools are used primarily tomanage Windows PCs, but many organizations look to use them to manage their Windows servers,smartphones, tablets and non-Windows client platforms (e.g., Mac and Linux).

Client management tools are widely adopted. Product capabilities for inventory, softwaredistribution, and OS deployment are similar across products. Patch management — in particular,the ability to patch non-Microsoft applications — differentiates products. Organizations increasinglysupport non-Windows endpoints, such as mobile devices and Macs. Desktop engineers often lookto their client management tools first to support these platforms, but the majority of products in theclient management space do not have strong support for both Mac OS X and mobile platforms. Thisleads organizations to use three separate products to manage Windows PCs, mobile devices andMacs.

Most client management tools support mobile devices well, and few provide strong Mac support.Overall, however, the market has been slow to meet the needs of customers that want strongfunctionality across all three major platform types. This follows a pattern in the client managementmarket, where vendors tend to offer new functionality only when that market reaches a critical massand requirements are well-understood.

More recently, software as a service (SaaS) has gained interest as an alternative delivery model forclient management tools. In the short term, most organizations will use this model for specificscenarios (e.g., mergers and acquisitions, and full-time telework,) rather than as the standardarchitecture for all users. Many vendors are now offering SaaS as an alternative or sole deliverymodel, but regulatory requirements and technical challenges will inhibit rapid growth. Asapplications evolve away from classic Win32 applications to Web and WinRT apps, and as clientcomputing continues to become more constantly connected, SaaS will be a more suitable model forclient management.

User Advice: Users will benefit most from client management tools when standardization andpolicies are in place before automation is introduced. Although these tools can significantly offsetstaffing resource costs, they require dedicated resources to maintain the product, define resourcegroups, package applications, test deployments and maintain policies.




Many factors could make certain vendors more appropriate for your environment than others. Forexample, evaluate:

■ Support for mobile devices and Mac OS X

■ Ease of deployment and usability

■ Scalability

■ Integration between service desk and client management functionality

■ Geographic focus

■ Capabilities that meet a specific regulatory requirement

Business Impact: Among IT operations management tools, client management tools have one ofthe most obvious ROIs — managing the client environment in an automated, one-to-many fashion,rather than on a manual, one-to-one basis.




Sample Vendors: Absolute Software; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Dell Kace; FrontRangeSolutions; IBM; Kaseya; LANDesk; Matrix42; Microsoft; Novell; Symantec


"Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools"

Infrastructure Monitoring

Analysis By: Ian Head; Jonah Kowall; Milind Govekar

Definition: Infrastructure monitoring tools monitor the performance and availability of the variousdata center components and sometimes wider portions of the infrastructure. These tools typicallymonitor the availability and performance of servers, networks, database instances, storage, virtualfabric, single application instances and, sometimes, wider infrastructure performance. It is commonto monitor real-time performance and to perform historical data analysis or trending of the particularcomponent or infrastructure portion that they monitor.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Infrastructure monitoring tools usually collectresource utilization metrics, such as CPU, memory, disk input/output (I/O), network bandwidth, diskspace and file utilization. Many tools are able to capture and analyze a wider scope than individualcomponents and enable users to set thresholds or automatically baseline, derive thresholds againstutilization metrics, and dispatch consequent alerts. Commercial open-source technologies arecommonly used. These tools may also be implemented in a software as a service (SaaS) delivery




model where enterprises do not have to buy and implement software in their data centers, but maybuy a subscription service.

Infrastructure monitoring tools can be acquired:

■ From the "Big 4" — BMC Software, CA Technologies, HP and IBM

■ From platform vendors, such as Microsoft and VMware

■ From scores of smaller, focused commercial vendors

■ As open-source tools that provide functionality across multiple infrastructure components (e.g.,server, networks, storage) or tools that just focus on a particular infrastructure component (e.g.,just the server).

Furthermore, most capacity-planning vendors provide this functionality as part of their tools. Theapplication instance monitoring products differ from application performance monitoring products,in that they look at single servers running instances of an application versus a distributedapplication in an end-to-end manner. Examples of these supported applications may include IBMWebSphere MQ, Oracle WebLogic Server, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange andMicrosoft SharePoint. The tools also monitor the virtual infrastructure by typically interfacing withvendor-supplied hypervisor management products such as VMware vCenter or Microsoft SystemCenter Virtual Machine Manager.

Infrastructure component monitoring tools have been available for decades, supporting various ITinfrastructure components. They are typically the first set of tools in which enterprises invest tomonitor availability and performance in a reactive manner. These tools provide valuable data thatcan be used by organizations to become more proactive by using the data to plot utilization trendsand for resource capacity planning. These tools are mature and are differentiated by: the scope oftheir footprint when collecting relevant metrics, ease of deployment, user interface and price.Component-level tools are now augmented by tools with a wider scope that look to provideinformation on the health of broader segments of the overall infrastructure, sometimes right out tothe end-user device.

The ongoing pressure to reduce IT costs is increasing interest in open-source tools and SaaSdelivery models. Almost all Global 2000 enterprises have implemented these tools for their datacenter components as a minimum scope.

User Advice: Enterprises that have not invested in these monitoring tools must invest in this area asa first step toward becoming more proactive in monitoring their infrastructure components.Enterprises should also examine the tools provided by their infrastructure platform vendors,because these tools usually provide good-enough monitoring data for that infrastructurecomponent. Most organizations could improve their proactive event and incident management bymaking more extensive use of the tools they already have and then by deploying the more extensiveinfrastructure monitoring solutions.

Organizations may extend their proactive infrastructure monitoring capability by deployingapplication performance monitoring and operational analytics solutions.




Business Impact: Infrastructure monitoring tools are used to monitor and manage the quality ofservice of components and sections of the infrastructure and help lower the total cost of ownership(TCO) of managing a large and complex infrastructure environment.

Benefit Rating: Low



Sample Vendors: Absolute Performance; AccelOps; AppFirst; ASG; Bijk; Blue Elephant; BMCSoftware; CA Technologies; Centerity; Centreon; Circonus; Compuware; Datadog; Dell; eGInnovations; Fujitsu; GFI; GFI Software; GroundWork; GSX; Heroix; Hitachi; HP; IBM; Interlink Data;Ipswitch; Kaseya; logicMonitor; LogMatrix; ManageEngine; Microsoft; MRTG; Nagios; Neebula;NetIQ; Nexthink; NEC; Opsview; OP5; Oracle; Orsyp; Paessler; Quest Software; RealtekSemiconductor; ScaleXtreme; ScienceLogic; Scout; Server Density; ServersCheck; SevOne;SolarWinds; SpiceWorks; Tango 04; Virtual Instruments; VMware; Wormly; Zabbix; Zenoss; Zyrion


"Cool Vendors in IT Operations Management, 2012"

"Toolkit: Server Performance Monitoring and Capacity Planning Tool RFI"

"Vendor Landscape for Application-Aware Network Performance Monitoring and Network PacketBrokers"

"Open-Source Monitoring: The Free Way"

"Open-Source Monitoring: Commercial Offerings"


Analysis By: Vivek Bhalla; Jonah Kowall; Colin Fletcher

Definition: Network fault monitoring (NFM) tools indicate status of network components, such asrouters and switches. These tools isolate, aggregate, deduplicate, filter, prioritize and resolve faults/alerts on the network. In some cases, the tools discover and visualize the topology of physical andlogical relationships and dependencies among network elements. This helps depict the up/downstatus of those elements in a contextual map, provide basic root cause analysis (RCA), and enhanceerror deduplication and suppression capabilities.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: These tools have been widely deployed, primarily toaddress the reactive nature of network monitoring in IT operations. They provide network teamswith a single location to monitor, alert and coordinate diagnosis of all network-related fault andavailability information. These events are useful to help ensure that critical network devices remainavailable to support the business applications and services that rely on them.




NFM tools can filter events based on predetermined rules, suppress symptomatic or superfluousevents, identify alerts and prioritize them accordingly. They then are able to initiate predefined,automated workflows, including the creation of trouble tickets or alert notifications. Eventenrichment is also a common feature whereby the original event is updated with additional contextto resolve the fault or ensure that information can be passed on to pertinent parties at the earliestopportunity and with the most-relevant details.

User Advice: Users should leverage network fault monitoring tools to assess the status of networkcomponents, but should work toward improving problem resolution capabilities and aligningnetwork management tools with IT service and business goals. NFM tools are frequently used forblame avoidance, rather than problem resolution, with the goal of proving that the problem is notthe network's fault. Resolving problems, not just avoiding blame, should be the goal.

More sophisticated network fault monitoring tools add the capability of correlating network eventsand leveraging network topology knowledge to automatically determine the likely root cause ofissues, which can improve network management staff productivity, and reduce the time required toidentify the problem. However, without network topology discovery capabilities in the network faultmonitoring tool, the network manager would be required to manually define correlation rulesregarding device interconnections, eliminating the potential advantages of any automated rootcause analysis capabilities.

A new requirement being placed on these tools is to go beyond physical connectivity to understandthe logical parent-child and containment relationships in the virtual infrastructure. The use of IToperations analytics tools is helping enhance the ability and value of such logical understanding ofthe network environment. These new capability requirements have yet to be incorporated by allsolutions offered by vendors in this space, nor are they fully exploited by end users at this stage,hence the readjustment in this year's Hype Cycle position to reflect this area of innovation andprogress.

Business Impact: These tools help IT organizations view their network events through a single,"network pane of glass." This helps improve the availability of the network infrastructure andshorten the response time for noticing and repairing network issues that affect businessproductivity. NFM tools support day-to-day network administration, and provide useful features fornetwork engineers. However, they generally treat the network as a largely undifferentiated utility,and don't assist in aligning the network with business applications, business services or businessimpact.




Sample Vendors: Absolute Performance; AccelOps; ASG Software Solutions; CA Technologies;Cisco; Dartware; LLC; Dell (Quest Software); Dorado Software; eG Innovations; EMC; Entuity; GFISoftware; GroundWork; HP; IBM Tivoli; Ipswitch; logicMonitor; ManageEngine; Nagios; NetIQ(Novell); OP5; ScienceLogic; SolarWinds; SpiceWorks; Uplogix; Zabbix; Zenoss; Zyrion





"Six Steps to Event and Network Fault Management Tool Integration and Device Support"


Analysis By: Milind Govekar; Biswajeet Mahapatra

Definition: Job-scheduling tools perform tasks or jobs based on a date and time schedule in anautomated fashion. These tasks can be bill calculations or the transfer of data between servers orapplications. A scheduled job usually has a date, time and frequency, as well as otherdependencies, inputs and outputs associated with it. Advanced IT workload automation brokertools also have job-scheduling capabilities.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Job-scheduling tools are widely used, maturetechnologies. They support Java and .NET application server platforms in addition to integrationtechnology. Job-scheduling tools help enterprises in their automation requirements acrossheterogeneous computing environments. They automate critical batch business processes, such asbilling or IT operational processes, including backups, and they provide event-driven automationand batch application integration (for example, integrating CRM processes with ERP processes).Some of the vendors in this market have IT workload automation capabilities in addition totraditional job scheduling, and some have evolved toward handling dynamic, policy-drivenworkloads; thus, they have moved toward IT workload automation broker tools.

These tools have been used on the mainframe for decades for automating mission-critical tasks andprocesses. Some of these tools have either built-in managed file transfer capabilities or have aseparate module that integrates easily with the job-scheduling tool. There are also tools on themarket that are targeted at specific environments like Java or .NET to automate jobs or tasks in thatenvironment. Likewise, there are products that automate tasks only in the distributed systemsenvironment with application adapters, disaster recovery automation capabilities and file transfercapabilities.

User Advice: Many enterprises are in the process of evaluating a job-scheduling tool, upgradingfrom an older version or tool, or consolidating more than two tools. Enterprises choose tools basedon cost, ease of migration, familiarity with the tool, availability of in-house skills and their own long-term perception of the strategic nature of job-scheduling tools. Enterprises should plan to use asingle job-scheduling tool or as few as possible to enable running jobs in their heterogeneousenvironments. Enterprises should also look at job-scheduling tools from a long-term perspectiverather than for immediate needs only. Environments that are largely static may choose to invest inthese tools. However, enterprises looking for policy-driven, dynamic workload managementcapabilities should consider IT workload automation broker tools.

Business Impact: These tools can automate a batch process to improve the availability andreliability of a business process that depends on it.

Benefit Rating: Low





Maturity: Legacy

Sample Vendors: Argent Software; ASG Software Solutions; Flux; Help/Systems; MVP SystemsSoftware; Software & Management Associates; SOS-Berlin; Terracotta; Vinzant Software


"Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation"

"Toolkit: Preparing an RFI for Workload Automation or Job-Scheduling Tools"

"How to Modernize Your Job Scheduling Environment"

"IT Workload Automation Broker: Job Scheduler 2.0"

"Toolkit: Best Practices for Job Scheduling"

Appendices




Figure 3. Hyper Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2012

Technology Trigger

Peak ofInflated

Expectations

Trough of Disillusionment Slope of Enlightenment


time

expectations

Plateau will be reached in:

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 yearsobsoletebefore plateau

As of July 2012IT Operations GamificationBusiness Productivity Teams


DevOpsSocial IT Management

IT Service SupportManagement Tools



Service Billing




IT Service CatalogTools

IT Process Automation ToolsWorkspace Virtualization

COBIT



IT Service Dependency MappingIT Service View CMDB




Server Provisioningand Configuration

Management

ITIL



IT Change Management Tools

PC Application Streaming Service-Level Reporting Tools



Mobile Device ManagementNetwork Performance Monitoring Tools

Client Management ToolsInfrastructure Monitoring IT Service Desk Tools



Source; Gartner (July 2012)




Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels

Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases

Phase Definition

Innovation Trigger A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generatessignificant press and industry interest.

Peak of InflatedExpectations

During this phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of well-publicized activity by technology leaders results in some successes, but morefailures, as the technology is pushed to its limits. The only enterprises makingmoney are conference organizers and magazine publishers.

Trough ofDisillusionment

Because the technology does not live up to its overinflated expectations, it rapidlybecomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few cautionary tales.

Slope ofEnlightenment

Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range oforganizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's applicability, risksand benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease thedevelopment process.

Plateau ofProductivity

The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Toolsand methodologies are increasingly stable as they enter their second and thirdgenerations. Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reducedlevel of risk; the rapid growth phase of adoption begins. Approximately 20% ofthe technology's target audience has adopted or is adopting the technology as itenters this phase.

Years to MainstreamAdoption

The time required for the technology to reach the Plateau of Productivity.


Table 2. Benefit Ratings

Benefit Rating Definition

Transformational Enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts inindustry dynamics

High Enables new ways of performing horizontal or vertical processes that will result insignificantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise

Moderate Provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result inincreased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise

Low Slightly improves processes (for example, improved user experience) that will bedifficult to translate into increased revenue or cost savings





Table 3. Maturity Levels

Maturity Level Status Products/Vendors

Embryonic ■ In labs ■ None

Emerging ■ Commercialization by vendors

■ Pilots and deployments by industry leaders

■ First generation

■ High price

■ Much customization

Adolescent ■ Maturing technology capabilities and processunderstanding

■ Uptake beyond early adopters

■ Second generation

■ Less customization

Early mainstream ■ Proven technologyVendors, technology and adoption rapidlyevolving

■ Third generation

■ More out of box

■ Methodologies

Maturemainstream

■ Robust technology

■ Not much evolution in vendors or technology

■ Several dominant vendors

Legacy ■ Not appropriate for new developments

■ Cost of migration constrains replacement

■ Maintenance revenue focus

Obsolete ■ Rarely used ■ Used/resale market only


Recommended ReadingSome documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Toolkit: ITScore for Infrastructure and Operations Service Improvement Project Planning"

"Successful ITIL and Service Management Projects Avoid These 10 Common Failings"


"Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools"

"MarketScope for the IT Asset Management Repository"




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