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This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]


G00214402

Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management,

2011Published: 18 July 2011

Analyst(s): Milind Govekar, Patricia Adams

Adoption of new technology and increasing complexity of the IT

environment continue to attract IT operations vendors that provide

management technology. Use this Hype Cycle to manage your expectations

regarding these management technologies and processes.

Table of Contents

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

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

The Hype Cycle................................................................................................................................3

Changes and Updates................................................................................................................4

The Priority Matrix.............................................................................................................................8

Off The Hype Cycle........................................................................................................................ 11On the Rise.................................................................................................................................... 11

DevOps.................................................................................................................................... 11

IT Operations Analytics............................................................................................................. 12

Social IT Management..............................................................................................................14

Cloud Management Platforms.................................................................................................. 16

Behavior Learning Engines........................................................................................................17

Application Release Automation............................................................................................... 18

SaaS Tools for IT Operations....................................................................................................20

Service Billing........................................................................................................................... 22

Release Governance Tools.......................................................................................................23

IT Workload Automation Broker Tools.......................................................................................26

Workspace Virtualization...........................................................................................................28

At the Peak.....................................................................................................................................29

Capacity Planning and Management Tools............................................................................... 29

IT Financial Management Tools.................................................................................................30


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IT Service Portfolio Management and IT Service Catalog Tools.................................................32

Open-Source IT Operations Tools.............................................................................................34

VM Energy Management Tools.................................................................................................35

IT Process Automation Tools....................................................................................................36

Application Performance Monitoring......................................................................................... 38

COBIT...................................................................................................................................... 40

Sliding Into the Trough....................................................................................................................41

IT Service View CMDB..............................................................................................................41

Real-Time Infrastructure............................................................................................................44

IT Service Dependency Mapping.............................................................................................. 46

Mobile Device Management......................................................................................................48

Business Service Management Tools........................................................................................50

Configuration Auditing.............................................................................................................. 52

Advanced Server Energy Monitoring Tools................................................................................54

Network Configuration and Change Management Tools........................................................... 55

Server Provisioning and Configuration Management................................................................. 56

ITIL...........................................................................................................................................59

Hosted Virtual Desktops........................................................................................................... 61

PC Application Streaming.........................................................................................................63

IT Change Management Tools..................................................................................................65

IT Asset Management Tools..................................................................................................... 67

PC Application Virtualization..................................................................................................... 69

Service-Level Reporting Tools.................................................................................................. 70

Climbing the Slope......................................................................................................................... 72

IT Event Correlation and Analysis Tools.....................................................................................72

Network Performance Management Tools................................................................................73

IT Service Desk Tools............................................................................................................... 75

PC Configuration Life Cycle Management.................................................................................76

Entering the Plateau....................................................................................................................... 77

Network Fault-Monitoring Tools................................................................................................77

Job-Scheduling Tools...............................................................................................................78

Appendixes.................................................................................................................................... 79

Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels..........................................................81

Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................................83

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List of Tables

Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases.................................................................................................................81

Table 2. Benefit Ratings........................................................................................................................82

Table 3. Maturity Levels........................................................................................................................82

List of Figures

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011....................................................................7

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for IT Operations Management, 2011...............................................................10

Figure 3. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2010..................................................................80

Analysis

What You Need to Know

This document was revised on 18 August 2011. For more information, see the Correctionspage on

gartner.com.

As enterprises continue to increase adoption of dynamic technologies and styles of computing,

such as virtualization and cloud computing, the IT operations organization faces several challenges:

implementing, administering and supporting these new technologies to deliver business value, and

continuing to manage the complex IT environment. Consequently, the IT operations organization

plays a key role in becoming a trusted service provider to the business. This, however, is a journey

of service orientation and continuous improvement, which will result in favorable business

outcomes.

The expectations of the business in terms of agility, low fixed costs and service orientations have

risen due to increased visibility of offerings, such as cloud computing-based services. The promise

of new technology to deliver these business expectations continues; therefore, the hype associated

with IT operations technology used to ensure service quality, agility and customer satisfaction

continues. Thus, making the right choices and investments in this technology becomes important.

This Hype Cycle provides information and advice on the most important IT operations tools,

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

As the global economy has shown signs of recovery during the last 12 months, investments in IT

reflect this change. Cost optimization continues to be a key focus for many enterprises; yet there is

a strong drive to make incremental investments in innovation and best practices, especially in the

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area of IT service management. According to Gartner CIO polling, IT budgets have increased very

modestly; therefore, IT ops and cloud management platforms are seen as opportunities to reduce

cost through automation thus enabling IT to invest in growth and transformation projects.

Achieving this, in conjunction with reducing their spending, helps IT ops to "run the business."

Changes and Updates

Along with economic changes, IT infrastructure and operations has experienced significant

disruption, which is represented in this Hype Cycle. IT organizations have continued to build upon

their virtualization and cloud computing strategies. The value proposition and risks associated with

private, hybrid and external cloud is gaining traction in some organizations. The disruption is

occurring in several areas, most notably the emergence of the DevOps arena and the intersection

with release management. DevOps represents a fundamental shift in thinking that recognizes the

importance and intersection of application development with IT ops and the production

environment. Just as silos were broken down with the adoption of IT service management that

crossed IT operations disciplines, the shift is now at a higher level i.e., across IT application

development and IT operations to build a more agile and responsive IT organization. In

conjunction with cloud and virtualization, this shift is resulting in new approaches that make IT more

business-aligned and remove many road blocks. However, this is a cultural change that requires

employees to be willing and able to accept, adapt, implement and build upon these new

approaches.

Other changes that have occurred on the 2011 Hype Cycle are in the process and tool areas. With

respect to process, ITIL version 2 (ITIL V2) was retired from the Hype Cycle, as ITIL V3 began to

outweigh ITIL V2 relevance in some of the process design guidelines. The adoption of ITIL V3 has

grown since its introduction four years ago and has almost become mainstream, with a large

number of Gartner clients having adopted at least one component of the most recent books. Thus,

we have just one combined entry (ITIL) for the two ITIL versions.

In 2011, application performance monitoring (APM) technology became a consolidation of the

various related technologies, such as end-user performance monitoring, application transaction

profiling and application management, which are typically part of the APM market. We have also

added behavior learning engines (BLEs). When used with other IT operations tools, BLEs improve

the proactivity and predictability of the IT operations environment. Furthermore, we have combined

virtual resource capacity planning and resource capacity planning tools into capacity planning and

management tools, which reflect the market and evolution of tools and technologies to increasingly

provide a holistic and consolidated approach.

As IT operations increasingly is run like a business, IT financial management becomes important,beyond just chargeback. Thus, we have introduced IT financial management tools to match this

change and subsume chargeback tools. Furthermore, we have added service billing, because it also

is important in this financial context. We have renamed run book automation to IT process

automation to show the precise process-to-process integration and the associated IT operations

tools integrations. We also have renamed network monitoring tools to network fault-monitoring

tools to more accurately describe their functions.



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To capture the "wisdom of IT operations specialists," social IT management tools that enable and

capture collaboration have emerged, particularly in the IT service desk area, and thus are on this

Hype Cycle. Energy management is always a concern for IT operations organizations and, therefore,

virtual machine (VM) energy management and advanced server energy monitoring tools, for use

specifically within data centers, have been positioned here. PC energy management is already

represented in the PC configuration life cycle management tools. Last, but not least, we are seeing

an emergence of IT operations analytics tools that more-advanced and mature IT operations

organizations are beginning to use to combine financial metrics and business value metrics that

form the platform for business intelligence (BI) for IT.

While the recovery from the recession is still under way, IT infrastructure and operations continues

to be a big part of IT budgets. Well-run IT operations organizations take a service management view

across their technology silos, and strive for excellence and continuous improvement. Thus, to

manage IT operations like a business requires a strong combination of business management

(added to model the ITScore dimensions), organization, processes and tools. This journey toward

business alignment, while managing cost, needs to be managed through a methodical, step-by-

step approach. Gartner's ITScore for infrastructure and operations is a maturity model that has

been developed to provide this guidance.

Virtualization is ubiquitous in production environments to improve agility and resource utilization,

and to lower costs. Cloud computing has the potential for improving agility, and lowering capital

expenditure (capex) and fixed costs in the IT environment, as well as lowering operating expenditure

(opex) through automation with private clouds. However, both these approaches are increasing the

complexity of the IT environment. Managing end-to-end service delivery in this dynamic

environment is challenging, and has led to new management technology entering the marketplace,

with the promise to manage these dynamic, yet complex, environments. Running IT operations as a

business means having a balanced and adaptable combination of organization, processes and

technologies. Therefore, we position organizational governance methodologies (such as COBIT) andprocess frameworks (such as ITIL) on the Hype Cycle and look at a wide range of IT operations

technologies, from new technologies (such as IT operations analytics and cloud management

platforms) to mature technologies (such as end-user monitoring and job-scheduling tools).

Most of the technologies and frameworks have moved gradually along the Hype Cycle. IT asset

management tools have dropped into the Trough of Disillusionment, because they have not

delivered expected benefits. Many of the technologies are climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, as

opposed to landing on the Plateau of Productivity, despite having 20% to 50% adoption, or more

than 50% adoption. The reason is that they have not fully delivered the benefits expected by users

who have implemented them.

This Hype Cycle should benefit most adoption profiles (early adopters of technology, mainstream,

etc.). For example, enterprises that are leading adopters of technology should begin testing

technologies that are still early in the Hype Cycle. However, risk-averse clients may delay adoption

of these technologies. The earlier or higher the technology is positioned on the Hype Cycle, the

higher the expectations and marketing hype; therefore, manage down your expectations and

implement specific plans to mitigate any risk from using that technology.



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We note three important considerations for using this Hype Cycle:

Creating a business case for new technologies driven by ROI is important for organizations with

a low tolerance for risk; whereas highly innovative organizations that have increased their IT

operations budgets likely will gain a competitive advantage from a technology's benefits.

Innovative technologies often come from smaller vendors with questionable viability. It is likely

that these vendors will be acquired, exit the market or go out of business, so plan carefully.

While budget constraints are slowly easing, 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 and the technology's potential benefits.

Figure 1 depicts technologies on the Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011.



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Figure 1. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011

TechnologyTrigger

Peak ofInflated

Expectations

Trough ofDisillusionment

Slope of EnlightenmentPlateau of

Productivity

time

expectations

Years to mainstream adoption:

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

As of July 2011DevOps

IT Operations AnalyticsSocial IT Management

Cloud Management Platforms

Behavior Learning Engines

Application Release AutomationSaaS Tools for IT Operations

Service Billing

Capacity Planning and Management Tools

Release Governance Tools

IT Workload Automation Broker ToolsWorkspace Virtualization

IT Financial Management Tools

IT Service Portfolio Managementand IT Service Catalog Tools

Open-Source IT Operations ToolsVM Energy Management Tools

IT Process Automation ToolsApplication Performance MonitoringCOBIT

Advanced Server EnergyMonitoring Tools

IT Service View CMDBReal-Time Infrastructure

IT Service Dependency MappingMobile Device Management

Business Service Management Tools

Configuration Auditing

Network Configurationand ChangeManagement Tools

ServerProvisioning and

ConfigurationManagement

ITIL

HostedVirtual

Desktops PC Application Virtualization

IT Change Management Tools

IT Asset Management Tools

PC Application Streaming

Service-Level Reporting Tools

IT Event Correlation and Analysis Tools

Network Performance Management Tools

IT Service Desk Tools

PC Configuration Life CycleManagement

Network Fault-Monitoring Tools

Job-Scheduling Tools

Source: Gartner (July 2011)

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The Priority Matrix

The Priority Matrix maps a technology's and process's time to maturity on a grid in an easy-to-read

format that answers two questions:

How much value will an organization get from a technology?

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

However, technology and processes have to be in lock-step to achieve full benefits; thus, we also

have process frameworks, such as ITIL and COBIT, on this Hype Cycle.

Virtualization, software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing continue to broaden the service

delivery channels for IT operations. Business users are demanding more transparency for the

services they receive, but they also want improved service levels that provide acceptable availability

and performance. They are looking to understand the fixed and variable costs that form the basis of

the service they want and receive. They are also looking at data security, increased service agility

and responsiveness. Many business customers have circumvented IT to acquire public cloudservices, which has led many IT organizations to invest in private cloud services for some of their

most-used and highly standardized sets of services.

They often have sought a harmonious mix of organization, processes and technology that will

deliver IT operational excellence to run IT operations like a business. There are a few truly

transformational technologies and processes, such as DevOps, ITIL and real-time infrastructure

(RTI). Most technologies provide incremental business value by lowering the total cost of ownership

(TCO), improving quality of service (QoS) and reducing business risks.

Fairly mature technologies, such as job-scheduling tools and network fault monitoring tools, enable

IT operations organizations to keep IT production workloads running through continuousautomation and lowering network mean time to repair (MTTR). However, the complexity of IT

operations environments continues to rise, as the implementation and adoption of service-oriented

architecture (SOA), Web services, virtualization technologies and cloud computing increase. This

presents challenges in such areas as IT financial management and improving IT operations

proactive responses to deliver business benefits.

Meanwhile, due to cost pressures, open-source visibility has increased in IT operations

management. These tools provide basic monitoring capabilities, and most of the implementation of

automated actions is done by script writing, resulting in fairly high maintenance efforts and longer

implementation times. The focus of these tools has changed from monitoring individual

infrastructure components, including networks and servers, to monitoring activities acrossinfrastructure components, from an end-to-end IT services perspective. Furthermore, these tools

have evolved to automate processes such as incident management. Such tools have the potential

to lower the license costs of commercial tools, but pure-play open-source tools may increase the

total cost of support.

IT financial management, along with IT asset management, and automation technologies will take

center stage through 2011 as IT operations' quest for continuous improvement and lower costs

continues. The focus on the cost of data will provide cost transparency for costs associated with



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the service portfolio, catalog tools and APM tools to rise through 2011. The integration of IT

operations tools is continuing at the data level, using technologies such as the configuration

management database (CMDB), and at the process level, using technologies such as IT workload

automation broker and IT process automation (ITPA).

Overall, there is no technology on this Hype Cycle that will mature in more than 10 years, and thereis only one technology (social IT management) that has relatively low benefit, but this could change

in the coming years as it matures (see Figure 2). The advantages of implementing IT operations

management technologies continue to be to lower the TCO of managing the complex IT

environment, improve the quality of service and lower business risk.



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Figure 2. Priority Matrix for IT Operations Management, 2011

benefit years to mainstream adoption

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

transformational DevOps

ITIL

Real-Time Infrastructure

high Behavior LearningEngines

Hosted Virtual Desktops

IT Service Desk Tools

PC ApplicationVirtualization

Application PerformanceMonitoring

Capacity Planning andManagement Tools

Cloud ManagementPlatforms

Configuration Auditing

IT Change ManagementTools

IT Financial ManagementTools

IT Service DependencyMapping

IT Service View CMDB

IT Workload AutomationBroker Tools

Open-Source ITOperations Tools

Server Provisioning andConfigurationManagement

Service Billing

VM Energy ManagementTools

Workspace Virtualization

Business ServiceManagement Tools

IT Operations Analytics

IT Process AutomationTools

IT Service PortfolioManagement and ITService Catalog Tools

moderate Advanced Server EnergyMonitoring Tools

Job-Scheduling Tools

Network Fault-MonitoringTools

Network PerformanceManagement Tools

PC Configuration LifeCycle Management

Application ReleaseAutomation

COBIT

IT Asset ManagementTools

IT Event Correlation andAnalysis Tools

Network Configuration andChange ManagementTools

PC Application Streaming

SaaS Tools for ITOperations

Service-Level ReportingTools

Mobile DeviceManagement

Release GovernanceTools

low Social IT Management

As of July 2011

Source: Gartner (July 2011)



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Off The Hype Cycle

Some of the technologies on this Hype Cycle have been subsumed or replaced by other

technologies. For example, virtual server resource capacity planning and resource capacity tools

have been combined into one entry called capacity planning and management tools; chargeback

tools are now part of IT financial management tools; end-user monitoring tools, applicationmanagement tools and application transaction profiling tools are now part of APM tools; ITIL V2 and

ITIL V3 process frameworks have been combined into the ITIL entry; mobile service-level

management tools and business consulting services are off the Hype Cycle, due to their lack of

direct relevance to the IT operations area.

On the Rise

DevOps

Analysis By:Cameron Haight; Ronni J. Colville; Jim Duggan

Definition:Gartner's working definition of DevOps is "an IT service delivery approach rooted in

agile philosophy, with an emphasis on business outcomes, not process orthodoxy. The DevOps

philosophy (if not the term itself) was born primarily from the activities of cloud service providers

and Web 2.0 adopters as they worked to address scale-out problems due to increasing online

service adoption. DevOps is bottom-up-based, with roots in the Agile Manifesto and its guiding

principles. Because it doesn't have a concrete set of mandates or standards, or a known framework

(e.g., ITIL, CMMI), it is subject to a more liberal interpretation.

In Gartner's view, DevOps has two main focuses. First is the notion of a DevOps "culture," which

seeks to establish a trust-based foundation between development and operations teams. In

practice, this is often centered on the release management process (i.e., the managed delivery ofcode into production), as this can be a source of conflict between these two groups often due to

differing objectives. The second is the leveraging of the concept of "infrastructure as code,"

whereby the increasing programmability of today's modern data centers provides IT an ability to be

more agile in response to changing business demands. Here, again, the release management

process is often targeted through the increasing adoption of automation to improve overall

application life cycle management (ALM). Practices like continuous integration and automated

regression testing should also be mastered to increase release frequency, while maintaining service

levels.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:While DevOps has its roots in agile methodologies,

and, from that perspective, is not totally new, its adoption within traditional enterprises is still verylimited, and, hence, the primary reason for our positioning. For IT organizations, the early focus is

on streamlining release deployments across the application life cycle from development through to

production. Tools are emerging that address building out a consistent application or service model

to reduce the risks stemming from customized scripting while improving deployment success due

to more-predictable configurations. The adoption of these tools is not usually associated with

development or production support staff per se, but rather with groups that "straddle" both

development and production, typically requiring higher organizational maturity.



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DevOps does not preclude the use of other frameworks or methodologies, such as ITIL, and, in fact,

the potential exists to incorporate some of these other best-practice approaches to enhance overall

service delivery. Enterprises that are adopting a DevOps approach often begin with one process

that can span both development and operations. Release management, while not mature in its

adoption, is becoming the pivotal starting point for many DevOps projects.

User Advice:While there is growing hype about DevOps, potential practitioners need to know that

the successful adoption or incorporation of this approach is contingent on an organizational

philosophy shift something that is not easy to achieve. Because DevOps is not prescriptive, it will

likely result in a variety of different manifestations, making it more difficult to know whether one is

"doing" DevOps. However, this lack of a formal process framework should not prevent IT

organizations from developing their own repeatable processes that can give them both agility as

well as control. Because DevOps is emerging in terms of definition and practice, IT organizations

should approach it as a set of guiding principles, not as process dogma. Select a project involving

development and operations teams to test the fit of a DevOps-based approach in your enterprise.

Often, this is aligned with one application environment. If adopted, consider expanding DevOps to

incorporate technical architecture. At a minimum, examine activities along the existing developer-

to-operations continuum, and experiment with the adoption of more-agile communications

processes and patterns to improve production deployments.

Business Impact:DevOps is focused on improving business outcomes via the adoption of agile

methodologies. While agility often equates to speed (and faster time to market), there is a somewhat

paradoxical impact, as well as smaller, more-frequent updates to production that can also work to

improve overall stability and control, thus reducing risk.

Benefit Rating:Transformational

Market Penetration:Less than 1% of target audience

Maturity:Emerging

IT Operations Analytics

Analysis By:Milind Govekar; David M. Coyle

Definition:IT operations analytics tools enable CIOs and senior IT operations managers to monitor

their "business" operational data and metrics. The tools are similar to a business intelligence

platform utilized by business unit managers to drive business performance. IT operations analytics

tools provide users the capabilities to deliver efficiency, optimize IT investments, correlate trends,

and understand and maximize IT opportunities in support of the business. These tools are capable

of integrating data from various data sources (service desks, IT ECA, IT workload automation

brokers, IT financial management, APM, performance management, BSM, service-level reporting,

cloud monitoring tools, etc.), and processing it in real time to deliver operational improvements.

These tools are not the same as data warehouse reporting tools. Data from IT operations analytics

tools will typically send data to data warehouses and other IT operations tools (e.g., service-level

reporting) for further non-real-time reporting. IT operations analytics tools may have engines, such

as complex-event processing (CEP), at their core to enable them to collect, process and analyze



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multidimensional business and IT data, and to identify the most meaningful events and assess their

impact in real time.

There are many business intelligence and analytics tools on the market (see "Hype Cycle for

Business Intelligence, 2010"), but these tools are not focused on the specific needs of the IT

operations organization. IT operations analytics tools must have IT domain expertise andconnectors to IT operations management tools and data sources in order to facilitate IT-specific

analytics and decision making. IT operations management vendors often partner with established

business intelligence vendors (for example, BMC Software partnering with SAP Business Objects)

to offer their customers advanced analytics capabilities.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:As IT operations analytics tools provide real-time

analytics that can improve IT operations performance, IT management can use these tools to make

adjustments and improvements to the IT operational services they deliver to their business

customers. For example, they can delay the acquisition of hardware by showing the cost of unused

capacity or help in consolidation and rationalization of applications based on utilization and cost

data. Analytics tools are well-established, but have experienced slow adoption in the IT organizationdue to their expense and lack of IT domain knowledge, and because IT organizations often lack the

maturity to consider themselves a business. Organizations at a maturity of at least Level 3 or above

in the I&O ITScore Maturity Model will be able to take advantage of these tools (see "ITScore for

Infrastructure and Operations"):

Rationalization of applications and services based on their utilization and their cost to and value

for the business

Delaying the acquisition of hardware (e.g., server/computer and storage) by revealing the cost

of unused capacity

Determining more-cost-effective platforms or architectures through what-if and scenarioanalytics

Optimizing the vendor portfolio by redefining contractual terms and conditions based on cost

and utilization trends

User Advice:Users who are at least at ITScore Level 3 or above in IT operations maturity should

investigate where and how these tools can be used to run their operations more efficiently, provide

detailed trend analysis of issues and deliver highly visible and improved customer service. Most of

the tools available today take a "siloed" approach to IT operations analytics; i.e., the data sources

they support are rather limited to their domains, e.g., severs, databases, applications, etc., or are

specific to agents from a single vendor.

Additionally, their ability to integrate data from multiple vendor sources and process large amounts

of real-time data are also limited. However, the IT operations analytics tools that have emerged from

specific IT operations areas have the potential to extend their capabilities more broadly. Most of

these tools rely on manual intervention to identify the data sources, understand the business

problem they are trying to solve and build expertise in the tools for interpreting events and providing

automated actions or recommendations.



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Investments in these tools are likely to be disruptive for customers, particularly as newer, innovative

vendors get acquired. This means that the product must have significant value for the customer

today to mitigate the risk of acquisition and subsequent disruptions to product advancements, or

changes to product strategy. A critical requirement for choosing a tool is understanding the data

sources it can integrate with, the amount of manual effort required to run analytics and the training

needs of the IT staff.

Business Impact:IT operations analytics tools will provide CIOs and senior IT operations managers

radical benefits toward running their own businesses more efficiently, and at the same time enable

their business customers to maximize opportunities. These tools that will provide a more accurate

assessment of the correlations among the business processes, applications and infrastructures in a

complex and multisourced environment.

Benefit Rating:High


Maturity:Embryonic

Sample Vendors:Appnomic; Apptio; Hagrid Solutions; SL; Splunk; Sumerian

Social IT Management

Analysis By:David M. Coyle; Jarod Greene; Cameron Haight

Definition:Social IT management is the ability to leverage existing and new social media

technologies and best practices to foster the support of end users, capture collaboration among IT

staff members and collaborate with the business, promoting the value of the IT organization.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:The impact on social media and as a mechanism for

collaboration, communication, marketing and engaging people is a well-known concept in personal

and business life (see "Business Gets Social"). It is only natural that social media would find its way

into the IT organization; however, the business value is only starting to be conceptualized.

We have identified three areas where social media can assist the IT organization with increasing

end-user satisfaction, increasing efficiencies and fostering crisper collaboration among IT staff:

Social networking acts as a medium for peer-to-peer support. End users have for years relied

on their immediate coworkers to better understand how to leverage internal systems, and for

help in solving technology issues. Often, this end user-to-end user support was done by email,instant message or walking to the co-worker's cubicle. Social media tools now allow end users

to crowdsource other end users through the entire organization to receive assistance. This

allows end users to become more productive in using business technologies. The IT support

team has the opportunity to be part of this collaboration to offer improved IT service and

support.

Social media tools can also facilitate the capture of collaboration among IT staff that would not

typically be captured via traditional communication methods. For example, the discussion



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regarding the risk of an upcoming infrastructure change is often done via email and IM, but that

information is not captured in the change management ticket. These ad hoc and informal

collaborations and knowledge-sharing instances can now be turned into reusable and audited

work assets (see "Collaborative Operations Management: A Next-Generation Management

Capability"). Collaboration technology will also become increasingly important in the emerging

DevOps arena as development and operations begin to work more closely to coordinate

planning, build, test and release activities.

Social software suites and text-based posts can allow the IT organization to promote the value

of IT services to the business. Typically, IT organizations unidirectionally inform the business of

planned and unplanned outages, releases and new services via email or through an intranet

portal. This type of communication is often disregarded or ignored. Social media enables

dynamic communications whereby users can generate conversation within these notifications to

understand the specific impact of the message in a forum open to the wider community of

business end users. End users can follow the IT organization announcements, services and

configuration items that are important to them through social media tools.

User Advice:It is important to develop a strategy for social media for the IT organization, because

end users are increasingly expecting this type of collaboration, which is so prevalent in other

aspects in their lives. If IT doesn't embrace and create a social media initiative, the risk is that end

users and IT staff will create many often-conflicting social media tools and processes themselves. IT

should not expect the use of social media tools to be high, and investments should be tempered

since the ROI will be difficult to quantify in the beginning. Therefore, social media initiatives should

be accompanied by the development of project plans, usage guidelines and governance. Also, be

prepared to change tools and strategies as new technologies and collaborative methods emerge,

and since social media usage within businesses is still immature.

Business Impact:Social media tools and processes increase end-user productivity by leveragingknowledge and best practices across the entire organization. Social media tools and processes with

enable the IT organization to increase end-user productivity, communicate easier with the business

and capture ad hoc and informal interactions that can be leveraged in the future. Additionally, a

social media strategy will provide the business with a perspective that the IT organization is

progressive and forward-thinking.

Benefit Rating:Low


Maturity:Emerging

Sample Vendors:BMC Software; CA Technologies; Hornbill; ServiceNow; Zendesk

Recommended Reading:"Collaborative Operations Management: A Next-Generation

Management Capability"



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Cloud Management Platforms

Analysis By:Cameron Haight; Milind Govekar

Definition:Cloud management platforms are integrated products that provide for the management

of public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The minimum requirements to be included in thiscategory are products that incorporate self-service interfaces, provision system images, enable

metering and billing, and provide for some degree of workload optimization through established

policies. More-advanced offerings may also integrate with external enterprise management

systems, include service catalogs, support the configuration of storage and network resources,

allow for enhanced resource management via service governors and provide advanced monitoring

for improved "guest" performance and availability. A key ability of these products is the insulation of

administrators of cloud services from proprietary cloud provider APIs, and thus they help IT

organizations prevent lock-in by any cloud service or technology provider. The distinction between

cloud management platforms (CMPs) and private clouds is that the former primarily provide the

upper levels of a private cloud architecture, i.e., the service management and access management

tiers, and thus do not always provide an integrated cloud "stack." Another way of saying this is thatcloud management platforms are an enabler of a cloud environment, be it public or private, but by

themselves they may not contain all the necessary components for it (i.e., such as virtualization

and/or pooling capabilities). This distinction holds true for public clouds as well.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Although the demand for cloud computing services is

increasing, the market for managing the applications and services running with these environments

is still modest, including for infrastructure as a service (or IaaS) clouds, be they private or public.

This is likely because IT organizations adopting cloud-style technologies are not running many

mission-critical applications and services on these infrastructures, which might necessitate greater

monitoring and control.

User Advice:Enterprises looking at investing in cloud management platforms should be aware that

the technology is still maturing. Although some cloud providers are beginning to offer management

tools to provide more insight and control into their infrastructures, these are limited in functionality

and generally offer no support for managing other cloud environments. A small (but growing)

number of cloud-specific management platform firms is emerging; however, the traditional market-

leading IT operations management vendors aka the Big Four (BMC Software, CA Technologies,

HP and IBM Tivoli) are also in the process of extending their cloud management capabilities. In

addition, virtualization platform vendors (e.g., Citrix Systems, Microsoft and VMware), not to

mention public cloud providers such as Amazon, are also broadening their management portfolios

to enhance the support of cloud environments.

Business Impact:Enterprises will require cloud management platforms to maximize the value of

cloud computing services, irrespective of external (public), internal (private) or hybrid environments

i.e., lowering the cost of service delivery, reducing the risks associated with these providers and

potentially preventing lock-in.

Benefit Rating:High




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Maturity:Emerging

Sample Vendors:Abiquo; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cloud.com; Cloupia; Gale

Technologies; HP; IBM Tivoli; Kaavo; Microsoft; Platform Computing; Red Hat; RightScale;

ServiceMesh

Recommended Reading:"The Architecture of a Private Cloud Service"

Behavior Learning Engines

Analysis By:Will Cappelli; Jonah Kowall

Definition:Behavior learning engines (BLEs) are platforms intended to enable the discovery,

visualization and analysis of recurring, complex, multiperiod patterns in large operational

performance datasets. If such engines are to realize their intent, they must support four layers of

cumulative functionality:

Variable designation this supports the selection of the system properties that are to be

tracked by the platform and how those properties are to be measured

Variable value normalization this is the automated ability to determine (usually by an

algorithm that regresses measurements) what constitutes the normal or usual values assumed

by the system property measuring variables

Observational dependency modeling this is a set of tools for linking the individual property

measuring variables to one another, where the links represent some kind of dependency among

the values taken by the linked variables; commercially available BLEs differ significantly with

regard to the degree to which the dependencies must be pre-established by the vendor or user

and the degree to which the dependencies are themselves discovered by BLE algorithmsworking on the performance datasets being considered

Assessment the means by which, once the normalized values and dependency map are

determined, the resulting construct can be used to answer questions about the values assumed

by some variables, based on the values assumed by others

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:When using IT operations availability and

performance management tools, many IT organizations struggle to deliver a proactive monitoring

capability, due to the vast amounts of disparate data that needs to be collected, analyzed and

correlated. BLEs gather event and performance data from a wide range of sources, identifying

behavioral irregularities, which allows IT operations to understand the state of the IT infrastructure in

a more holistic way.

BLEs detect subtle deviations from normal activity and how these deviations may be correlated

across multiple variables. This enables more effective and rapid root-cause analysis of system

problems and encourages a more proactive approach to event and performance management. The

adoption of BLEs is being driven by the emergence of virtualization, an increased focus on cross-

silo application performance monitoring and the need to gain a holistic understanding of the virtual



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Definition:Application release automation (ARA) tools focus on the deployment of custom

application software releases and their associated configurations, often for Java Platform,

Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and .NET applications for middleware. These tools also offer versioning

to enable best practices in moving related artifacts, applications, configurations and even data

together across the application life cycle. ARA tools support continuous deployment of large

numbers of small releases. Often, these tools include workflow engines to assist in automating and

tracking human activities across various tasks associated with application deployment for

auditability. Some tools focus on the build and development phases and are now adding the

capability to deploy to production, though many still provide only partial solutions.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:IT organizations are often very fragmented in their

approach to application releases. Sometimes, the process is led by operations, although it can also

be managed from the development side of the organization. This means that different buyers will

look at different tools, rather than comprehensive solutions, which results in tool fragmentation. The

intent of these tools is fivefold:

Eliminate the need to build and maintain custom scripts for application updates by adding morereliability to the deployment process with less custom scripting, and by documenting variations

across environments.

Reduce configuration errors and downtime.

Coordinate releases between people and process steps that are maintained manually in

spreadsheets, email or both.

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

Speed the time to market associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes to

deploy and configure across all environments.Adoption and penetration of these tools are still emerging (1% to 5%), because they are being used

for only a small percentage of all applications. For large enterprises with mission-critical websites,

adoption is becoming more significant (5% to 20%), because of the criticality of improving agility

and reducing disruption. Even in this scenario, we still see the largest "competitor" of these tools

being in-house scripts and manual processes.

User Advice:Clients must remember that processes for ARA are not standardized. Assess

application life cycle management specifically deployment processes and seek a tool or tools

that can help automate the implementation of these processes. Organizational change issues

remain significant and can't be addressed solely by a tool purchase.

Understand your specific requirements for applications and platforms that will narrow the scope of

the tools to determine whether one tool or multiple tools will be required. Some vendors have

products that address application provisioning (of binaries: middleware, databases, etc.) and ARA.

When evaluating tools, consider your workflows and the underlying software you are deploying; this

will increase time to value for the tools. Determine whether life cycle tools can address the needs of

multiple teams (such as development and testing), while meeting broad enterprise requirements, as

this will reduce costs. Organizations that want to extend the application life cycle beyond



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development to production environments using a consistent application model should evaluate

development tools or point solutions that provide out-of-the-box integration with development

tools.

Business Impact:ARA tools can eliminate the need to build and maintain time-consuming custom

scripts for application updates. They can add more reliability to the deployment process with lesscustom scripting and by documenting variations across environments, to reduce configuration

errors and downtime. In addition, with more consistency, there will be an increase in

standardization, which will enable all the benefits standardization brings in terms of economies of

scale, cross-training, documentation, backups, etc. ARA tools can supplement or enhance the

coordination of releases among people, as well as the process steps that are maintained manually

in spreadsheets, email or both. By reducing the scripts and manual interactions with automation, IT

organizations can move the skills base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less

costly resources. The most significant business benefit of ARA tools is that they improve the speed

associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes to deploy and configure

applications across all environments by creating consistent application models that improve the

likelihood of successful deployments to production.

Benefit Rating:Moderate

Market Penetration:1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity:Emerging

Sample Vendors:BMC Software; HP; MidVision; Nolio; Urbancode; XebiaLabs

Recommended Reading:"Cool Vendors in Release Management, 2011"

"Managing Between Applications and Operations: The Vendor Landscape"

"Best Practices in Change, Configuration and Release Management"

"MarketScope for Application Life Cycle Management"

"Are You Ready to Improve Release Velocity?"

SaaS Tools for IT Operations

Analysis By:David M. Coyle; Milind Govekar; Patricia Adams

Definition:Software as a service (SaaS) is software owned, delivered and managed remotely byone or more providers, and purchased on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on usage

metrics. All IT operations management tools that can be 100% managed through a Web client have

the potential of being licensed as SaaS. SaaS enables the IT organization to have new pricing,

delivery and hosting options when acquiring IT operations management tools, in addition to the

traditional perpetual model. Not all IT operations SaaS use multitenancy and elasticity, which are

the hallmarks in a cloud computing delivery model.



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Position and Adoption Speed Justification:SaaS has been a viable pricing model for many

software products, such as CRM and HR, for several years; however, it is newer to the IT operations

management tool market. Fewer than 5% of IT operations management tools are bought utilizing

the SaaS licensing model. Few traditional software vendors have licensed their tools as SaaS, but

this model is increasingly being added to product road maps. However, growth in the acceptance of

SaaS as a licensing model in the software industry as a whole, plus the use of the Web-only client

for IT operations management tools especially IT service desk, resource capacity planning and

end-user monitoring tools will ensure that this model becomes pervasive in IT operations

management.

Mature resource capacity planning tools have been offered as a service since the mainframe days,

and can be good candidates to fit the SaaS delivery model in today's computing environment. For

IT organizations that are experiencing budget constraints, SaaS solutions that are paid for monthly

or quarterly and come from the operating budget can be viable alternatives to a large capital

software purchases.

In particular, small or midsize businesses (SMBs) have begun to favor SaaS-based capacitymanagement and planning. SaaS IT service desk vendors currently have 8% to 9% of the overall

market; however, by 2015, 50% of all new IT service desk tool purchases will use the SaaS model

(see "SaaS Continues to Grow in the IT Service Desk Market"). Because many of the IT service desk

vendors also offer IT asset management (ITAM) tools, which are tightly integrated, we expect to

begin to see SaaS extend to ITAM implementations where software license models aren't overly

complex.

Similarly, end-user monitoring tools have been consumed as a SaaS delivery model for more than

five years, and we are beginning to see increased interest in this delivery model. In addition,

chargeback tools are being sold as a SaaS model. However, security, high availability and stability

of the vendor infrastructure, heterogeneous support, integration and long-term cost are some ofenterprises' primary concerns. In some cases, the tools architecture may not lend itself to the

functionality being delivered in a SaaS model. Customers that need to customize software to meet

unique business requirements should be aware that there is risk associated with customizing SaaS-

delivered software that may cause conflicts when new versions become available.

User Advice:Clients should evaluate the inherent advantages and disadvantages of SaaS before

selecting this model. Trust in the vendor, customer references, security compliance, contracts and

SLAs should be foundational when buying SaaS. Clients should compare the SaaS vendors'

products with the more-traditional, perpetually licensed products in terms of features, functionality,

adherence to best practices, total cost of ownership through the life cycle of the tool, high

availability, manageability and security. They should ensure that they don't choose one product overthe other, based solely on licensing model or cost. If choosing to operate the SaaS tool within your

data center, it is important to understand the hardware required, the architecture models and the

differences in pricing.

IT operations tools do not exist as an island, and some level of information, data and process

integration is required, which should be an important SaaS evaluation criterion. Finally,

organizations that have unique requirements may find that the one-size-fits-all approach to SaaS



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might not be a good fit for business requirements that require tool customization to increase the

value of the tool.

Business Impact:SaaS offers new options for IT organizations to purchase, implement and

maintain the IT operations management tools in their environment. More choices will enable IT

organizations to become agile, use IT budgets more appropriately and gain more flexibility withvendor negotiations. Implementation time frames should also be faster, potentially leading to faster

payback.



Maturity:Emerging

Sample Vendors:Apptio; BMC; CA; Cherwell Software; Compuware; InteQ; Keynote Systems;

Service-now.com

Recommended Reading:"SaaS Continues to Grow in the IT Service Desk Market"

Service Billing

Analysis By:Milind Govekar

Definition:Service-billing tools differ from IT chargeback tools in that they use resource usage data

(on computing and people) to calculate the costs for chargeback and aggregate it for a service.

Alternatively, they may offer service-pricing options (such as 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, including servers, networks, storage,databases and applications. Service-billing tools perform proportional allocation based on the

amount of resources (including virtualized and cloud-based) allocated and used by the service

for accounting and chargeback purposes.

Service-billing costs include infrastructure and other resource use (such as people) costs, based on

service definitions. As a result, they usually integrate with IT financial management tools and IT

chargeback tools. These tools will be developed to work with service governors to set a billing

policy that uses cost as a parameter, and to ensure that the resource allocation is managed based

on cost and service levels.

Due to their business imperative, these tools will first emerge and be deployed in service providerenvironments and by IT organizations that are at a high level of maturity. These tools are also being

deployed for cloud computing environments, where usage-based service billing is a key

requirement.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Shared sets of resources for on-premises or off-

premises implementations require the ability to track usage for service-billing purposes. As the IT

infrastructure moves to a shared-service model, resource-oriented chargeback models will evolve

into end-to-end collection and reporting approaches. Furthermore, the service-billing tools will work



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with service governors to proactively manage the costs of services and their associated service

levels.

User Advice:This is a new and emerging area, and its visibility has risen sharply. Most commercial

tools are being developed by cloud computing service providers for their own environments, or by

cloud infrastructure fabric vendors in private or public cloud computing environments, in addition tocommercial off-the-shelf tools. Service-billing tools will take a life cycle approach to services, will

perform service cost optimization based on underlying technology resource usage optimization

during the entire life cycle and will provide granular cost allocation.

The emergence of these tools, to accommodate the vision of dynamic automation of real-time

infrastructure, will involve their integration with virtualization automation tools that dynamically move

virtual environments, based on resource or performance criteria to assess the cost effects of such

movement. For example, enterprises that want to incorporate virtual server movement automation in

their environments should assess these tools, as they emerge to assist with controlling costs in their

data centers.

The available service chargeback tools aggregate costs mainly for static environments, where there

is no automation or dynamic control of resources. These tools will emerge from startups, as well as

traditional chargeback vendors, asset management vendors, virtualization management vendors

and software stack vendors.

Business Impact:These tools are critical to running IT as a business, by determining the financial

effect of sharing IT and other resources in the context of services. They also feed billing data back

to IT financial management tools and chargeback tools to help businesses understand the costs of

IT and to budget appropriately.

Benefit Rating:High


Maturity:Emerging

Sample Vendors:Apptio; Aria Systems; BMC Software; Comsci; Digital Fuel; IBM Tivoli; MTS;

Unisys; VMware

Release Governance Tools

Analysis By:Ronni J. Colville; Kris Brittain

Definition:Release governance tools enable coordinated, cross-organizational capability that

manages the introduction of changes into the production environment, including those affecting

applications, infrastructures, operations and facilities. The two main focuses are release planning

and release scheduling. Planning orchestrates the control of changes into a release by governing

the operational requirements definition (designing with operations in mind, versus just building to

business functional specifications alone early on) and integrated build, test, install and deploy

activities, including coordination with other processes required prior to rollout (such as system



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management and documentation). Scheduling activities are focused on ensuring that prerequisites'

and corequisites' requirements are met and that rollback planning is coordinated for the execution

of changes and release bundles, to ensure that no conflicts occur prior to production deployments.

Release governance tools have tended to develop as an extension to existing IT operations tools.

For example, change management tools have similar workflows that IT service desk vendors have

extended for release workflows. Sometimes, run book automation tools, which can supplement or

augment automation processes' and activities' interactions, can have release workflow templates.

In addition, application life cycle management release tools for tracking release requests are

sometimes being extended to include broader release workflows beyond an application focus.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:There continues to be an increase in focus on

developing a comprehensive release management process across development and production

control, as well as on automating various aspects of release management (e.g., planning for

governance and release provisioning and deployment). This interest in formalizing the process and

supplementing manual efforts has four main drivers and approaches: (1) ITIL process improvement

initiatives are focused on several processes (such as problem, incident, change and configuration),

where the release is often one of the processes being addressed but, often, later in the timeline

of the initiative; (2) the increase in number of composite applications being deployed (such as Java

Platform, Enterprise Edition [Java EE] and .NET) into production; (3) continuous deployment

techniques (e.g., agile and DevOps) for the introduction and maintenance of applications to the

production environment; and (4) the rise in the frequency of changes and the need to bundle, align

and control them more efficiently. Release process adoption in ITIL initiatives tends to be at later

phase of the project, and most often will force a reshaping of early change and configuration

management process work.

Release governance tools become critical in ensuring that the appropriate planning and scheduling

has been done to reduce disruption to the production environment, along with appropriate

communication and reporting mechanisms. These tools can also reduce costs, but only whenviewed across the entire organization, from project management to application development to

release management to operational support. Release governance tools also are becoming more

commonly integrated with project and portfolio management (PPM), application life cycle

management, change management, incident/problem management, and IT operations management

tools. Configuration management works hand in hand with release management for distribution

activities of software packaging, deployment and rollback, if required.

The main benefits of release management include:

More consistent service quality as a result of better planning, coordination and testing of

releases, as well as automated deployment through configuration management tools

The ability to support higher throughput, frequency and success of releases

Reduced release risk through improved planning

Reduced cost of release deployment due to fewer errors

Despite these benefits, fewer than 25% of large enterprises will formalize release management

through 2014, up from less than 5% today. The reason that so few organizations will achieve



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success with release governance tools is twofold. First, success with formal release management

requires that implementations of change and configuration management be in place to integrate

with; thus, release management is normally implemented in the latter phases of an ITIL or IT

process improvement implementation. During the past five to 10 years, most of the focus on

process improvement has been on change management, and, more recently, on configuration

management surrounding configuration management databases (CMDBs). Release management

has only recently become a focus in ITIL programs as progress has been made on change and

configuration, and because there has been an increase in the number of changes.

Second, release governance tools require a coordinated release management process and

organizational role integration across business processes, applications, project management and

operations. As a result, it is one of the more-difficult disciplines to implement, requiring significant

top management commitment and, often, organizational realignment and/or the establishment of

competency centers. Contributing to the inhibitors is that organizations will need to build labs to

perform integration testing to ensure the validity and integrity of the release in the production

environment. Today, testing is done in the application life cycle management (ALM) process, but

these test environments rarely mirror the production environment. Therefore, it is critical to plan for

and establish an integration test lab prior to production rollouts. In some cases, organizations can

effectively use the existing independent test organization, which is usually affiliated with the

development team. Such independent quality assurance (QA) functions are a hallmark of Maturity

Level 3 development organizations, specifically in their use of methodologies, such as Capability

Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI). Funding process projects in this way is often easier to justify

than the inclusion of new hardware, software and resources to support a test lab.

User Advice:IT organizations need to ensure that solid objectives based on the needs of the

business are established for release planning and release distribution activities, and that those are

mapped to stakeholders' specifications. Because releases occur throughout and across the IT

application and infrastructure organization, release management will require the participation ofmany IT groups, and may be considered part of development, operational change management,

production acceptance/control, and the tail end of the IT delivery life cycle. With the addition of

SOA-based applications, the granularity and frequency will add to the fluency with which releases

need to occur. Successful release management will require a competency center approach to

enable cross-departmental skills for release activities.

Release management takes on greater significance, much as production control departments did in

the mainframe era. Planned changes to applications, infrastructure and operations (such as system

and application management, documentation and job scheduling) processes are integration-tested

with the same rigor that occurs on the development side. Working with architecture groups, more-

rigorous policies are put in place for maintenance planning (such as patches and upgrades) and theretirement of software releases and hardware platforms in adherence to standard policies. The

release management group also will be responsible for preproduction testing and postproduction

validation and adjustments to policies related to dynamic capacity management and priorities for

real-time infrastructure.



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IT organizations should:

Establish a project team composed of application development and operations resources to get

the foundation of a release management policy in place.

Be prepared to invest in infrastructure to establish integration testing for production control (asis done for preproduction and development).

Organizations that have already implemented change and configuration management

processes should:Look to formalizing a release process as one of your next investments, and

one that will greatly improve overall service quality (in an additive way).

Implement release governance tools to provide a mechanism for tracking the life of a release

(singular or a bundle) for planning and scheduling.

Business Impact:Because new releases are the first opportunity for IT customers to experience

IT's capabilities, the success or failure of a release management process will greatly affect the

business-IT relationship. Release governance tools will provide automation that facilitates the manystakeholders required to ensure successful deployments into the production environment. It is

important, therefore, that releases are managed effectively from inception to closure, and that all IT

groups work in concert to deliver quality releases as consistently as possible using release

governance tools.



Maturity:Emerging

Sample Vendors:BMC Software; CA Technologies; HP; IBM Tivoli; Service-Now

IT Workload Automation Broker Tools

Analysis By:Milind Govekar

Definition:IT workload automation broker (ITWAB) technology is designed to overcome the static

nature of scheduling batch jobs. It manages mixed batch and other non-real-time workloads based

on business policies in which resources are assigned and deassigned in an automated fashion to

meet service-level objectives, for example, performance, throughput and completion time

requirements. These tools automate processing requirements based on events, workloads,

resources and schedules. They manage dependencies, (potentially, across multiple on-premisesand off-premises data centers) across applications and infrastructure platforms. ITWAB technology

optimizes resources (e.g., working with physical, virtual and cloud-based resource pools)

associated with non-real-time or batch workloads, and is built on architectural patterns that

facilitate easy, standards-based integration for example, using SOA principles across a wide

range of platforms and applications.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Some characteristics of ITWAB were defined in "IT

Workload Automation Broker: Job Scheduler 2.0." A federated policy engine that takes business



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policies and converts them into a technology SLA is over two years away from being deployed in

production environments. ITWAB can emerge in vertical industry segments for example,

insurance where a set of standardized, risk model calculation processes is driven by a common

definition of business policies. Alternatively, ITWAB is emerging in situations where decisions need

to be made on use and deployment of computing resources; for example, to finish processing

workloads associated with business processes by a certain deadline, ITWAB may make decisions

to use cloud-based computing resources, as needed in addition to on-premises resources. An

intermediate stage of tool development will be the manual conversion of business policies into

technology SLAs.

Visibility, discovery and optimization of resource pools across the entire physical, virtual and cloud

computing environment isn't possible today. Intermediate solutions based on targeted

environments, such as server resource pools through the use of virtualization management tools,

will emerge first. Some tools have integration with configuration management databases (CMDBs)

to maintain batch service data for better change and configuration management of the batch

service to support reporting for compliance requirements. Integration with run book automation

(RBA) tools, data center automation tools and cloud computing management tools to provide end-

to-end automation will also continue to evolve into enterprise requirements during the next two

years in order to facilitate growing or shrinking the pool of resources dynamically, i.e., in an RTI

environment to meet batch-based SLAs. Furthermore, critical-path analysis capabilities to identify

jobs that may breach SLA requirements are being adopted by many of these tools.

User Advice:Users should use these tools instead of traditional job scheduling tools where there is

a need to manage their batch or non-real-time environment using policies. Users should also keep

in mind that not all ITWAB capabilities have been delivered yet (as highlighted above). Tools that

have developed automation capabilities such as run book automation (or IT operations process

automation) and/or are able to integrate with other IT operations tools should be used to implement

an 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, and will play a role in end-to-end

automation. ITWAB will be involved in the initial stages of implementing the service governor

concept of real-time infrastructure.

Benefit Rating:High


Maturity:Early mainstream

Sample Vendors:BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cisco (Tidal); IBM Tivoli; Orsyp; Redwood

Software; Stonebranch; UC4 Software

Recommended Reading:"IT Workload Automation Broker: Job Scheduler 2.0"

"Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling"



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Workspace Virtualization

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

Definition:Workspace virtualization tools separate the user's working environment (i.e., data,

settings, personalization and applications) from the OS or any applications on the PC or Mac onwhich it executes. This allows users to run a corporate-managed workspace (i.e., one that is

patched, provisioned, secured, etc.) on a corporate or user-owned PC or Mac. Because these tools

allow the workspace to execute on the local client (as opposed to hosted virtual desktops [HVDs],

which execute in the data center), users can have a secure, data-leakproof, device-independent

workspace, while leveraging local processing power and working offline.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Adoption of workspace virtualization tools was

originally driven by organizations that wanted to separate workspaces to prevent data leakage (e.g.,

financial services or government). Growing interest in this technology is driven by:

Employee-owned PC programs (see "Checklist for an Employee-Owned Notebook or PC

Program")

Organizations looking for new ways to manage mobile or distributed users (see "New

Approaches to Client Management")

Organizations that want to give nonemployees temporary access to a corporate system (e.g.,

contractors)

The technology has matured enough to support thousands of users; however, the large vendors do

not have mature products, and the mature products come from small vendors. We are starting to

see this change as major client computing industry players, such as Intel, HP and Lenovo, start to

bring workspace virtualization tools to market. This will drive adoption and awareness of the

technology, and secure the viabilit

hype cycle for it operations

Documents