Adam Holtby, ITSM Research Analyst, Ovum

Through discussions with vendors, clients, and research into technology trends and disruptors, Ovum has identified what it believes will be the key IT service management (ITSM) advances of 2013. More detailed information and analysis can be found in our recently published report, 2013 Trends to Watch: IT Service Management.

Technology is evolving to assist with changing business demands

Technology continues to advance, and we are finally starting to see some good ITSM tool innovations around technology disruptors such as social and mobile. For example, BMC recently announced MyIT, an enterprise IT helpdesk solution that was developed with the objective of empowering users through giving them more visibility and control over their IT services from any device.

As a market leader, it is encouraging to see BMC make such a bold move in embracing and investing in mobility and social technology. BMC was slower than …

Convirture has released a new version of its ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud software that can now be used to manage VMware vSphere and ESXi in addition to virtual and cloud technologies including Xen, KVM, Eucalyptus, OpenStack and Amazon EC2.
ConVirt is an open source-based tool that is used by IT organizations worldwide to manage virtual and cloud infrastructures. This new version adds VMware to the list of supported technologies. It provides sophisticated management capabilities to operators of heterogeneous data centers that employ multiple technologies and platforms, including major public and private clouds.

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Outsourcing the IT operations, support and associated infrastructure maintenance has been the norm for large enterprises over the last decade. Typically the multi-year IT outsourcing contracts cover the following aspects:
Application Development Services: These will be the set of resources and other costs, like environment, required to perform the custom development of various applications and sometimes customization and configuration of COTS products.
Application Testing Services: Even though testing is covered as part of development, to make this step more independent most enterprises outsource testing activities as a separate entity.

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A few weeks ago, Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast, leaving devastation in its wake. Thousands of people were without power, food, and water. It quickly became clear that Sandy’s aftermath would bring life on the East Coast to a standstill for days as the region began to rebuild.
Early estimates of the damage put the business loss associated with the storm as high as $30 billion. But Grudi Associates, The John M. Glover Agency, and many others weren’t a part of that group. Evolve IP’s redundant cloud platform allowed them to run their businesses remotely as the storm raged on.
For example, InformationWeek Cloud picked up the story of how we helped Apria Health Care stay functional during the storm so that they could continue to provide their vital health services to customers in the days after the storm. Thanks to Evolve IP, Apria was able to deliver essential products to each customer, the most important being the personal oxygen tank.

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Those of you who followed my blog for a while know that the idea of applying manufacturing best practices to cloud computing is a favorite topic of mine*. This week the topic popped up in a fireside chat (the popular term for keynotes delivered from a set of armchairs, often with no fire in sight) between Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogel and CEO Jeff Bezos at re:Invent, the first Amazon Web Services customer conference.
I won’t cover the conference here – many blogs and media sites already did – but in the chat Bezos made a number of interesting points on how principles of lean manufacturing are guiding Amazon’s overall endeavors and how cloud computing both supports and benefits from this approach. He discussed how – for developers- this approach turns the cost of infrastructure operations from an abstract overhead-like concept into a very visible direct cost they can directly influence. And how the cost of quality is always lower than the cost of non-quality, as fixing problems later – after it has shipped to the customer – is many times more expensive than doing things first time right. But also how cloud computing allows to continuously improve products and processes (similar to how factory workers at Toyota were empowered to stop the production line and jointly improve the process). He also stressed the importance of focusing on customers and their requirements (by continuously measuring and providing feedback loops) instead of focusing on competitors or winning.

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Recent IDC research shows that worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $44.2 billion by 2013. And a recent Gartner report predicts that the volume of enterprise data overall will increase by a phenomenal 650% over the next five years.
These two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in New York City at 12th Cloud Expo – being held June 10-13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
As at every Cloud Expo, we are offering in New York City a vast selection of technical and strategic breakout sessions, General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, our signature discussion “Power Panels” and a bustling Expo floor complete with two busy Demo Theaters so that as a delegate you can kick the tires of solutions and offerings, and discuss one-on-one with all the leading Cloud and Big Data players what they are offering and how to make use of it in your particular situation.

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Enterprises are quickly realizing that their future success is dependent on their ability to adapt their business to the Cloud. That realization however comes with more questions and concerns about executing an effective cloud-based strategy. The explosion of the OpenStack community has made it possible for hosting providers and businesses to create or utilize Amazon-like public and private clouds, but it’s clear that the Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution. One prime factor that dictates the success of a cloud strategy is the particular workload an enterprise is tackling. From DevOps, to rapidly deploying dynamic and scalable websites, enterprises’ workload needs should dictate their cloud architecture.
The specific workloads have an impact on many elements of the cloud, particularly the architecture of the infrastructure. It becomes clear how integral infrastructure architecture is to meeting workload requirements as we examine specific workload use cases.
The first element to consider in the architecture of cloud infrastructure is computing power. The number and speed of compute nodes within a cloud configuration will dictate how quickly processes can be executed. This comes into play prominently when assessing a workload, as the computing power required to develop a web app pales in comparison to the compute power required to execute Big Data analysis. Large-scale data analysis projects require powerful compute capabilities. While this kind of project is completely within the purview of well-constructed cloud architectures, that architecture must be designed as such.

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