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BSM comes of age
Business Service Management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring
and measuring IT services from a business perspective. By Manjari Juneja
 Business
Service Management (BSM) is a comprehensive and unified platform that simultaneously
reduces IT costs, increases business impact, improves quality of service, manages
risk, and provides transparency. The BSM approach helps link the key IT components
of a company to the goals of the business and helps predict the impact of technology
on business and vice versa. BSM is the level above IT Service Management (ITSM)
software which many organizations use to monitor infrastructure and services
from an IT perspective.
With BSM, an organization can prioritize work based on critical business services
and orchestrate workflow across the IT management processes and functions. BSM
simplifies, standardizes, and automates the IT processes across distributed,
mainframe, virtual, and cloud-based resources, so that an organization can efficiently
manage business services throughout their lifecycle.
BSM typically utilizes a suite of IT management software tools that integrate
network, server, application and business transaction monitoring to help improve
the efficiency of IT operations while delivering high-quality IT services.
Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacific, BMC Software, said, “BMC has been delivering
BSM solutions to thousands of customers, in every industry and geography, to
address their most critical IT needs. We pioneered the concept of BSM as a way
to better align IT operations with business needs. Our BSM leadership comes
from several years of internal development and complementary acquisitions around
the core platform of Remedy and Atrium and is further strengthened by our mainframe
expertise.”
Rahul Singh, Country Marketing Manager, HP Software & Solutions, HP India,
explained with an example, “The functioning of BSM can be explained with
the help of a simple business case—a Web-based travel service provider.
Typically, a travel service provider offers three broad business services which
are Search (for hotels, flights), Bookings and Payments. Each of these business
services is enabled by a complex IT infrastructure at the back-end (including
servers, storage, databases, firewalls, routers and other network devices).
If any of these components of the infrastructure fails, it can bring down the
business service resulting is a poor customer experience and disruption of the
business opportunity. BSM in these scenarios would automate and check the health
of the business service in a continuous manner and proactively raise an alert
if there is a potential failure coming up in any of the components. In the event
of a failure, BSM can pinpoint the exact component that caused the failure.
Importantly, in the event of more than one failure it can help prioritize corrective
action by determining which failure is more critical to the business service.”
A non-traditional monitoring system
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 "Apart
from traditional sectors, the government sector is expected to accelerate
its growth. We expect 40% of Indian revenues to come from this sector"
- Chip Salyards
VP, Asia Pacific, BMC Software
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 "In
the event of more than one failure, BSM can help prioritize corrective
action by determining which failure is more critical to the business service"
- Rahul Singh
Country Marketing Manager, HP Software & Solutions, HP India
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Traditional network management systems focus on measuring
and monitoring the technical metrics and trends of IT applications and infrastructure.
The primary users of these systems are technicians and system administrators
on the IT operations side. Although these systems enable the IT operations team
to identify problem areas from a technical point-of-view for a given piece of
infrastructure, significant gaps exist in determining the business impact of
a specific problem.
For example, if a router and a server fail at the same time, these systems offer
no way for the network operations center operator to determine which of these
is more critical or which business service has been impacted by the failure
of these devices.
Additionally, newer technologies such as service-oriented
architecture (SOA), virtualization, cloud computing, portal frameworks, grid
architectures, and mashups within organizations make troubleshooting and monitoring
of business services very difficult. A single business process or service may
be supported by a number of composite applications, all of which could be dependent
on a diverse set of distributed computing and communication elements. An isolated
issue anywhere in this complex web may impact one or more tasks in the business
process. Traditional network management systems and technology-centric monitoring
approaches are incapable of determining the business impact of an issue in such
a complicated infrastructure environment.
Adds Singh, “Traditional network management focuses
on monitoring only the technical metrics of applications and infrastructure.
While traditional network monitoring helps IT teams identify problems from a
technical viewpoint it does not help determine the business impact of a specific
problem. For instance, if two infrastructure components fail at the same time,
traditional systems will be unable to determine which failure is business critical
and which business services have been impacted. This issue is aggravated in
virtualized environments and Business Service Management tools provide the best
solution here.”
To put BSM in place, IT must consolidate the management of
complex and diverse IT assets, correlate the status of business processes with
the underlying IT infrastructure and applications that support them, and manage
changes and demand peaks without business disruption. Business processes need
to be automated and integrated with infrastructure and application management.
As the basis for measuring service to users, IT needs mapping capabilities,
role-based dashboards, processes to assess the user experience, and a unified
service model—the information model that provides a complete 360° view
into IT services, mapping the relationships of the technology assets that support
a service.
BSM requires systems for mapping, measurement, reporting, and adjusting services—all
of which are required to manage IT resources as a function of business processes.
| Reduce IT costs |
Many IT organizations spend over two-thirds
of their budget keeping existing services up and running. With BSM, you
can maximize the efficiency with which you plan, deliver, and manage services,
so that you reduce costs and reallocate resources from supporting existing
services to delivering new ones. |
| Increase business impact |
IT is constantly challenged to support
projects that create new business value. With BSM, you can design your service
portfolio so that you can quickly respond to recurring business requirements;
add or modify services to address new and changing business requirements;
and drive IT-enabled business changes. |
| Improve Quality of Service |
When services are disrupted, business
is disrupted. However, allocating extra support resources to specific services
in the anticipation of downtime rarely works, and is certainly more expensive.
BSM offers an alternative. With BSM, you can improve service quality, reliability,
and availability by prioritizing business services, anticipating service
issues, and quickly restoring service. |
| Manage risk |
In many enterprises, IT has become a
critical party to ensuring compliance and minimizing risk by making sure
key information and processes are documented and followed. With BSM, you
can automate and enforce controls and processes that relate to compliance,
business interruption, personnel, and vendors. |
| Provide transparency |
Business stakeholders are putting more
pressure on IT to demonstrate how IT budgets are being spent and to prove
the value that they deliver. Furthermore, IT leaders require greater visibility
into how their organization is running, so that they can make better, fact-based
decisions. BSM helps you demonstrate where IT is spending its time and money
so that business stakeholders have a clear understanding of what IT is doing
to meet business expectations and goals. |
Are we ready for BSM?
Indian organizations over the past few years have seen tremendous business growth
(especially those in the telecom, banking and IT/ITES sectors) and subsequently
their IT infrastructure has expanded rapidly and become increasingly complex.
Also, the extensive adoption of virtualized environments in recent times has
posed new management challenges for IT departments. In this scenario, sophisticated
management solutions like BSM have seen rapid adoption in India.
Companies have become increasingly aware that any IT disruptions, however minor,
have the potential to cause significant losses in sales and customer service
that can affect a company's bottom line. Many sectors in India are adopting
BSM services not only to support the business, but also because of the strategic
business advantage and the highest levels of service quality and availability
that accrue from these.
Salyards added, “BMC Software has signed a slew of deals in different segments.
We grew over 30% in India in 2009, and signed over 20 new customers. Apart from
traditional sectors, the government sector is expected to accelerate its growth.
To provide efficient services to a huge population, government departments need
IT service management solutions to efficiently manage their IT infrastructure.
We expect 40% of revenues from India to come from the government sector.”
Bottlenecks in growth
The technical community in India is highly educated and willing to openly engage
and accept new technology. The downside is the fierce competition that this
creates for technology vendors, some of which is from internally developed systems.
The market is growing at an encouraging rate, but it will need to reach a level
of maturity required to sign multi-year platform deals. The challenges are more
than offset by the tremendous opportunity ahead.
Road ahead
Companies in India, especially telcos and banks, are fighting for a growing
market share. This can only be won by delivering and maintaining a high level
of service and, at the same time, reasonable costs.
There are significant investments in automation, not to necessarily reduce staff,
but to reassign them to more valuable, meaningful and profitable projects. The
acceptance of downtime is quickly becoming a thing of the past and systems and
services need to be up and available.
manjari.juneja@expressindia.com
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