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Busy Data Center

Is Your Network Ready for the Video Deluge?

By on May 16, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Last week at the Interop show in Las Vegas, our friends at Network Instruments surveyed attendees about their use of video conferencing in their organizations. After covering video conferencing for a number of years at Network World, I’m happy to see that 83 percent of respondents said they’ve deployed some type of video conferencing, but I am a little shocked that they claim to reserve only 10 percent of network traffic for it.

Really? Only 10 percent? If video is really becoming that pervasive, than IT organizations are going to have to start allocating a little more pipe to video bits and bytes. Heck, according to those same survey respondents, two-way video is already taking up on average 29 percent of available bandwidth. So they’re already in a hole and it’s only going to get worse as those surveyed said that number will hit 40 percent within the next year.

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IT is the Best of Times and the Worst of Times

By on May 15, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT is often a tale of two cities.  Similar to Dickens’ classic opening lines, IT can be both the best of times and the worst of times, a place of reason and one of foolishness, a place upon which every part of the business depends and a place where nothing really matters to the business.

A good example of this is when that dream project comes along; the one that will take careers to the next level because it is so strategic; the one that is sure to change the competitiveness of the entire business. But, just when the project gets interesting key project team members can’t focus on it because of an unexpected surge of repetitive tasks, mundane tasks that, if they are done well, no one will notice, but if done poorly, everyone will notice.

You know the kind of tasks I am talking about. These are the kinds of tasks that often wouldn’t even be required if maintenance had been done properly in the first place or if the change requests had been implemented completely instead of one or two checks being skipped.

They are the kind of tasks that IT staffs hate because the tasks force the staff to turn away from interesting work to spend time and attention on tedious work.

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Architects

Letting You In On The Best Kept Technology Secret

By on May 14, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Tom Petty said it best when he sang, “The waiting is the hardest part.” When testing applications, waiting for resources, waiting to get the code into production and waiting to deliver high-quality apps to the business can be the most difficult part.

There are several reasons for the wait, but none of them seem to justify the pain it causes. Architects, developers and even operations want to better understand how applications will behave in a production environment. Yet the resources available for testing are often sparse or offered with limitations, and teams working to reduce costs, increase speed to market and improve quality aren’t able to do all three.

That is unless they tap the capabilities in service virtualization technologies, which are now available from ITKO, a CA Technologies company, IBM with its Green Hat acquisition, Parasoft and HP.

“Service virtualization eliminates the wait time for people; people waiting for something to be ready to test, people waiting to have access to resources,” says Theresa Lanowitz, industry analyst and founder of Voke Inc.

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Citrix Synergy 2012

Service Assurance and Citrix XenDesktop

By on May 9, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Citrix Synergy 2012CA Technologies is at the Citrix Synergy 2012 show at the San Francisco Moscone Center this week (May 9-11, 2012). One of the demos in our booth will be focused on Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies, our integrated solution suite spanning Application Performance Management, Infrastructure Management, Service Operations Management and Executive Insight.

XenDesktop, the new desktop virtualization solution from Citrix, will be a major highlight at the show. Citrix customers are facing the challenge of migrating to and running XenDesktop in production, and are asking, “How do I assure business services as my environment changes? How do I ensure an optimum end-user experience?”

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Cloud

Cloud Impairs App Troubleshooting, survey says

By on May 9, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Attendees at this week’s Interop conference in Las Vegas proved what the majority already assumed to be true: there are numerous benefits to adopting cloud computing and cloud services. Yet a survey of 102 network engineers on the show floor revealed another fact: cloud causes some problems when trying to troubleshoot application performance.

The poll conducted by Network Instruments (a CA Technologies partner) found that 70% “indicated that their ability to troubleshoot applications worsened or remained the same after migrating to the cloud.” The informal Interop poll results echo sentiment from the company’s larger State of the Network survey released earlier this year, which showed that cloud blurs IT’s view into the end-user experience.

Now the 70% is a combined number; some saying it worsened and some saying it remained the same. Still the fact that cloud hinders application performance troubleshooting should concern adopters. Today application performance can significantly impact a company’s brand and reputation if that performance is externally or customer facing. A lessened ability to understand that performance is not a positive for cloud. And for those saying cloud keeps thing status quo that could be negative too – depending on how well they are able to monitor application performance on premise.

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CA Executive Insight

Speak to the Business in the Language of the Business

By on May 8, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

The expression ‘Lost in Translation’ has a special significance for me. I was born in a region of the world where cold meant any time temperature drops below 85 degrees Fahrenheit.  At the age of 10, I left the familiar for a place where winter temperature dropped below freezing, people wore things that looked like they just came off of large furry animals, and I had to learn English to survive.

As someone who’s now fluent in two languages, I have an insight a person who can’t speak multiple languages may never have. Language is about connection, trust and relationships. To be fluent in a language is more than knowing the right amount of words. It means being able to understand the nuances of the culture of that language and with that understanding, the ability to connect and gain trust.

The separation between IT and the business has many parallels to my early life experiences with learning a new language and adapting to a new culture.  IT and the business have distinct cultures and ways of communicating. For IT to be able to bridge the gap between the two cultures, the language spoken has to illustrate IT’s understanding of the value system of the rest of the enterprise.

Changing how IT communicates its contributions with the rest of the enterprise starts with changing the information it shares with executives and business stakeholders. IT’s strategic role in enabling business success means IT is also a rich source of high-value metrics that are early indicators of success or failure of business results.

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Watch video

Managing Complexity to Help Customers Manage IT

By on May 2, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Technology by definition is designed to make life simpler, but in the era of cloud computing, compliance and more, technology can often add complexity to IT and business environments, causing end users to shy away from using the tools designed to make their lives, jobs and days easier.

The IT industry looks to correct this complexity problem with best practice frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, but compliance demands by way of Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA just to name two, outpace even the most adept IT organization. That’s why pureSCM works to reduce the complexity its clients encounter when managing IT environments. By adhering to frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT and Six Sigma and coupling that know-how with service desk and other IT management solutions from CA Technologies, pureSCM makes smart IT practices attainable for any organization.

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Innovation

Bringing Innovation Back to IT

By on April 30, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Some IT leaders might recall the glory days when they had the time and budget to introduce the company to the latest ‘gee-whiz’ technology, drive innovation across the business and also actively engage their personal love of technology.

IT departments today tend to be bogged down with maintaining complex infrastructure and operations, reacting to business demand in a tactical, not strategic, way and expending resources on fixing problems rather than driving innovative projects. Add to that the latest trend of end users getting tech-savvy and bringing consumer devices, mobile apps and cloud services into the environment without IT’s input, and idea of IT as the main innovator seems to fall away completely.

Enter Business Service Innovation. This new strategic approach from CA Technologies provides a strategic approach for IT leaders to move out of the IT management morass and into an environment that fosters innovation. CA Technologies breaks Business Service Innovation in to three primary tenets: accelerate, transform and secure. Under those are six capabilities that a Business Service Innovation approach addresses: model, assemble, automate, assure, manage and secure. Where IT leaders want to start depends on their maturity or preference, but the general idea is to make a move toward a more evolved, agile IT environment that is poised to meet business, customer and end-user demand in what is being dubbed “The New Normal” by CA and other industry experts.

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Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure Management: Is more better?

By on April 25, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

If you’ve spent as many years in Infrastructure Management as I have, it is gratifying to finally see it back in the news after taking a back seat to “trendier” management technologies and methodologies. In a previous post, I cited a CIOInsight story that pointed to the new normal of cloud services, virtualization, voice and video technology and “too big to fail” infrastructures that are driving renewed interest, and renewed need, for infrastructure management solutions that can step up to the complexity IT now faces.

But, is more Infrastructure Management always better? Ovum’s latest Decision Matrix: Selecting an Infrastructure Management Solution seems to conclude the answer to that question is “no.” In the press release, while generally agreeing with the technologies that are driving updated Infrastructure Management solutions, Ovum brought up an interesting point: “The IM market is splitting into two distinct segments catering for two different groups of organizations – ‘just enough’ management by small and medium-sized organizations, and service assurance by large enterprises.” Ovum goes on to say, “But the needs are better amplified by the significance of IT to the organization. Where IT is a competitive differentiator, service assurance is of greater value, but if IT is seen as a cost of doing business, ‘just enough’ is better aligned.”

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Infrastructure Management: Do You Still Care?

By on March 13, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Infrastructure Management is so … 1990s. Everyone has it, could there be anything interesting left to say? Yes … that it is more critical than ever. It may still be just the plumbing, but the demands on it are only growing and yesterday’s point solutions won’t do the job.

In a June 2011 article in CIOInsight, interestingly titled, “IT Investment Trends: Infrastructure Back in the Mix” they note, “CIO Insight’s latest IT Investment Trends study shows renewed interest in the fundamentals of the IT infrastructure. This is refreshing amid today’s ethereal talk about clouds and virtual machines.”

It is, in fact, those ethereal technologies that are driving infrastructure management solutions to grow up and meet the demands placed on them by combining integration, automation and intelligent analytics. These new, unified infrastructure management solutions can step up to the requirements for agility and the ability to handle the complexity that new technologies and higher expectations inflict on all organizations — enterprises, government agencies and service providers alike.

Here are four reasons why — in 2012 — you should still care:

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Right-sizing the IT Management Toolbox

By on March 12, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

The concept of too much of a good thing applies when it comes to myriad management tools. Probably purchased with the best intentions and promised uses, many network, system and application monitoring tools become underutilized and lose value as environments evolve and IT organizations shift their focus from an element-management approach to a service-oriented strategy.

Worse yet is the fact that many IT shops aren’t completely aware of all the tools that are running across the various IT disciplines. This conundrum causes a few problems for IT organizations attempting to streamline operations and mature their management style to assure quality IT services are delivered as the business demands.

Suffering from IT Management Tools Overload?

What to do? There are different degrees of management tool overload, but a few steps can help many organizations get moving in the right direction toward fewer tools and more meaningful management data. Recently The Register hosted a Webcast in which Tim Phillips, broadcast editor from The Reg, moderated a discussion with Freeform Dynamics Service Director Andrew Buss andPatrick Ancipink, vice president for product marketing at CA Technologies, on the steps needed to make private cloud work. During that discussion the topic of management tools overload came up, and Ancipink shared how CA Technologies advises customers to start reducing the tools and optimizing service assurance.

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Suffering from IT Management Tools Overload?

By on March 7, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT executives could be scratching their heads as to why the management technologies they’ve invested in over the years aren’t delivering the results they promised. The problem lies in too many solutions purchased to address monitoring across varies IT silos.

Now that the shift from specialized device/system management to IT service management and delivery is becoming a reality for many IT shops, the abundance of disparate, element-specific tools could actually be hindering some much-needed change. Many IT departments experienced the shift from the large “management framework” technologies to best-of-breed tools and have an unhealthy mix of products that aren’t well integrated or delivering the data they need to role-specific dashboards.

Today’s service-oriented approach to managing IT across various domains requires a bit of right-sizing when it comes to management tools, according to industry watchers. Recently The Register hosted a Webcast in which Tim Phillips, broadcast editor from The Reg, moderated a discussion with Freeform Dynamics Service Director Andrew Buss and Patrick Ancipink, vice president for product marketing at CA Technologies, on the steps needed to make private cloud work. During that discussion the topic of management tools overload came up, and Buss shared some research on how this reality is hurting some IT shops.

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