EMA Radar For Business Service Management (BSM): Service Impact Q Interlink Vendor Profile

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1 EMA Radar For Business Service Management (BSM): Service Impact Q Interlink Vendor Profile by Dennis Drogseth, Vice President Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) June 2010 IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

2 Table of Contents Interlink Software...1 Introduction...1 Deployment and Administration...2 Cost Advantage...2 Architecture and Integration...2 Functionality...3 Vendor Strength...4 Strengths and Limitations...4 I

3 Interlink Software Vendor Products included in the evaluation: Business Enterprise Server (BES) and Service Configuration Manager (SCM) Value Category: Value Leader Feature or Category Award: Most Innovative Introduction Interlink Software, based in the U.K., is one of the unsung heroes in the BSM Service Impact marketplace. It is not particularly new, founded in 1996, but has evolved in a conservative, self-funded manner and is just now looking at plans to grow more aggressively in the U.S. Its two solution sets represented here, Business Enterprise Server (BES) and Service Configuration Manager (SCM) form an almost perfect fit to EMA s BSM Service Impact model. As far back as 2006, Interlink had provided value in a CMDB deployment for a mid-western financial services provider 1

4 whose downtime was one million dollars a minute. By reconciling monitoring investments into a consistent service model, this deployment reduced Mean-Time-To-Repair by 70%. Interlink is ranked as a leading BSM innovator and a value leader in the radar. The company is careful in committing to its customer investments given its still small size, but if you have pre-existing monitoring investments and are looking for an effective way to automate business impact into dynamic and contentrich service models, Interlink is one of the very best choices in the marketplace today. Deployment and Administration Interlink has an excellent mix of services and technology directed at BSM Service Impact and can begin to deliver meaningful results within a few months. Needless to say, Service Impact initiatives evolve and so Interlink deployments may roll-out over several years, especially as they can potentially combine CMDB and BSM Service Impact deployments as well as business impact analyses including business activity metrics. Interlink is planning to introduce BES and SCM as SaaS offerings later this year. Cost Advantage Calculating costs for Interlink BES and SCM deployments can be approached in two ways. If you are primarily seeking to assimilate pre-existing monitoring and change management tools, meaningful initial deployments can be achieved for a base cost of about $250K, or a quarter of what most platform investments might run. If pre-existing monitoring solutions need more of a bottoms-up approach, then some of those investments will need to be added in to supplement Interlink s own basic capabilities for monitoring. Architecture and Integration One of the things that makes Interlink so effective is that it was architected around a model-driven approach from the very beginning. SCM models subscribe and then shop for discovery and performance information, which is reconciled and normalized across a wide variety of supported third-party solutions as well as Interlink s own cross-domain discovery capability. This elegant design point helps to reduce administrative overhead and increase levels of automation as well. Interlink offers an Automated Service Modeler (ASM) tool to assist with the automated creation of Business Service dependency mapping models by using a Service Subscription Wizard to create subscription methods. Pre-existing or automatically discovered relationships present in the SCM CMDB are also used to dynamically create Business Service Models. Interlink is also perhaps the furthest along of all the vendors in this EMA Radar Report in recognizing and supporting both sides of the application dependency equation: more configuration-centric, less real-time requirements, and more real-time, performance and flow-based requirements. To some degree, Interlink views this as a continuum and builds a hierarchy of dependencies, some of which are optimized to capture the impacts of configuration and change, while others are targeted at service impact performance e.g., if Internet banking was the service, Checking Account and Pay Bills and Apply For new products, what are the break points for a customer checking their balance? Interlink can also assimilate pre-existing metadata targeted at weightings for impact from third-party solutions into its own overarching set of weightings. Interlink currently supports more than a hundred third-party management tool integrations and has defined exports to sixty-four different brands. When importing data, Interlink reconciles it based on trusted source so that, say, asset information for a CI may come from one repository whereas discovered 2

5 configuration may come from another tool or source. Raw data is separated from processed data that has flowed through rules and correlation provided by Interlink via its Common Alert Format. Both BES and SCM are highly modular and so easily extensible. Dashboards can also be generated based on custom requirements through Interlink s Enterprise Dashboard Studio. According to Interlink, This has been a major factor for our clients. Automation is condition driven, and policies are easily defined from models. Interlink has some history of integrating with major IT Process Automation or run book solutions, such as Opalis. It is also considering developing its own approaches to run book. Sample Web-based real-time business service dashboard depicting multiple service aspects including business metrics, service availability, incident & change information. Functionality While Interlink doesn t compete primarily as a monitoring solution, but as a true BSM Service Impact capability, it does offer its own lightweight agents for Unix and Windows systems, as well as agentless monitoring through TCP/IP and other protocols. But Interlink shines when it comes to assimilating data from multiple third-party agents and monitoring tools. Interlink brings fairly robust analytics in terms of cross-domain correlation, rule-based analysis, and topology-driven correlation, but perhaps even more importantly, has created highly contextual, model-driven associations for assimilating and leveraging analytic values imported from other sources. One example of Interlink s attention to detail is in change impact, where it combines data relevant to core configuration change with the myriad of other data sources that can actually impact service performance impact analysis and triage. SCM also keeps a history of changes associated on a per-ci basis, and offers a Risk of Change Simulation Tool. Rules and conditions can be applied to impact groups such as redundant groups, or number of users logged on, or all objects must fail minus 2. Changes are also cross-referenced automatically with security and other policies. Interlink touts what it calls historical service reporting, which distinctively combines service impact histories with change and configuration histories on a per-ci basis for statistical analysis to determine underlying issues impacting service performance and proactively optimizing infrastructure and configuration in the future.

6 The company provides analytic options for managing SLAs and calculating financial impact. It is very focused on Balanced Scorecard, as well as ITIL processes, which it embeds into its design point wherever appropriate. BES includes an object-based service modeling tool and data enrichment module for determining the financial impact of performance without the need for developing and maintaining scripts. Interlink s flexibility in the BSM Service Impact arena is underscored by recent work with several large enterprises where its sole use is to monitor business processes and business activity metrics for financial and performance reasons. In a parallel packaging, Interlink is delivering a dashboard optimized for security management this year. Interlink is also developing what it calls a dynamic Impact Calculation Engine (ICE) which enables a hierarchic approach to understanding CI interdependencies and applies a tiered approach to Balanced Scorecard for prioritization and context. For instance, a financial services company might choose to view a CI in terms of performance, security and financial impact, and rank its priorities in reverse order, with financial impact being topmost and performance being ranked third. Vendor Strength Interlink is a small company and conservative in how it chooses to grow. Based on EMA phone dialogs, it treats its customers well, but at times is constrained in how much it can do by size and resource. Nonetheless, Interlink is beginning to grow more actively through partners, as it has chosen to do in the Nordic countries, and will be expanding its footprint in the U.S. more aggressively later this year. Strengths and Limitations Interlink s BSM Service Impact strengths are: Elegant, model-centric design which was there as a foundation for its solution. An almost perfect alignment with BSM Service Impact in terms of form and function. Proven and sophisticated capabilities for assimilating and reconciling third-party monitoring tools into a true BSM framework. CMDB support that is in many environments complementary to pre-existing CMDBs so that Interlink becomes the equivalent of an Operational CMDB. Strong capabilities for developing, assimilating and reconciling application dependency mapping capabilities that range from in-depth configuration and change to more fluid, real-time awareness of transaction and application flows. Flexible dashboarding and analytics and easy functional extensibility. Proven capabilities for assimilating business performance and business impact information. A long history with true BSM deployments resulting in more mature services and experience in helping customers plan and succeed in phases. Interlink s BSM Service Impact limitations are: Size. Interlink is careful in how it grows to support new customers, but could do yet more with more resources in services, consulting, product development and product support. Bottoms-up monitoring. Interlink is optimized to assimilate pre-existing sources of monitoring rather than providing most core monitoring from its own solution set. Integrated automation is still not at the platform level.

7 About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that specializes in going beyond the surface to provide deep insight across the full spectrum of IT management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise IT professionals and IT vendors at or follow EMA on Twitter. This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. EMA and Enterprise Management Associates are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries. EMA, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES, and the mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 5777 Central Avenue, Suite 105 Boulder, CO Phone: Fax: Interlink