EMA Radar for Advanced Performance Analytics (APA) Use Cases: Q4 2012

Transcription

1 EMA Radar for Advanced Performance Analytics (APA) Use Cases: Q BMC Software Profile By Dennis Drogseth ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) Radar Report December 2012

2 BMC Software Profile Introduction BMC gained one of the APA crown jewels as far back as 2007 when the vendor acquired ProactiveNet. This was significantly enhanced by two additional acquisitions Neptuny for cross-domain capacity planning analytics in 2010, and Coradiant in April of 2011 for one of the industry s most versatile capabilities in end-user-experience-driven analytics. So not surprisingly, for this APA Radar, BMC has leveraged its ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite, which includes BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM), BMC Capacity Optimization, and BMC End User Experience Management (EUEM), as well as its BMC Cloud Operations Management capabilities for assimilating and optimizing unique cloud-related requirements into its overall service management capabilities. BMC is consistently among the highest across all 22 vendors in functionality and architectural strength, and a clear Value Leader in change impact and capacity planning as described below. And as BMC continues to evolve and further integrate its analytic capabilities, it should further enhance its position as one of the very strongest APA solution sets in the industry. Use-case Perspectives Change Impact and Capacity Optimization Value Leader Here, BMC provides both real-time and historical insights into how application services delivered over the infrastructure, or via a Cloud-related ecosystem, are taxing existing infrastructure and software investments. This is balanced by BMC s strengths in change impact via its rich support for modeling services with the Atrium CMDB, BMC s Real-Time Service Model, and Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) for broad-based application dependency mapping. It should 1

3 be stressed that while many vendors in this EMA Radar are exploring capacity and change impact targeted at virtualized systems and to a lesser degree virtualized infrastructure, BMC s rich support for fully cross-domain capacity and change impact is without equal in this report. BMC Capacity Optimization and change impact leverages a broad array of analytics including if/then analysis, intelligent placement, correlation, anomaly detection and predictive, self-learning capabilities. BMC is at the very top of our 22-vendor list for cross-domain support and integrated automation for change impact and capacity planning. EMA Radar Map for Change Impact and Capacity Planning and Optimization 2

4 Business Impact Management Strong Value BMC s strengths in business impact lead with its End User Experience Management which is one of the most evolved and versatile in the industry and in this EMA Radar. As EMA research has documented time and again, user experience is a window not only on service performance, but also on end-user and customer behavior, application/service preferences, completed business transactions, and business process impacts. This strength is enhanced through service modeling and associations for revenue, business activity management, service and SLA costs and chargeback, and supports BMC s capabilities in capacity optimization as richly as it does technical service performance. However, BMC has not yet fully exploited this core foundation in terms of out-of-the box reports to support non-it, business stakeholders to analyze and optimize business outcomes. 3

5 Technical Performance Analytics Strong Value BMC s ProactiveNet was one of the pioneers of Advanced Performance Analytics, and with its capabilities for assimilating a broad range of data points across multiple domains, both through its own data collection and through third-party integrations, remains a clear leader today. BMC has enhanced this advantage with application analytics investments from BMC Application Diagnostics, BMC Application Transaction Tracing and BMC End User Experience Management with its WatchPoint analytics, to range from code-level issues,.net and Java, database, middleware, mainframe, network, and end-station transaction variables. Moreover, BMC is one of only four vendors in this EMA Radar to bring job scheduling and workload automation tools into a cohesively monitored, service management worldview. Needless to say, BMC s strengths in performance management are strongly enhanced by its predictive analytics for change impact, and it shares leadership across the 22-vendor community in performance management for cross-domain support and integrated automation with only four other vendors. Deployment, Administration and Services BMC conservatively estimates ROI within nine months to one year of deployment, for environments with 1,000 to 5,000 managed devices. Administrative support for analytic capabilities (versus basic monitoring) is streamlined at.25 to.50% of a full-time employee. BMC services include full 24x7 support with very rapid guaranteed premier response times (1-15 minutes) as well as extensive on-site services based on customer requirements. These include added strategic support for service modeling, capacity planning, IT transformation, migration services, and broader education services, among others. As such, it was among the top three vendors for overall APA-related professional services. 4

6 Cost Advantage BMC s suite of APA solutions are, along with all platform and large suite investments, at the higher end of the APA spectrum for this EMA Radar if purchased collectively. BMC s EUEM is available as a SaaS offering. Annual maintenance fees are between 19% and 22% of purchase price. Architecture and Integration BMC s analytics can scale to more than one million managed entities, with the largest in deployment being 100, ,000. They can also assimilate between 10 million and 50 million KPIs within five minutes and have done this in practice. Both ProactiveNet and EUEM can take in data within two to five seconds and generate narrative insights at that same level of granularity. BMC supports virtually all domains queried, either directly or through its many third-party integrations. For instance, BMC s partnership with Aternity not only extends its already strong support for user experience management, but provides in-depth capabilities for end-device diagnostics including mobile devices. Like many vendors, BMC is seeing a shift in priority away from adapter-driven integrations towards more standards-driven, Web Services integrations. In its support for DevOps, BMC delivers modular capabilities for sharing and reuse of tests, metrics and analytics between Development, Operations and Q/A Test. Functionality BMC s service support spans all applications categories, from Web and Web 2.0 to prepackaged ERP and other third-party to custom-developed and non-http mobile apps. It does not currently support network-centric services such as VoIP or rich-media. Similarly, from a transaction perspective, BMC can capture granular transaction performance issues, as well as fully modeled business services made up of multiple transactions. BMC s self-learning, predictive algorithms can assimilate time series data, which is most often applied in performance, business impact, capacity, and to some degree in anticipating the impacts of change. BMC s coupling of analytics with automation is broad-based, and can include such actions as automated diagnostics and automated repair (including automated configuration actions), optimal workload placement and load balancing, as well as service desk integrations for trouble ticketing and process workflows. The BMC Dashboard from the Atrium product suite leverages widgets and other capabilities for full cross-domain insights across all use cases described here. BMC also offers a Business Objects-based back end for further trending and report generation. The BMC Dashboard, a well as BMC s other visualization capabilities, can support all domains except those focused on voice and video, and most cross-domain skill sets, as well as business stakeholders in areas such as on-line operations, line-ofbusiness and executive governance. Vendor Strength BMC is one of the largest and most established vendors in the EMA Radar with global reach and more than 500 partners worldwide, including systems integrators (e.g. HCL, Dell, Accenture and Tata), and Technical Alliance Partners and Market Zone partners for functional and other extensions to BMC s portfolio. BMC has also managed to generate high levels of innovation for a vendor its size, with a surprisingly cohesive and well directed overall APA strategy. 5

7 Strengths and Limitations Strengths BMC is one of the true industry leaders in APA analytics with its ProactiveNet capabilities. BMC was the single strongest vendor in integrated capacity, change impact and performance management. BMC has one of the most versatile end user experience management solutions in the industry bar none a critical barometer for all three APA use cases. BMC has leveraged its Atrium foundation for a truly holistic approach to service modeling to support more contextually aware APA results. BMC offers advanced support for cloud and cloud hybrid environments. BMC is a substantial market presence with a broad array of professional services. Limitations As a large vendor with a complex suite, BMC s solutions are at the higher end of this EMA Radar in terms of costs. BMC has growth opportunities in further exploiting its data in support of non-it stakeholders and in building further integrations in the network and networked services arena. Customer Quotes Right now we have about 100,000 servers being managed by ProactiveNet across our various customer accounts, and are taking data from network management tools from HP and CA. BMC s solution integrates well with other management investments in assimilating events and other data and optimizing its analytics. We have to perform appropriate performance and capacity analysis both to save money and to prevent any break of service level agreement commitments. BMC s BPPM and capacity analytics play a major role to identify existing gaps such as over and under utilization of the infrastructure. We can then make appropriate recommendations and help us formulate some migration plans. This includes estimating the potential impact of planned changes as much as twelve to twenty months out. 6

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