Architectural Foundations for Next-Generation Service Design and Delivery: A Look at BMC s Atrium in Market Context An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) White Paper Prepared for BMC August 2011 IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH, INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Table of Contents Introduction...1 BSM and the New IT Management Architecture...1 The New Politics in the Age of Cloud Computing...1 EMA s New Architectural Model: The Three Faces of BSM...2 A Lifecycle Approach: Applying Key Technologies and Processes to a Lifecycle Vision...3 Service Strategy and Service Design...3 Service Transition...3 Service Operations...3 Continual Service Improvement...4 BMC s Unique Architectural Approach...4 The Atrium CMDB and the Unified Service Model...4 Atrium Integrator for More Streamlined Data Integration...5 Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM)...5 Atrium Blueprints for Service Design and Provisioning...6 BMC Service Catalog for Provisioning and Governance...6 Run-Time Service Models for Performance, Change and Other Dynamic Insights...6 Atrium Orchestrator...7 Atrium Support for Visualization...7 EMA Perspective...7 About BMC...8
Introduction In spite of the often-fair criticism of skeptics, the marketplace for IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions has progressed considerably since its shift from point products towards SNMP platforms in the early 1990s. Platforms evolved into frameworks, which as a class proved unwieldy, spawning a rise in more architecturally organic suites. With growing attention to CMDB/CMS systems, service modeling, cross-domain automation and a greater focus on the assimilation and reconciliation of multiple brands into cohesive service management systems the face of the management industry is once again taking on new life. This new face of service management is no longer product defined in the traditional sense, but architecturally defined. This new face of service management is no longer product defined in the traditional sense, but architecturally defined. ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) research and consulting has for years confirmed that more progressive IT organizations are seeking core investments to assimilate, analyze and automate capabilities across multiple sources, including multiple brands, rather than a single vendor s Santa s bag of tools with little architectural consistency, inconsistent functionality, and often poor levels of integration. Current technology trends such as Cloud services and technologies, SOA, and Web 2.0 ecosystems are only accelerating this trend toward cross-domain awareness with a focus on selective relevance and actionable, dynamic information. Similarly, IT organizations are moving slowly but surely towards a more cross-domain model to facilitate more efficient processes, dialog, and information sharing across different skill groups. This sometimes extends to the business community outside of IT especially in environments where business success depends on the effective delivery of critical IT services. This EMA report looks at the high-level, core foundations of next-generation service management architectures, along with their benefits and design components. It then highlights BMC s Atrium Platform as the single most visible expression of this new architectural perspective in the industry today. BSM and the New IT Management Architecture The term Business Service Management, or BSM, is one that is often interpreted differently depending on who is asked. In recent EMA research, it has been defined as everything from a strategy to a set of processes to a portfolio of products. But it also represents a change in how IT works and thinks even beyond process. In many respects, it reflects the emergence of a new IT culture. The New Politics in the Age of Cloud Computing Organizational changes within IT are shifting towards a new, more cross-domain, and more serviceoriented approach for managing both the processes and the business of IT. Some of this is clearly stimulated from the pressures to assimilate and optimize the cross-domain management requirements of Cloud (Operationalizing Cloud, EMA, January 2011). But other pressures have arisen from more ongoing trends such as the need for more effective problem resolution and triage, more cohesive service portfolio planning, and more efficient ways of provisioning services and managing change are also factors. This same research showed that 59% of its more than 150 global respondents had a crossdomain services management group in some form, usually with high-level executive sponsorship. Moreover, IT organizations with such a cross-domain group outperformed those without such a group in virtually all areas the research tracked, including the effective simulation of Cloud services. Page 1 Page 1
Similar results were achieved when core technologies were applied to the equation such as CMDB/ CMS deployments, application dependency mapping, IT Process Automation, service catalogs, and service dashboard analytics. Each of these provide strong advantages in provisioning, optimizing, and assuring Cloud-related services (See Operationalizing Cloud Technology Adoption). EMA s New Architectural Model: The Three Faces of BSM EMA has made its own independent evaluation of the BSM landscape and arrived at its own taxonomy. From a technology perspective, EMA views BSM as an architectural model optimized for effective data assimilation, analysis, automation and visualization to support three key areas of benefit: BSM Service Impact: enables a cohesive, end-to-end service monitoring with strong business impact analysis capabilities that include, but are not usually limited to, SLM. Strengths in relating user experience management to application-to-infrastructure interdependencies are also often present. BSM Financial Optimization: requires taking broad-based discovery, modeling, and analysis to support a service-centric model for asset and financial planning in which infrastructure and application assets, including vendor services, opex and capex investments, are viewed as performing contributors to critical IT/business services. BSM Change Automation: enables unique IT efficiencies and minimizes risks by hardening processes to support a lifecycle approach to both service and asset management, including but not limited to configuration and change, automated closed loop remediation, and dynamic capacity optimization in support of new service requests or performance issues. Figure 1: This is a rough sketch of EMA s vision of how effective Business Service Management emerges out of core management service requirements to support the three use cases above. New architectures are enabling optimized efficiencies across many management tools and brands of tools to enable more effective data gathering, topology and other discovery, service dependency mapping and modeling, data normalization and reconciliation and data sharing, analytics, and automation. Blueprints and Service Catalog, while central to Change Automation, also depend on Service Impact and Financial Optimization to capture what s available and at what cost. Page 2 Page 2
These three faces actually represent a single, cohesive architecture (see Figure 1) in which data from many multiple sources is designed, discovered, reconciled, modeled and mapped to interdependencies and analyzed in support of superior levels of automation, visualization, and business-aligned decision making. A Lifecycle Approach: Applying Key Technologies and Processes to a Lifecycle Vision The role of next-generation architecture technologies can perhaps best be understood in context with a lifecycle schema for service management and key service management processes. EMA s lifecycle schematic below shows a logical flow. It represents a summary of just some of the more critical technologies and processes involved in each stage. Service Strategy and Service Design Service Portfolio Management for Service Portfolio Planning understanding costs and assigning value to services (new and existing). This requires effective IT-to-business dialog to help set SLAs (Service Level Management), capacity requirements, and both back-office and customer-related service policies. Service (or Application Development) tools leverage insights from service dependency models to better optimize application designs for performance, responsiveness and costs. Service Transition Provisioning new services and managing change effectively depends heavily on a core set of technology advantages. These include: Application Dependency Management and Discovery for visibility across infrastructure-toinfrastructure, application-to-infrastructure, and application-to-application interdependencies. CMDB/CMS and related Modeling capabilities for process control and analysis of approved versus discovered states, as well as for linking physical and logical interdependencies across a service ecosystem in support of virtually any IT process or discipline. Service Blueprints and Service Catalogs for creating and externalizing recipes for new services that can be provisioned and optimized based on policies. This is especially important for Cloud and hybrid environments, where the pace of provisioning new services can be vastly accelerated. IT Process Automation and active configuration automation (release management) to accelerate and harden critical provisioning and change management processes. Validation that changes are non-disruptive through performance-related analytics. Service Operations Assuring that new and pre-existing services are performing optimally requires a host of technologies such as: Cohesive service management dashboards with advanced analytics User Experience Management (UEM) baselines and analysis Service Level Management to support commitments and governance requirements Direct linkages to the CMDB/CMS for insights into configuration issues, change impacts, and potential capacity-related issues, owner, customer and a wide variety of other relationships. Page 3 Page 3
Continual Service Improvement Optimizing pre-existing processes for cost, value, efficiency and relevance requires insights gained from virtually all the technologies listed above in support of historical analysis configuration processes, asset-lifecycle issues, capacity-related issues, application service performance and usage, compliance issues and costs related to service delivery, among other factors. BMC s Unique Architectural Approach BMC was the first platform vendor, and in many respects the first service management vendor, to recognize that architecture was beginning to trump a laundry list of product functions and features. When BMC first introduced its Atrium architecture in December 2005, it caused a stir that has changed the management landscape ever since. BMC was the first platform vendor, and in many respects the first service management vendor, to recognize that architecture was beginning to trump a laundry list of product functions and features. At that time, not surprisingly, Atrium was largely defined in the public awareness through its CMDB offering. And in fact, BMC helped to escalate ITIL s idea of a CMDB into the limelight more than any other single vendor, and so not surprisingly BMC remains a clear leader in CMDB market presence to date. Part of this CMDB-centric association with Atrium comes from the fact that much of the CMDB tidal wave was centered in the idea of reconciling and optimizing management information to achieve a more cohesive foundation for virtually any service management discipline. This big CMDB idea far transcends the notion of just a database, and includes a set of technologies such as discovery, application dependency, automation, visualization and analytics that are all well represented in BMC s current Atrium solution set either directly or through integration. It is, in many respects, more logically the architectural equivalent of ITIL v3 s Configuration Management System (CMS) and its Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) which EMA believes will continue to reflect requirements for service management design for many years to come. The sections below will highlight BMC s current Atrium capability with a focus on recent, 2011 enhancements. The Atrium CMDB and the Unified Service Model Modeling remains at the heart of Atrium, but BMC has extended it beyond classic CMDB support to reflect more real-time requirements for performance management (Run-Time Service Model). Atrium modeling also includes business-related extensions to support customerrelated service associations such as cost, level of service (SLA) and customer entitlements for service catalog usage. For provisioning, Atrium modeling provides blueprints optimized for creating new services in a more dynamic and automated fashion. BMC s name for its extended modeling capability, all of which is fully reconciled with the Atrium CMDB, is the Unified Service Model. BMC remains a clear leader in CMBD market presence to date Page 4 Page 4
These extensions, each of which will be examined in more detail below, offer critical advantages for more dynamic IT environments especially those leveraging Cloud computing and virtualized infrastructures, as well as Web 2.0 and other ecosystems that demand highly responsive ways of modeling, provisioning, managing and optimizing services and service choices. Atrium Integrator for More Streamlined Data Integration At the heart of any CMDB or CMS is the capability to assimilate data from multiple sources, including third-party sources. Atrium Integrator is an advanced integration engine with a number of usability and performance enhancements. These include automation to support best practices, faster performance, maintenance windows for managing updates, and much improved ease of modeling through wizards and templates. Atrium Integrator also supports the CMDBf standard. Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) Nothing is more central to the notion of a true CMS than understanding the interdependencies between application services and the infrastructure that supports them. BMC s much enhanced ADDM solution (through its 2009 Tideway acquisition) ships with more than 34,000 product configurations for modeling common third-party applications (Oracle, SAP, etc.) as well as mature and flexible approaches for modeling custom applications. This is of great value for assessing the impact of change on business services for performance monitoring, diagnostics and capacity planning. It is especially critical in Cloud and virtualized environments where workloads can shift dynamically with unpredictable disruptions to application ecosystems that spread across multiple physical and/or virtual servers. BMC s ADDM solution is agentless with a broad range of discovery capabilities that span distributed infrastructures, mainframe environments, and even power consumption dependencies. It also has advanced functionality to support prototyping to solicit feedback from key application owners. This helps to accelerate a process that requires a flexible way of optimizing automated application discovery in conjunction with the effective incorporation of application domain expertise. Figure 2: Business Application Showing Infrastructure Interdependencies Page 5 Page 5
Figure 3: Application Dependencies Application View Visualization for Mail Hub Atrium Blueprints for Service Design and Provisioning BMC s Unified Service Model is not just an internal direction to unify its own portfolio, but a well thought-out and externalized initiative to support a number of use cases surrounding lifecycle service management across traditional, virtualized and Cloud-specific environments. Atrium s Service Blueprints are targeted at the creation of new service offerings and fully leverage the Atrium CMDB and ADDM for contextual awareness of relationships, attributes and interdependencies. The Blueprints are effectively service definitions much like recipes in a cookbook, including both key functional components and communications requirements. They also include deployment models so that, for instance, the same service might be deployed in a single, simple configuration, or in a more distributed, complex, tiered environment. Administrators can use tags on blueprints to further refine requirements such as those for service levels, unique resource requirements, specific customer access rights, etc. Atrium s Service Blueprints are targeted at the creation of new service offerings and fully leverage the Atrium CMDB and ADDM for contextual awareness BMC Service Catalog for Provisioning and Governance BMC s Service Catalog has been significantly enhanced through its clear linkage to the Atrium CMDB via the Unified Service Model and Service Blueprints, to enable a clean, lifecycle handshake between service discovery, service creation, and service provisioning. Business extensions to the catalog models are effectively CI attributes that can capture information such as pricing, quality of service, support for end-user self-provisioning, unique customer T s and C s, and other business-related variables. BMC s service catalog capability is flexible enough to incorporate both public and private Cloud, as well as physical and virtual environments. Service Catalog offerings can be externalized in a Self-Service Portal. Run-Time Service Models for Performance, Change and Other Dynamic Insights Once a service is delivered, it has to be managed from an operations perspective, and in the era of Cloud computing time dependencies across provisioning, validation, operational management and even capacity optimization can become so condensed that they may collapse into a single, complex set of decisions. The Atrium Run-Time service model fully leverages the advantages of all the relationships in Page 6 Page 6
the Atrium CMDB, and ADDM, but also supports CMDB updates so critical in virtualized and Cloud environments. Through BMC s advanced analytics, they can also support cohesive analysis of user experience, capacity utilization and load balancing options, and service-level management requirements. Atrium Orchestrator As an architectural foundation for superior service lifecycle management, automation is key. The BMC Atrium Orchestrator integrates with release management solutions such as BMC BladeLogic and BMC Network Automation including Cloud (internal and public) environments for full change managementrelated automation. Atrium Orchestrator also supports automated diagnostics and remediation, and spans other key requirements to support machine-to-machine, human-to-machine, and human-tohuman process enhancements. In this way BMC Atrium Orchestrator can serve as a consistent source of policy-based automation across multiple technologies. The presence of automation in hybrid and Cloud environments can mean the difference between success and failure in many deployments. Atrium Support for Visualization As Atrium is an architectural foundation, its benefits extend well beyond the Atrium portfolio itself to support more effective service management dashboards and visualization solutions. For instance, BMC Atrium Dashboards and Analytics leverage the currency of the Atrium Unified Service Model to unify BMC s investments in advanced performance analytics with its service modeling for service impact, change impact, and other application service relationships. Specifically a part of the Atrium portfolio, BMC Atrium Dashboards and Analytics provide an overview dashboard to promote cross-domain collaboration and communication, including well-designed support for executives seeking prioritized insights into service commitments, performance and costs. EMA Perspective BMC has been actively growing its core Atrium foundation and leveraging that foundation ever more effectively in the last few years with significant in-house development as in its Cloud Lifecycle Management directions, combined with well targeted acquisitions. To some degree, this is a return to BMC s industry-changing directions back in 2005 when Atrium was first introduced, as BMC needed time in between to assimilate and optimize other major acquisitions, such as BladeLogic most notably. It is Atrium, more than anything else, that sets BMC apart as a truly architecturally defined platform with strong support not only for integrations across its own portfolio, but far-ranging capabilities for third-party integrations as well. BMC s advances in Atrium now parallel other smart investments, such as Coradiant for User Experience Management and Neptuny for capacity analytics, which will make the Atrium foundation more multi-dimensional. Through these acquisitions and well-focused internal development, BMC has become a true leader in service lifecycle management with balanced strengths in all stages from service transition, to service operations, to continual service improvement with strong capabilities in support of service design and service strategy. Clearly BMC, like its other platform peers, has areas to continue to improve in terms of portfolio simplicity, ease of deployment, and ease of administration. But it is Atrium, more than anything else, that sets BMC apart as a truly architecturally defined platform with strong support not only for integrations across its own portfolio, but far-ranging capabilities Page 7 Page 7
for third-party integrations as well. This is a model that is redefining the role of platforms, especially in the age of Cloud and other ecosystems where multiple environments with heterogeneous sources of information will need to be reconciled, modeled and managed responsibly. About BMC Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software. Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended March 31, 2011, BMC revenue was approximately $2.1 billion. About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data 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, lines of business users, and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com. Follow EMA on Twitter and EMA on Facebook. 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. 2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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 80301 Phone: +1 303.543.9500 Fax: +1 303.543.7687 www.enterprisemanagement.com 2277.083111 Page 8 Page 8