To clarify the term, DCIM refers to holistic monitoring and management processes – including power management, asset management, thermal management, space management, access and control, and network distribution – that dynamically delivers a complete picture of how devices and environment conditions relate to each other across an IT ecosystem. For example, when a device is introduced, changes, or fails, DCIM processes help determine how the disruption will affect the performance of all other devices and conditions in the environment.

The core of the confusion in the marketplace, however, derives from the fact that DCIM encompasses such a wide range of management disciplines, and vendors offering products that support one or only a few of these processes are staking a claim to the broader descriptor. An asset tracking platform is an ITAM platform. A product that measures and reports on energy consumption is a power management solution. The very definition of DCIM does not allow the platforms to be identified as such because they do not deliver a holistic view of ALL critical elements in the environment.

So, which vendors qualify as delivering the only true DCIM solutions? I could tell you, but we spent so much time developing the research, it’s best if I just direct you there. The DCIM Radar Report Summary is available for download for free and provides an in-depth comparison of the leading product sets: http://bit.ly/UBMWMU

IBM is of course in a class by itself in terms of its breadth of vision. This was not a conference on IT management; it was a glimpse of the multidimensional technological future hurtling towards us. Health care, smart cities, utilities – one was as likely to meet an expert on muncipal power distribution as to meet an IT service desk manager. The keynotes by IBM executives hit a set of IBM themes that are becoming familiar: Analytics, Watson, health care, DevOps, Smarter Planet, and IBM’s formidable hardware and software. They are developing quite a view of a thoroughly IT-enabled society. But I’ll leave macro-analysis of IBM to others. My primary questions in attending Pulse were:

1) Is IBM finally integrating its formidable portfolio of IT management products into a coherent IT value stream capability?

2) What’s Maximo?

Towards these ends I found myself favoring the show floor over the breakout sessions. I spent quite a few hours working the booths, meeting a number of fascinating vendors and listening in as customers posed various problems for IBM and its partners.

Of the major IT vendors, it’s been hard of late to spot IBM’s presence in core IT service management. This is strange, as IBM has some of the industry’s deepest roots there. The IBM “yellow books” (A Management System for the Information Business) were an important precursor to ITIL in the 1980s. However, after the IBM sale of the Tivoli Service Desk to Peregrine in 2000, IBM had essentially nothing in the Service Desk space for six years, until it acquired MRO Software, the maker of Maximo, a major vendor of Enterprise Asset Management software.

The Maximo product filled an essential gap in IBM’s portfolio, being a flexible workflow framework capable of serving as a general development platform. A core set of ITSM products have been developed using it, yet Maximo still seems to have more traction in its original niche of Enterprise Asset Management.

Now, Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) is an interesting field, covering a wide variety of capital-intensive problems from refineries to rail transport. Like its sister IT Asset Management, it is NOT the same as the Fixed Asset modules one sees in a Financial ERP system; in addition to tracking detailed asset financials, EAM addresses issues like maintenance, uptime, regulatory compliance, and so forth.

To provide further perspective on Maximo’s reach in EAM, the following user groups met during Pulse:

• Maximo Life Sciences User Group
• Maximo Airports User Group
• Maximo ITSM User Group
• Maximo Manufacturing User Group
• Maximo Transportation User Group
• Maximo Facilities Management User Group
• Maximo Oil and Gas User Group
• Maximo Utility Working Group (MUWG)

Not your traditional IT Service Management suite by a long shot! This breadth has been further bolstered by IBM’s acquisition of facilities & real estate solutions provider Tririga. The overall message to the market is clearly, “IT is becoming pervasive, mobile, and embedded, and what’s important is how it’s applied.”

One of Maximo’s significant aspects is the depth of its partner ecosystem. Represented at Pulse was a rich array of vendors skilled in implementing solutions on the core Maximo framework. This translates to a deep pool of Maximo expertise that can be leveraged across domains. I talked with at least one vendor who had originated in an unrelated industry vertical and was now building ITSM-related solutions on top of Maximo. Some of the conversations I had:

• I know from my PeopleSoft years that very often the SDLC tools provided with Maximo-like frameworks are rudimentary at best. Both interloc solutions with their Interloc Release Manager and Asset Partners with their Config Compare are addressing this gap.
• gen-E offers Maximo extensions for runbook automation, social media, knowledge management, and other areas. Of interest was their process analytics capability, reflecting some things I’ve discussed here.
• Regular readers know that demand and execution management for IT are ongoing areas of interest for me. I was therefore particularly intrigued with the Maximo vendors building products in this area. In particular, Pipeline Software with their Syntempo and Primavera integrations was notable, although not targeted to IT management. CiM’s Visual IT Scheduler was the kind of innovative solution that I love to see emerging from a framework ecosystem. I am a big fan of this kind of visual view on IT demand and execution; I’ve seen it have C-suite traction. Had a good discussion with CiM’s Sebastien Charbonneau as well about the potentials of true production scheduling for IT work.

I still am amazed that more operations perspective has not transferred to IT management. When I read (for example) marketing literature from Pipeline stating “Pipeline Software’s Syntempo® solution automates the craft feedback loop, eliminating the need to chase down work status” I ask myself, how is such a capability different from managing a team of systems engineers in a data center? Other than the term “craft” which (I infer) refers to the kind of plant maintenance personnel who work from big Snap-On carts instead of at terminals?

IBM realizes this, and the “IT/OT” (Information Technology/Operations Technology) convergence was mentioned a few times from the podium and in one on ones.

Of course, the major Maximo news for IT service management is the announcement of the SmartCloud Control Desk, a consolidation of Tivoli Asset Management for IT (TAMIT), Tivoli Service Request Management (TSRM), and Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB). This has been accompanied by extensive usability engineering which is good; usability consistently comes up in EMA discussions as a challenge for Maximo-based ITSM products. Watch for further in-depth discussion of SmartCloud Control Desk by EMA.

On the other topic: IBM has long had waterfront coverage of the IT lifecycle from development through operations, but this has seemed less than the sum of its parts. Along these lines, the concept of DevOps was widely discussed, including at a special analyst presentation, and I spent quite a bit of time at the back of the Expo floor with Rational and Tivoli engineers familiar with the details of IBM’s support for this movement.

IBM has turned to the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard for some support in this area, but there are details that this spec does not address. I observed a Rational engineer developing a simple topology representing an application server talking to a database, and I asked “what metamodel is that”? He said it was (unfortunately) not a standard, but a proprietary construct in the Rational Software Architect for Deployment Planning that everyone referred to as “Zephyr.” (It IS based on Essential MOF, for those who care, so it interoperates with the OMG stack.) He also told me that from his perspective, there were still some unresolved complexities around the relationship between model, code, and deployment and their supporting systems (UML, source code management, and CMDB/discovery). I didn’t have time to drill into the last mile of what he was saying, but it seems they are close to closing the gaps.

I’ll take some credit here. A Google search for Model-Driven Configuration Management yields nearly 4 million hits, with my eight-year-old post proposing the concept at the top. There are any number of reasons why such theories have struggled, from Agile to dynamic virtualized environments, but I still believe that there is an important and as yet unrealized service portfolio information flow between development and operations, and I continue to look at specific DevOps practices for a solution.

Random: thrilled to be interviewed by Jan and Grady Booch (that’s him and me in the picture) for their new series, Computing: The Human Experience. (I talked about my first experiences with computing, courtesy of the historic Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and related initiatives. I played Oregon Trail version 1. And was a big fan of the chat facility on the Control Data computers known as “XTalk.” Been doing social computing since 1975…)

Also pleased to see my book in good quantity at the Pulse Bookstore. Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell, a classy guy if there ever was one, bought a copy and asked for my autograph. (I own his book on CMDB, so I guess fair is fair.)

Finally, cave canem: Large companies like IBM are able to be their own test beds for their IT management solutions, a strategy known as “eating one’s own dog food.” IBM SVP Steve Mills used this metaphor during his keynote, and also came up with the astounding visual image, “zSeries Linux runs like a scalded dog.” Yelp!

One hopes no dogs were harmed in the making of these metaphors. I’m not sure I’d want to be Steve’s pooch, between having my food eaten and getting hot water dumped on me. But I won’t be the one to report him to PETA. Although I can just envision Pamela Anderson showing up with a protest sign at Pulse.

Cheers,

Charlie

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For additional IBM perspective from my EMA colleague John Myers, see “Focus On The Forest Rather Than The Trees:IBM Smarter Cities China.”

Obviously, desktop management practices are far too complex to be performed by manual processes alone in enterprise environments, and automated tools must be employed to ensure consistency and reliability across the support stack.  Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) encompasses the breadth of desktop support requirements from initial deployment through final retirement, and, fortunately, a number of automated CLM solution suites are currently available that can greatly simplify and enhance those processes.  But with all the options
available in the market place, it’s not easy to determine which solutions are best suited to meet an organization’s unique requirements.  All too often, enterprises settle on the solution pitched to them by the first vendor they encounter or simply adopt solutions offered by one of the most popular vendor names.  CLM solutions that are designed to be cost-effective, however, may not provide the breadth of support an enterprise requires, and platforms with expansive feature sets may be wasteful to organization that only require a portion of the functionality provided.

To assist in this decision making process, We have developed a ranking report titled, “The EMA Radar Report on Client Lifecycle Management” (http://bit.ly/ptdYa6), that provides an in-depth side-by-side comparison of the leading vendors in the CLM space and clearly rates them according to both features and cost-effectiveness.  Vendors that achieve
the best value in their solutions have been awarded special recognition in the
report.  It is our opinion that clearly and objectively revealing both areas of excellence and deficiencies encourages platform innovation and improvements with vendor development efforts.

Any organization investigating or considering a client lifecycle management solution needs to review The EMA Radar Report on Client Lifecycle Management.  Although each business will have its own unique requirements for a CLM platform, the Radar Report will provide the foundation from which informed decision making can be performed.  We’ve done all the research and product vetting for you – all you have to do is read it.

Tagging is likely to make inroads via governmental sourcing and supply chain standards, as well as security concerns. And even China is showing interest….

Q. What are the major things you’d like to communicate to IAITAM attendees?

A. There’s been a great deal of interest from tool providers, publishers, end users, and in particular the U.S. government. The biggest drivers have been very large enterprises that are starting to go to their [software] publishers and say, “We have a problem, we’re committing to these audits, discovery requirements, and purchase requirements, but we’re not getting the information we need back in order to manage our process in an automated fashion. It’s costly, resource intensive, we get it wrong on a regular basis, and it ends up with this negative set of repercussions between customer and publisher, and that should go away.”

These enterprises are going out to the publishers saying here’s how we can fix it, here’s an international standard. Multiple government organizations are tracking this and looking to implement.

For those publishers that are interested in doing this-  in having that transparent communication channel with their customer, this isn’t going to be a problem. It’s inexpensive, it’s easy, straightforward. Engineers within the organization will look at this and say it just makes sense.

It saves money for the publisher in multiple different ways; they are looking at tracking their own software. Many ISVs have separate business units, some that publish the software, others that try to identify the software, and they don’t have an effective communication channel…

Q. Tags help the product organization and the audit organization communicate…

A. As well as the tools organization. There are many companies that have both publishing and tool development units. The tool development units are doing discovery, desktop management, software asset management, and there is no cohesive communications solution or handoff between those two business units. It makes sense for the publisher to implement SWID tags, they will save money. It makes sense for the end user to require SWID tags, they will save money by more accurate information, they’ll be able to automate the process much more effectively. For the tool providers, there was a fair amount of resistance for a fairly long period of time; in the last couple of years, there has been some head-nodding, saying “that makes sense, but we’re not sure what’s going to happen in this area, not sure if we can commit to it.” Now that tool providers are seeing publishers move to support SWID tags, tool providers such as Flexera who are actively working to support software identification tags.

From the government perspective, we’re starting to see China looking at the ISO SAM standards. They want to apply the policies from 19770-1, and they are looking at what they can do to require software identification tags…

Q. … which offers the promise of greater profitability in China …

A. … so there is a concerted effort to get the intellectual property efforts in China up to speed, China understands that they need to do that…

Q. … but the US software industry has effectively been in a poor position to challenge China on this stuff because it’s such a mess…

A. … correct. So it will be interesting to see if China actually beats the US to the requirement for software identification tags. The interesting thing is, since this is based on an ISO standard, if China says “in order to sell software here you need to follow the international standard,” there can’t be any effective argument against that.

Q. Right. “You’ve been complaining about our piracy…”

A. “…And we’ll fix it as soon as you give us the data we need to fix it…” It’s going to be a very interesting dynamic as that starts to come to the fore.

In terms of the US government, there are multiple different perspectives; they’ve been looking at it from a security perspective, a cost savings perspective, a compliance perspective, both from policy and licensing compliance. Accuracy of purchase (in the RFP space) – in the security space, you have supply-side security, operational security, identification for policy & access – who has rights, you’re looking at vulnerabilities – are all the patches installed or not, with software ID tags you can actually automate that process. You’re looking at zero-day vulnerabilities, can we identify this quickly enough and know exactly what devices a specific unpatched software product is installed on…

We talked more about Tagvault, which is being framed as a registration authority that may ultimately support many registrars (similar to how ICANN supports multiple domain registrars such as GoDaddy.) There’s much more for the interested reader at tagvault.org.

I’ll be attending the SAM Summit in Chicago next week and participating in two sessions. Given how critical software asset management has become to many enterprises of late, this should be an interesting show. As usual, I’ve got a research agenda I’m going in with, focusing on four things:

1. The problem of “market data” – we see companies over and over again assembling their own data sets of vendors, products, and fingerprints, and struggling mightily with the formidable maintenance and quality problems such efforts entail. It was clear to me as a practitioner in this space that was a non value add problem I badly wanted to outsource. This overlaps with, but is not identical to…

2. Software “tagging.” What constitutes “good behavior” for installed software, whether in house built or vendor supplied? How can software tags increase direct traceability from discovery to contracted product, bypassing the need for error-prone and expensive to maintain fingerprints? And will Tagvault.org succeed?

3. Entitlement modeling and metering. There are so many ways that entitlements can be structured. Is it possible for 3rd party tools to handle them all? Or is this ultimately all going to be handled by in-band by the vendors? What about the availability and security concerns of ongoing metering and enforced availability compliance?

4. Finally, what does an integrated software asset management ecosystem look like? What is the enterprise architecture of SAM? What are the end to end processes, the major data subjects, and the required systems integrations? Here is a straw man I’m going to present at one of the roundtables (click for full size):

There are a number of interactions between the data stores and activities required for complete end to end software asset management. The interactions show a number of use cases:

• the identification and approval of a given software product as fit for enterprise use
• the registration of that product into the service catalog (ordering, provisioning, and supporting the product being a service)
• the modeling of that product/service cost and the ongoing tracking of actuals via provisoning/deprovisioning
• provisioning/deprovisioning activities feeding the enterprise CMDB and/or IT asset system
• the representation of entitlements in a structured manner, flowing from contract terms & conditions (T & Cs)
• the need for a form of market data for both contracts (and downstream systems) and ongoing discovery
• the metering of actual use against entitlements
• unclear or exceeded entitlements routing into risk
• security risks routing to patch management (a form of provisioning, actually)

This is one way to think about it and as I stare at the ecosystem other interactions pop out. What are your thoughts?