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Service-now.com is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that combines IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 process support, SaaS delivery, and Web 2.0 functionality to provide a flexible and intuitive application specifically built to support the automation of IT Service Management (ITSM) processes. The solution is functionally rich and easy to use, and from a systems management perspective, the burden of application provision sits solely with Service-now.com. This is a big plus for overstretched IT fu…
Technology Audits - published 27/01/2010 - Stephen Mann
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When Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems in April the general expectation was that the acquisition would be completed around the end of the summer holiday period. After all, Sun was not exactly fighting off Oracle’s advances as happened with some of Oracle’s acquisitions over the last few years. But it is now November and there is no immediate conclusion in sight. Apportioning blame is not very helpful, but the reasons for this are mostly as a result of delays in the regulatory app…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/11/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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Requirements Management (RM) is one of the key disciplines in software engineering and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for achieving project success: ensuring that the requirements are captured, understood, and managed. The adoption of Agile processes and methodologies has now reached the mainstream and Agile requirements are created and managed in two ways that differ radically from traditional RM. First, the high-level project requirements are structured in terms of stories or business value fea…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/11/2009 - Michael Azoff
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Next week sees the 18th Annual itSMF UK Conference and Exhibition in Birmingham, with presentations and exhibitions from a who’s who of IT Service Management (ITSM) product and service providers and seasoned ITSM practitioners. It is a, if not the, major event in the UK ITSM calendar, and this year’s event hopes to top that of 2008, which had more than 1,200 attendees from around the world.
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/11/2009 - Stephen Mann
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It is a fact of life that whenever there is a major shift in the way we use IT, the way that we buy IT capabilities also needs to change.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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Change is inevitable in any organisation; and with change comes risk. When one actively stops to think about change, one can be surprised at how big a part it plays within IT operations, ‘Run the Business’ as well as the ‘Change the Business’ function. Whether it is reactive to resolve errors or to adapt to changing circumstances; or proactive to provide new services or functions to increase performance; or to reduce costs or increase efficiency.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Stephen Mann
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In terms of attention from the mainstream press, the trade press, and the analyst community, China is among the most overlooked of markets in relation to its importance.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Somak Roy
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As virtualisation and Infrastructure Cloud Computing (ICC) become more widely adopted the challenge is to change the financial model for providing IT to an organisation in a manner that matches the organisation’s maturity and readiness, as well as understanding what fits with how they do business.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Roy Illsley
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FinancialForce.com is the result of a brand new, joint venture between salesforce.com and Unit 4 Agresso (parent company of financial management software vendor CODA). The new company is the vehicle for taking the existing built-for-Force.com Coda2Go financial management application to market. Unit 4 Agresso will have the majority holding of the new venture and CODA CEO Jeremy Roche will be CEO of FinancialForce, but salesforce.com will be actively involved by providing first-line customer support and ha…
OpinionWire Articles - published 15/10/2009 - Angela Eager
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Wide Area Network (WAN) optimisation has been a technology that has evolved over recent years. It has seen an evolution from being a specialist piece of bespoke equipment, requiring skilled network engineers to install and maintain, to an appliance-based solution that is just plug-and-play.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/09/2009 - Roy Illsley
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Curl provides the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform, an enterprise-ready offering that enables organisations to move their business applications to the Web without compromising on performance, security, or scalability. Curl applications can run inside the browser, as well as outside the browser context on the end user’s desktop. The Curl Runtime Environment installs on the user desktop and is responsible for compiling and executing Curl applications. The platform now offers support for a rang…
Technology Audits - published 22/09/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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In recent years, power capacity limitations, energy cost increases, and resource constraints have affected many enterprises and Corporate, Social, and Environmental Responsibility (CSER) has also become a significant issue. The challenges in meeting these responsibilities have pushed the need for a more proactive IT response centre stage. Senior business managers are realising that there is a significant gap between their operational energy and Green (or sustainability) goals and the organisation’s abili…
Technology Audits - published 22/09/2009 - Stephen Mann
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VMworld 2009 was held in San Francisco from 31 August to 3 September, and attracted nearly 13,000 people (12,488 to be precise as confirmed registered by the time Paul Maritz CEO of VMware began his opening keynote speech). This year’s event was noticeable by its focus, which was less about the technical aspects of virtualisation and more about the wider business implications of the topic.
OpinionWire Articles - published 10/09/2009 - Roy Illsley
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Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) appears to be yet another framework designed to help IT standardise and industrialise its processes, but is there value in organizations using more than one framework when ITIL® has become the dominant framework? 75% of organisations in a Butler Group survey report using ITIL®, while approximately 40% were using two frameworks or more. Therefore, is there a need for an organisation to use more than one framework, and what role should MOF be used for in these circumstances?
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/08/2009 - Roy Illsley
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The worldwide adoption of IT Service Management (ITSM) policies, processes and enabling tools has grown rapidly in recent years. IT organisations have, in particular, adopted IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice to provide consistency of process and improve operational performance – propelled by the increasing business demand for IT, the growing enterprise-level reliance on high quality, business-critical IT services, and the increased complexity of the corporate IT infrastructure.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 24/08/2009 - Stephen Mann
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Cherwell Service Management is an IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 best practice, that seeks to help IT functions meet the enterprise-wide mandate to ‘deliver more with less’ and the need to demonstrate business value and to maximise the availability of business-critical services. The solution offers capabilities in core ITIL v3 areas such as Incident and Request, Problem, Change, Release, Configuration, and Service Level Management. Built from scratch b…
Technology Audits - published 18/08/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Stephen Mann
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A report titled “Carbon Connections: quantifying mobile’s role in tackling climate change” was recently published by Vodafone, in collaboration with Accenture. The report highlights the importance of mobile technology, which has been estimated could help cut Europe’s annual energy bill by at least EU€43 billion and be a major enabler of carbon reductions across a range of industry sectors.
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/08/2009 - Mark Blowers
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IT organisations are not only being squeezed by the enterprise-wide mandate to ‘deliver more with less’, but also IT-specific drivers to demonstrate business value (through business alignment) and the need to maximise the availability of business-critical IT Services. In addressing this squeeze, the business adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process framework and ISO/IEC 20000 standard have both raised the profile of, and increased the necessity for, tools to support IT Service Management …
Technology Audits - published 11/08/2009 - Stephen Mann
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ZOHO Corporation’s Enterprise IT Management Software division, ManageEngine, offers ManageEngine IT Compliance Suite (ITC Suite), a range of separately licensable solutions that address compliance-oriented, automated management of areas of the security and general IT infrastructure. The features offered are impressively capable and span a range of management tasks, and while they are readily available within many competing, enterprise-strength solutions from large vendors, ManageEngine makes the benefits…
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Alan Rodger, Jayasree Jayaprakash, Karthik Balakrishnan
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NetMRI is an appliance-based solution from Netcordia that aids organisations in network configuration and change management. Often, unintended or unauthorised configuration changes in network devices can have an undesirable effect on availability and can, at times, lead to network downtime. Netcordia’s NetMRI attempts to offset this risk by mapping out the network topology and establishing the interdependencies of network elements to aid in impact analysis. The solution uses built-in subject matter exper…
Technology Audits - published 06/07/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
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IT functions are not only subject to the enterprise-wide mandate to ‘deliver more with less’ but also IT-specific challenges that include the demonstration of business value and the need to maximise the availability of business-critical services. HP Service Manager is an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3-aligned, fully integrated IT Service Management (ITSM) software suite that can help an IT organisation to address these challenges: to improve service levels, control costs, and mitigate risk exposure....
Technology Audits - published 11/06/2009 - Stephen Mann
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Two recent announcements from IBM have marked the company’s expansion of its vision on cloud computing. Having previously majored on the provision of managed cloud computing environments, the new announcements focus on large organisations that wish to deploy and own their own private clouds in order to optimise the allocation and use of internal IT resources. IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition provides the application server bundled with a version of Linux that will execute directly on t…
OpinionWire Articles - published 04/06/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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The last week of May marked the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the US Government committee that created the first description of COBOL (the abbreviation for COmmon Business-Oriented Language), and hence the foundation for a language that has been prevalent throughout most of the computing era ever since its creation, and which still continues in widespread and highly active service today.
OpinionWire Articles - published 04/06/2009 - Alan Rodger
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The re-birth of technologies requires more than just a marketing slogan, and while x86 virtualisation and Cloud Computing have grabbed the attention of the IT industry, the long-time workhorse – the mainframe – has seen its popularity begin to increase. CA has coined the phrase ‘Mainframe 2.0’, and uses May Mainframe Madness (3M) in an attempt to raise the profile of this often overlooked sector of the IT industry.
OpinionWire Articles - published 28/05/2009 - Roy Illsley
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The rise of x86 virtualisation has introduced many new terms to the IT manager’s lexicon, but one in particular appears to have adopted an ‘it just does’ understanding: that term is Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/05/2009 - Roy Illsley
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