Delegates at CA World user conference hear plan to
control IT costs.
Addressing the perennial problem of IT infrastructure
complexity, software suppliers are starting to hone their IT
management suites to offer holistic end-to-end IT infrastructure
management, business activity monitoring and self-healing
systems.
Such features are becoming essential to IT managers as systems
become increasingly complex, amalgamating old tech- nologies such
as legacy databases with state-of-the-art equipment, requiring
skillful and often expensive management.
At its CA World user conference earlier this month, the supplier
outlined its Enterprise IT Management (EITM) strategy, which aims
to unify and simplify IT management and control costs. CA plans to
release 26 products that will work with its Unicenter platform to
accomplish this.
EITM ties together management of the whole enterprise IT
environment, including end-users, infrastructure, data,
applications, IT services and business processes, said CA.
The industry has been attempting for many years to simplify
systems management but the technology now appears to be coming
together. Gary Barnett, IT research director at analyst firm Ovum,
said, "CA was talking about EITM in the 1990s, but now the
technology is more likely to work. CA is really focused on business
service optimisation."
IBM is also pursuing a strategy of broadening the reach of its
systems management software.
IBM recently acquired Collation, and plans to build the
supplier's technology into its Tivoli Change and Configuration
Management Database - part of its systems management suite.
Collation's software can automatically capture information about
IT resources, such as servers, applications and databases, and
display it on a detailed map.
This means IT managers will be able to anticipate the impact of
changes to an IT environment, said IBM.
Hewlett-Packard is making major changes to its Openview IT
management platform, and said it would reveal more at its user
conference at the start of December. HP recently released SOA
Manager to monitor SOA applications from development to
deployment.
This month BMC also enhanced its IT management portfolio with
the Business Process Integration Suite, supporting message oriented
middleware, Java applications and web services.
This allows users to integrate real-time processes with batch
processes from mainframes, distributed systems, ERP systems and
home-grown applications into a single, unified, centrally managed
business process, said the firm.
Reality of business activity monitoring
Henry Peyret, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that
although systems monitoring suppliers are offering business
activity monitoring, early project implementations have revealed
significant user frustrations.
"The products are too tightly linked to supplier technologies
such as business process management or business intelligence and
are not really open enough to support a service oriented
architecture strategy yet," said Peyret.