Managed IT Services

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

The key differentiating factor between the success and failure of a project, says a well known CIO, is that you understand, define and create an agreement on the deliverables at the start itself, with both your suppliers as well as your customers. And, IT infrastructure according to this CIO has everything to do with IT-h/w or s/w, LAN or WAN. Once you consider that the IT in your organization is a supplier and the other parts of the enterprise are its customers, you will discern that you need a function or solution or process to happen from your desktop and the IT needs to provide for it. You do not care if the LAN is down or a printer is under repair. Therefore, your expectations for the delivery of service from your IT must be setup and agreed upon.

You can outsource the entire IT project, its implementation, products, sourcing, maintenance and so on to an outside party on a revenue sharing basis (BOOT -Build, Own, Operate, Transfer basis). This operator would set up the whole thing, run it for sometime and eventually hand it over to you to run. These contracts are fairly long term, to the tune of 10 years and longer and the deals are worth huge amounts of money. In fact, organizations can choose how much of their infrastructure they want to outsource. It is important to select the right MSP (Managed Service Provider) to work with. When you do decide to outsource you will come across several technology terms. We'll explain those here.

CMDB
CMDB stands for Change Management Database. This is an ITIL based process for managing change in processes/workflows as well as configuration. 'Configuration' does not deal with just the configuration of servers, desktops/workstations, networks and so on, but refers to the configuration of your IT with the definitions of how each element of it interacts (and iterates) with every other element. Change management starts when an IT user requests a change and continues till the point that the change is finally made and the request ticket marked 'closed'. A part of this process may also involve risk modeling and analysis of how that change might affect the business or the business processes. After that, accounting of the resources required is made and the change is implemented. Management of processes involves efficiently marshalling the steps in a workflow and dynamically guiding it.

IBM's Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database and Mercury's Universal CMDB among others help you perform C&CM efficiently and transparently. These products feature automatic discovery of current configuration (using agents that communicate over secure channels) and a workflow-based process to track and manage the change processes. These software also maintain the information in a centralized database and generate various kinds of reports out of it. Similarly, ZENMetrics from the UK based 413 Technologies is an agentless configuration and change discovery system. It can monitor network infrastructure, device and software configuration.

Service Impact Modeling
When you manage your IT as a service, how do you pinpoint some part of it and ascribe a value of profit or risk to it? You require a modeling tool that can let you model the entire orchestration and a business vis-à-vis IT service impact intelligence. And this needs to be placed in-stream without creating ripples in the existing environment. An SIM toolkit (from the likes of BMC Software) gives you real time service-specific views and reports and lets you trip alarms and implement remedial steps when something unexpected is detected. This data is picked up from CMDB data stores.

Federated Data Model
In a federated model, data is marshaled according to the entity or area it is attached to. One would use an FDM with a CMDB implementation so that specific IT assets can be attached to their respective accounting, SLAs, POs, troubleshooting tickets and so forth. Such a structure can increase the responsiveness of your IT and helps with compliance. It provides for an easier and quicker view of your IT assets and what technologies are being tied in where, enabling you to control critical changes more accurately. The FDM can also help reduce information silos, reducing unexpected results when changes are made.

Business Process Modeling
Using UML (Unified Modeling Language), one can assess the enterprise business architecture and its internal relationships including organizational structure and data. BPM is used within the company to model various entities, information capture and release points and explore the relationships and requirements versus delivery to find out if optimal processes are being followed. In tune with this, there is an organization called the BPMI that overseas standards being evolved for business process management. So far, the sub-group Object Management Group has adopted two standards, viz. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BMM (Business Motivational Model). Further a specification called the SVBR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) has been adopted.

Shared services
This is a popular trend in managed services. You go in for outside management of your IT to decrease your OpEx. When an MSP can create a common pool of resources for its customers and provides its services out of that pool, the cost of his operations from that pool goes down. This is subsequently passed on to you.

Multi-play Networks
Enterprises go in for WANs because this offers them a dedicated pipe between its offices, data centers and other points of presence or commerce. WANs also let the enterprise enjoy the additional benefits like utilizing the extra bandwidth available for VoIP. The SBI Connect network implemented by the Datacraft for the SBI Group lets SBI switch to VoIP for calls between all their branches rather than go through the PSTN network. This reduces the cost of operations on non-IT areas (like communications).

Other favorites include managed voice services where an MSP provides the enterprise with VoIP along with security features, redundancy and quality of services. ISPs in India are providing such services on a pay-per-use model. Similarly, rather than setting up your own infrastructure for VPN services, an MSP can provide you connection end-points while managing the 'how' of it transparently. Common SLA parameters include round-trip times, supported protocols, security, redundancy and reporting.

Managed Applications
This is not about managing updates and patches. We are referring to the management of enterprise/business applications. The new model seems to be SaaS (Software as a Service) where the application is hosted with an ASP (Application Service Provider). In such cases, the background of the application, its upgrades, maintenance and so on, is completely transparent to the user enterprise. The most successful player in this field is the CRM service provider: SalesForce.com. SalesForce.com have evolved a partnership model where partner organizations like TCS, Wipro and Satyam (in India) provide customized versions of the application to their customers. These customizations can range from simple style sheets and skinning to complete reconfiguration of the modules involved to different conditions and customizations for particular industries.

Not only do these MASP (Managed Application Service Providers) manage their own applications, but some of them like HP and IBM can also manage your SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft applications. Here, the application consultant (MASP) works with you on understanding your problems and demands of the software and tries to solve them by releasing custom modules and patches. MSPs can pull in their expertise and manpower from similar other projects and come out with even their own releases of the application that better suits your need.

Page(s)   1