IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING

Executive Summary

IT services and the hardware and software infrastructure supporting them have become increasingly

critical to enterprises and mid-tier businesses – as they are producing competitive advantages in pro-

ductivity, revenue generation, and enabling new, more effective business models. At the same time, cost

pressures from macro-economic factors are constraining IT budgets and IT resources dramatically.

Clearly then, proceeding with traditional approaches to managing and optimizing infrastructure, soft-

ware and operational assets and services can’t answer all the demands of this brave new world.

As a result, there has never been a better time for new and innovative technology solutions to help

enable more effective ways for communicating, monitoring and managing IT and business infrastruc-

ture, hardware and software investments.

This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) report looks at some of the market

and technology factors surrounding these conditions in more detail. It then introduces BDNA’s IT

Genome Center, which provides a unique, innovative and pragmatic way to support IT in the multi-

faceted decision making so central to adapting to these changing conditions.

BDNA’s IT Genome Center—provides a unique, innovative and pragmatic way to support

IT in the multi-faceted decision making so central to adapting to these changing conditions.

Marketplace Trends

Organizations today are looking beyond traditional IT Asset Management to combine it with IT finan-

cial planning and service management to create a much more holistic approach to optimizing IT invest-

ments, in context with the service-related values that IT delivers to the business. As such, a patchwork

of fragmented domain-specific functions is moving towards a more unified and business aligned whole

(Figure 1).

How would you characterize your existing environment?

Asset management and service planning

are managed separately

Asset management and service planning

are managed together

Asset management and service planning

are managed separately today but will be

managed together in the future

Other (Please specify)

0%

37%

34%

29%

1%

5%

10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%

Column %

Figure 1: Data from “The Changing Face of Asset Management: Merging, Asset, Service and Financial

Management,” (EMA June, 2008) shows that sixty-three percent of respondents either plan, or are

already, combining their asset management and service management initiatives.

Optimizing Your IT Environment for Service Delivery: A Lifecycle Management Approach with BDNA’s IT Genome Center

©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING

In the research above, EMA learned that 29% of respondents are managing their assets across domains,

30% are fragmented in traditional silos, and 39% are divided between the data center and the NOC/

telco. However, dialogs and consulting reveal that these numbers, even in 2010, may be overly encour-

aging – as what respondents have indicated more often than not is intention or early phase initiatives

versus full-born organizational, technology and process integrations.

Organizations are looking beyond traditional IT Asset Management to

combine it with IT financial planning and service management to create

a much more holistic approach to optimizing IT investments.

Nevertheless, while there’s still a long way to go, the direction is clear: Many IT professionals are seek-

ing to go beyond understanding what hardware and software assets are deployed across the business,

which still remains a significant challenge in many environments. More advanced IT organizations are

linking that information to IT planning tools, Service Lifecycle, and other business applications to

more effectively optimize investments, service values, and business competitiveness.

There are a number of drivers for this, including:

• Increased need for business alignment between IT and the business it serves

• Changes driven by business conditions, such as mergers and acquisitions/expansions or downsizing,

which require an increased awareness of infrastructure, software and other assets

• The need to manage and optimize operational costs more effectively

• The need to optimize both traditional IT assets, as well as facilities, power and other concerns

regarding Green IT and energy efficiencies overall

• Increased frequency of change and the need to manage change more effectively – including

provisioning new application services, upgrading infrastructure, and managing software licenses

for compliance and cost optimization

• The move to virtualization and Cloud services, which is creating a renewed focus on infrastructure

awareness, including license compliance

• The ongoing need to step up to industry compliance requirements and manage security risks and

vulnerabilities

• The need for transparency to support ongoing governance and best practices

• The growing importance of understanding assets in context not only with costs but value and

relevance – including SLAs, usage, business impact, etc.

Optimizing Your IT Environment for Service Delivery: A Lifecycle Management Approach with BDNA’s IT Genome Center

©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING

Some Cost Management Priorities

Managing costs in the current economic environment is a clear and dominant priority. Some of the

areas getting top priority by IT organizations are:

• Management and maintenance costs (40%)

• S/W license costs and H/W asset costs (39%)

• Overall cost management (46%)

• Project management costs and compliance (about 46%)

• Security and compliance costs (49%)

• Incident management tracking of particular assets (30%)

Figure 2: Top cost priorities in IT (from “The Changing Face of Asset Management: Merging, Asset, Service and Financial Management”)

Other, service-related costs are also critical, such as Service Level Agreements, Lifecycle Asset

Management, and compliance related costs. More advanced technologies such as chargeback and usage

accountings scored low in 2008, but are coming back into prominence in research done in late 2009

focusing on the assimilation of Cloud Services and virtualization.

Green IT and Beyond

Virtualization and power management are central to Green IT initiatives. In 2007, the Environmental

Protection Agency released a study on the power utilization of all domestic U.S. datacenters and the

results were rather astonishing. The total amount of datacenter energy utilization doubled between

years 2000 and 2006 to a total of 61 billion kilowatt-hours of power, which is about 1.5% of all U.S.

electricity consumption. To put this in perspective, that’s almost twice as much power as consumed by

all the nation’s color televisions combined and more than half as much consumed by all U.S. household

lighting. Worse, if trends continue, there’s every indication that this power utilization will nearly double

by 2011, resulting in a whopping $7.4 billion dollars in annual electricity costs.

And datacenters are only the tip of the iceberg. A recent EMA survey has indicated that worksta-

tions, like desktops and laptops, account for roughly 90% of total business IT utilization. So clearly,

workstations account for a whole order of magnitude greater than data center systems for energy

requirements. Since power management of these systems is often left to the end user, businesses have

little, if any, control over their use.

Yet even these numbers reflect only a part of the overall challenge. IT organizations are increasingly

asked to manage and optimize facilities, including all infrastructure associated with housing IT devices,

as well as the business infrastructure itself in a growing number of cases. These may range from all the

facilities and utilities within a business, to transport fleets, to manufacturing lines, to in some cases even

power grids and urban transportation systems. The economies of consolidating this within a single,

well informed, and highly automated set of resources should be self evident. But to get there, most IT

organizations still have a long way to go to get their own houses in order.

Optimizing Your IT Environment for Service Delivery: A Lifecycle Management Approach with BDNA’s IT Genome Center

©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Page 3