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Executive Summary

This report is designed to help IT organizations more effectively plan for the adoption of solutions that

can help bring together a unified view of IT service performance as it impacts business outcomes. The

very term, “Business Service Management” (BSM) is far from linear in meaning, and it’s safe to say that

each of the fourteen vendors here represents a unique design point, each of which is relevant in its own

way to supporting BSM requirements.

The report will nonetheless show how different vendors cluster across different types of functionality

such as “platform,” “overlay,” “monitoring suite,” and other categories relevant to the many constitu-

encies that require insights into IT services from both a performance and business impact perspective.

Far more important than scores, or even, strictly speaking, visual clusters, is understanding the design

points of the individual vendors themselves and how they relate to your requirements in pursuing a

more cohesive way to manage and align your most critical business services.

In many respects the vendors included here represent a BSM Service Impact elite. The intensive work

required to complete Enterprise Management Associates’ uniquely granular assessment was in itself

forbidding enough to weed out more casual players. None of the vendors here is a bad choice for

BSM, and depending on your priorities, any one of them might turn out to be the right place for you to

start. At a minimum, you should be able to develop an effective short list based on targeted priorities,

budget, existing investments, maturity level and other specifics.

Introduction and Methodology

To do this Radar Report, EMA worked extensively with fourteen vendors who were largely self-

selecting in representing what might be called a “BSM elite.” These vendors are: AccelOps, ASG,

CA Technologies, Compuware, FireScope, HP, IBM, Interlink, Netuitive, Novell, OPNET, OpTier,

Prelert and Zyrion.1 As such, they include platforms, mid-sized vendors, and smaller vendors,

including new and emerging innovators.

Enterprise Management Associates’ extensive questionnaire addressed details of architecture, function-

ality, deployment, administration, vendor viability and costs. EMA supplemented each questionnaire

with ongoing dialog, demos and reviews to ensure that vendor positioning was represented honestly

and clearly. EMA also interviewed upwards of 27 customer deployments in order to validate vendor

dialogs. While all vendors provided some access to their customers (access ranged from one to three

customers), ready customer availability was viewed as a mildly favorable indicator in assessing and

validating vendor portfolios.

Finally, EMA continued to leverage its extensive and ongoing industry dialogs in research and consulting

to provide a balanced and fair set of insights regarding each vendor’s strengths and limitations.

The EMA RADAR

EMA has produced a report specially targeted at leveraging Radar reports in general: “How to Use the

EMA Radar Report,” EMA, April, 2010. The goal is to provide a graphical, clear way of understanding

how vendors cluster in a given market, along with some more in-depth discussion of their individual

design points. In all fairness, BSM Service Impact is in itself a more heterogeneous market than most,

and so design points are at least as important as apparent “rankings” in understanding how and where

to invest in a solution appropriate for you.

EMA Radar™ For Business Service Management (BSM): Service Impact Q3 2010

BMC Software declined to participate in this report.

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Figure 1: The EMA Radar is optimized to show how vendor solutions cluster in terms of two primary axes: Vendor Strength

(architecture, integration, functionality) and Cost Efficiency (Ease of administration, deployment, customer support, cost advantage)

Quoting from How to Use the EMA Radar Report, “No analysis of this type can tell you which vendor

is best for you. The data collected for an EMA Radar Report can certainly be used to make that deter-

mination, but it must be applied to the specifics of your current environment, level of maturity, and

goals and priorities. Since the authors of any given Radar Report do not have your unique specifics,

the Radar Report can only be a starting place and a guideline. It can inform you of the market and

short-cut your process to developing a short list.”

Functionality

Architecture &

Deployment &

Integration

Administration

Vendor Strength

Cost Advantage

Functionality

Architecture &

Integration

Vendor Strength

Cost Advantage

Deployment &

Administration

Strong Product – Higher Price

Specialized Product – Low Cost

Figure 2: Radars for each vendor are included in the full report and show a five axis

contrast between the average profile and the vendor in question

EMA Radar™ For Business Service Management (BSM): Service Impact Q3 2010

Market Credibility

Figure 3: BSM Service Impact Assessment

What is BSM Service Impact?

BSM Service Impact is one of three overall BSM market categories that EMA will over time pursue as

separate radars in and of themselves. The other two are BSM Financial Optimization – with a focus on

the dollars-and-cents side of service management and portfolio planning, and Lifecycle BSM – with a

focus on automation.

All three BSM markets were first defined in the report: Business Service Management: A Model for Business-

Aligned Service Management in the 21st Century, EMA, November 2009. BSM Service Impact has its roots

in end-to-end service monitoring with well-defined business impact capabilities that often include, but

are not necessarily limited to Service Level Management (SLM).

According to the above report, BSM is defined explicitly as: “Optimizing IT processes and technologies to more

effectively manage, monitor, measure and govern IT from a holistic business contribution perspective in terms of costs,

value and competitiveness. Like SLM, BSM readiness can be directly tied to cross-domain organizational

maturity levels. In addition, BSM has a distinctive emphasis on understanding application-to-infra-

structure interdependencies, as well as a growing requirement to assimilate the impacts of change

on service performance. BSM goes beyond SLM in requiring more focused attention to evaluating

how services actually do contribute to the business, and how IT can be optimized from a cost/value

perspective to support business and organizational objectives.”

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We will quote from the How to Use the EMA Radar Report at targeted intervals throughout this Radar to

help you better interpret both graphics and analyses.

SUB-CATEGORIES

Ease of Deployment

Support & Services

Ease of Administration

Licensing Model

Price

Architecture

Integration & Interoperability

Features

Ease of Use

Vision

Financial Strength

PROFILE SCORES

Deployment & Admin

EMA RADAR SCORES

Deployment Cost Efficiency

Cost Advantage

Architecture & Integration

Product Strength

Functionality

Vendor Strength

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The BSM Service Impact Model

The BSM Service Impact marketplace is currently at a turning point in which new technologies for

capturing service interdependencies are being adopted more aggressively and by more vendors than ever

before. In the majority of cases, these center on more innovative approaches to assimilating information,

analyzing information, and modeling information so that the logical and physical implications of service

performance can be more readily understood. This in turn leads to more informed decision making, and

in some cases supports far more advanced uses for automation than was possible in the past.

In order to understand vendor placement in this report, it’s important to understand the model applied

to the very heterogeneous group of vendors represented here for purposes of evaluation. This ideal

BSM Service Impact model has the following characteristics:

• It is a top-down capability for assimilating, analyzing, and presenting information from

multiple sources

• It is designed to support multiple roles inside and outside of IT for critical decision making

and purposes of automation

• It can capture business as well as performance information and correlate across the two

both in real time and historically in order to optimize business impact in terms of ongoing

performance and in terms of long-term planning

• It provides unique capabilities for reconciling information from multiple sources, including

from multiple brands of management tools

• It captures, reconciles and correlates cross-domain interdependencies impacting

business service performance

• It can monitor and assimilate critical metrics regarding user experience as key indicator

of business impact through its own and/or third-party monitoring capabilities

• It can at minimum alert to issues regarding SLA commitments and penalties

• It can assimilate the impact of configuration and other planned and unplanned changes

on service performance for diagnostics and/or in order to validate that changes made are

non-disruptive to business services

• It integrates with capabilities for automation such as closed-loop incident management

and problem resolution, as well as configuration changes required for automated

remediation

• It integrates with financial planning systems, security management systems, compliance-

related policies, and other capabilities for governance, risk mitigation and financial

optimization

It should be stressed that this “ideal model” does not specify that the monitoring is done through the vendor’s own capabilities.

This is very important in understanding positioning in this EMA Radar Report. Pure play monitoring

tools were only included if they had unique business impact capabilities. Conversely, solutions that were

primarily designed to assimilate other vendor monitoring systems were given equal footing with those

solutions that had significant amount of monitoring capabilities within their own portfolios.

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The reason for this is simple. The industry has long ago moved past a position of buying every-

thing from a single vendor. CMDB deployments as they mature into more federated Configuration

Management Systems (CMSs) are examples of this active interest in multi-brand reconciliation, and as

such they are directly relevant to many BSM Service Impact architectures reflected here.

Most BSM Service Impact initiatives are also primarily venues for assimilating a wide variety of

monitoring and analytic capabilities, and in fact may reasonably combine multiple vendors represented

here. This is absolutely as it should be. Just as with a CMDB/CMS investment, if you sense that the

vendor you’re working with is trying to drag you back to a late 1990s framework mindset, it’s time to

ditch them and move forward into the 21st Century with a growing focus on choice, reconciliation, and

metadata (modeling) to enable cohesion and automation.

• Support for service monitoring from a cross-domain perspective

• Reconcile information from multiple sources

• Provide some insights into user experience

• Automate linkages between IT service performance and SLA or other business outcomes

• Capture application/infrastructure interdependencies

• Support some level of policy-driven automation

• Support multiple roles across IT and the business

Figure 4: The EMA BSM Service Impact Model led to the following minimal criteria for inclusion.

Criteria for Inclusion

The model listed above is ideal. No single vendor answered all the criteria. However, to be included all

vendors had to support the following minimal requirements:

• Support service monitoring from a cross domain perspective either through their own

tools and/or reconciled tools from third-party brands

• Either import and reconcile information from multiple sources, and/or export to third-

party sources with a clear and defined role in BSM Service Impact (e.g., best available

transaction monitoring system)

• Provide some insights into user experience as one criteria for evaluating service

performance either through their own monitoring and/or reconciled third-party solutions

• Automate linkages between IT service performance (through their own or reconciled

sources from third-party vendors) and business outcomes, such as SLA violations,

business process impacts, direct revenue impacts, and other business activity-related

impacts

• Capture some level of interdependencies between IT applications and infrastructure,

whether for in-depth configuration or for more real-time application flows, or at minimum

for cross-domain diagnostic purposes

• Support some level of policy-driven automation for aligning service monitoring with active

outcomes in terms of remediation

• Support multiple roles across IT, and ideally between IT and business constituencies

through dashboards and analytics

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The Overall State of the BSM Service Impact Market

Having stated the overall BSM Service Impact model, it’s worth looking at how the industry as a whole

stacks up in Q2, 2010 to these requirements:

Top-down capability for assimilating, analyzing, and presenting information from multiple

sources

The industry is moving towards this, but with something of a limp. Some vendors have had a long

history focused around this design point, such as Novell (once Managed Objects), Interlink and ASG;

however, others are moving towards this fairly aggressively, including CA Technologies, HP, IBM and

Compuware, as platforms. Not all the platform announcements were complete in time for this EMA

Radar Report, but all were at minimum committed. CMDB or CMS foundations can play a strong

role, especially as they evolve towards more real-time service modeling systems which are designed

to support the equivalent of a performance management database alongside a CMDB. Other vendors with

roots in a strong mid-market focus are FireScope, in particular, and Zyrion and AccelOps, where

assimilation is more targeted at infrastructure and applications.

Provide unique capabilities for reconciling information from multiple sources, including from

multiple brands of management tools

Overall, this is an area of active growth. The advent, in 2010, of significant commitments to support

a “metadata” or modeled approach to reconciling information from various management sources,

including third-party, is encouraging. But there is still a long way to go. Platforms categorically start

with tools within their own portfolio. And standards for assimilating information, such as the CMDBf,

are at best emerging and incomplete. But there is clear momentum here across the broader industry,

and new software designs utilizing Web Services promise to help make this a trend to watch with

real forward progress. Analytics also plays a role here. Improvements in cross-domain event consoli-

dation, and advanced heuristics such as those in Netuitive and Prelert, are making heterogeneous data

sources far more palpably accessible than ever before. Finally, CMDB, related technologies, as well

as discovery reconciliation capabilities, including application dependency mapping solutions, are all

contributive here.

Capture, reconcile and correlate cross-domain interdependencies impacting business service

performance

Here the industry is advancing in full stride and advanced analytics is key. In platforms, these may

take the form of “performance management databases” looking at performance or time series infor-

mation, or event-management-centric integrations, or self-learning heuristics as mentioned regarding

Prelert and Netuitive. OPNET from an overall operations perspective, and OpTier from a trans-

action-centric perspective are also worth mentioning. Zyrion’s container model is very attractive here,

and bodes well for easy extensions in linking these interdependencies with specific SLM and other

business outcomes.

Assimilate the impact of configuration and other planned and unplanned changes on service

performance for diagnostics and/or in order to validate that changes made are non-disruptive

to business services

This area is an active work in progress. All major platforms with CMDB/CMS investments are providing

enhanced metadata capabilities to link service performance to change and configuration impacts, and

ASG, Novell and Interlink have well thought-out capabilities for doing this as well. OPNET has a long

established footprint in this, and OpTier is increasingly looking to link service impact into its trans-

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action-centric model of service performance. Advanced analytics provide a less topologically-centric

slant, but can also provide insights—including those from Netuitive and Prelert.

Integrates with capabilities for automation such as closed-loop incident management and

problem resolution, as well as configuration changes required for automated remediation

One of the better reasons to invest in a major platform vendor is integrated automation. While this

research didn’t give credit for actually providing the automation technologies directly, for now, the most

complete automation integration comes, not surprisingly, from platform vendors. However, this is not

to say that other solutions cannot accommodate policies to support automation in a variety of ways,

and moreover, you can expect these “handshakes” to grow significantly in depth and breadth in the

coming years.

Monitor and assimilate critical metrics regarding user experience as key indicator of business

impact through its own and/or third-party monitoring capabilities

User Experience and QoE have been areas of active research within EMA for years. EMA currently

offers both a Solution Center and several reports detailing user experience requirements and market

trends. The industry as a whole is clearly coming to realize that user experience is one of the “ultimate”

metrics for assessing how IT services effectively, or ineffectively, impact user performance. One of

the most positive industry trends, in fact, is that an actual majority of vendors included in this report

indicated that they were automating around QoE as a departure point for service impact prioritization

and triage. Although there was no separate QoE award given out, industry leaders are Compuware,

OPNET, OpTier, HP and CA Technologies.

At minimum alert to issues regarding SLA commitments and penalties

Service Level Agreement (SLA) contract management, and Service Level Management (SLM) are

mainstays for BSM Service Impact, and almost all the vendors in this EMA Radar Report had fairly

well developed capabilities to at least alert on SLM violations. CA Technologies, with its acquisition

of Oblicore, has the most complete capability for actively linking SLA contract management to SLM

performance and violations.

Capture business as well as performance information and correlate across the two both in real

time and historically in order to optimize business impact in terms of ongoing performance

and long-term planning

This was probably the most disappointing area in the EMA Radar research. The same vendors

supporting multiple roles typically have some level of business correlation. IBM’s focus on extending

service management to support business infrastructure and business performance requirements gives it

a unique position and advantage here. HP also has strong capabilities for business process integrations,

including some actual deployments, but these are done reaching beyond HP’s BSM dashboard. Once

again, market pressures for other, more tactical capabilities tend to push these requirements further

down on the list than ideally they should be. But as IT organizations mature, correlating business and

IT outcomes will become an increasingly sought after capability.

Integrates with financial planning systems, security management systems, compliance-related

policies, and other capabilities for governance, risk mitigation and financial optimization

This is another largely disappointing area. Many platforms do have strong capabilities for financial

planning and optimization, but the integration with active service performance and ongoing business

impact remains primitive. Once again, this is partly a statement about how IT organizations are currently

organized, and how most IT executives think. The fact that all IT financial investments should directly

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enable service optimization in all respects is understood by many IT executives, but active execution

within this area still remains ahead of industry. Cloud services and the demand to optimize both value

and cost in near real-time fashion will be a catalyst to accelerate this trend, as will other requirements

for more dynamic governance, compliance and risk mitigation. In the area of security, which was

admittedly not a major focus area in this report, AccelOps offers one of the more aggressive answers

in integrated security and service performance management.

Support multiple roles inside and outside of IT for critical decision making and purposes of

automation

While many vendors will check off a long list of roles supported, actual forethought to support

individualized role requirements still has a long way to go. For the most part, BSM Service Impact

solutions are targeted at operations and applications management. This is partly market-driven, as most

IT organizations are not yet optimized for business impact support. Novell, Interlink, IBM, ASG, and

to some extent Compuware, OpTier and Netuitive are beginning to flesh out a wider variety of role

capabilities beyond Operations in their BSM Service Impact directions.

A Few Other Trends Worth Mentioning

Vendor solutions often become clearer in context with how actual deployments occur. As mentioned

earlier, it was the rule, not the exception, to find solutions from multiple vendors represented within

the same BSM initiative, which needless to say shed added light and value in terms of how the solutions

both complement each other and compete against each other.

Four Tiers

One of the more interesting trends to see in actual deployments, and one that paralleled several vendor

initiatives, is what I might call “four tiers” of bringing BSM service impact information together. This

occurred in multiple instances, albeit rarely at a point where all four tiers were fully assimilated and

integrated.

• Event tier: A unified and consolidated approach to event management was a mainstay.

• Metrics tier: A performance management tier was often in play in which time series information

was analyzed cohesively. This was often separate from the event system, although it may have

exported alerts into the event system.

• CMDB/CMS/ Service model: A logical modeling system that ideally included both a CMDB, or a

federated CMS and an application dependency mapping capability.

• An over arching dashboard that provided role-sensitive access to key BSM decision makers and

stakeholders.

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Figure 5: A look into the future? Here is a speculative drawing pieced together from both current vendor directions and actual IT

deployments. It’s one interpretation of what, in ITIL v3, is called a “Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). It is a logical, more

than architectural design optimized for flexibility, choice, and model-driven analysis and automation. In some environments, no doubt the

OMDB and PMDB will be combined into a single system. See Figure 6 for a more extended look at the service model in the center.

This sketch is not meant to be proscriptive so much as descriptive of some of the more advanced

BSM deployments interviewed. What it does call out is some of the key ingredients for bringing BSM

insights together. Exactly how these are architected and productized is a very individualized discussion,

at least for the foreseeable future.

Application Dependency Mapping Comes in Multiple Flavors

EMA is embarking on a Radar Report dedicated to application dependency mapping which will elucidate

these and other ideas in much more granularity. But in particular, BSM Service Impact vendors have

highlighted the difference between classic, configuration-management-centric application dependency

capabilities, and more real-time, or at least run-time systems targeted at application flows and/or actual

transactions. Some of these more real-time systems, such as those from OpTier and Compuware, are

already affiliating in some more advanced deployments with CMS linkages. Other more “real-time”

application dependency systems are offered in varying form factors from OPNET, Netuitive, Interlink,

and Novell. Platform vendors are similarly moving towards more real-time application flow insights,

typically leveraging capabilities such as HP’s Business Availability Center, and CA’s Spectrum Service

Assurance Manager and Wily dashboards.

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Service Modeling

Although this has already been mentioned, it is significant enough that it deserves its own space here.

To date, this is more a vendor direction than something made conspicuous through deployments,

but its implications are vast in terms of service management architectures, and as a corollary, service

management planning and implementations. The ability to provide a modeling technology with logical

and physical associations that can support a superset of services, service dependencies, service owners,

service performance and impact information, and business outcomes is going to become a visible, or

in some cases “under the covers” capability across many vendor solutions in 2010 and beyond.

Figure 6: The power of the Service Modeling in non-real-time and near-real-time as it relates to managing change,

diagnostics, service and business impact, and automation may be the single most dramatic force shaping the

BSM Service Impact marketplace over the next five years. Figure 6 provides examples of how a service model

might combine logical and physical associations not limited to performance or impact management.

IT adopters should view the model in Figure 6 as optimized for federation, not a single repository or

source, and view it as well as something to evolve to in phases. Vendors in BSM Service Impact should

ideally, however, be able to support or integrate with all these dimensions at least architecturally in their

modeling in the near future, even if their immediate solutions only support three or four “facets” of

the jewel.

Novell (Managed Objects) probably has the longest history with service modeling. But ASG and

Interlink are similarly strong and established in their metadata-centric capabilities for enabling service

monitoring, triggering automation and supporting multiple roles. CA Technologies, HP and IBM are

all actively expanding the metadata foundations for what might be described in ITIL v3 as a Service

Knowledge Management System, and CA Technologies has incorporated metadata links in its Spectrum

Service Assurance Manager since mid-2009. How much visibility this will get, however, will depend on

each vendor’s willingness to present BSM as an architecture, which it truly is, versus simply a product/

packaging discussion, which it fundamentally is not.

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Expectations for BSM Service Impact Adoption

Most of the attention here has been on architecture and functionality. A word or two should be

spent on administrative and deployment expectations as in the EMA Radars; cost, administration, and

deployment issues are given equal weight with function and design.

A lot of what makes sense for you will depend both on your immediate objectives, as well as where you

are in terms of existing management investments. If you are an enterprise, you probably have plenty

of monitoring tools and you’ll need to invest in the optimal solution for reconciling them and making

them consistent with business impact requirements. If you are a smaller business, you may need more

of a one-size-fits-all capability. And if you have unique priorities, such as transaction management, or

an operations-centric approach to BSM, or BSM-related diagnostics, or cross-IT/business analytics,

you will have a different departure point with a differing outcome in terms of technology selection.

Similarly, BSM-related services can be focused narrowly on deployment, or more broadly on areas such

as optimizing BSM for change impact, or for business impact, or user experience management. Given

this diversity, there is no set winner or loser in this report. Each vendor here is worthy of a first choice

for initiating or forwarding a BSM initiative depending on priority, readiness, and purpose.

Platforms, Overlays and Monitoring Suites

Vendor functionality in this BSM Service Impact Radar Report tends to group into three separate

categories:

• Platforms – overall solution sets designed for complete BSM, not just BSM Service Impact

solutions.

• Overlays – capabilities targeted at assimilating and reconciling BSM Service Impact information

from multiple sources, including multiple brands.

• Monitoring Suites – monitoring capabilities optimized to provide cross-domain service impact

information.

One could argue that this might divide the report into three separate Radar Reports, except that all

vendors represented here have some functionality in two or sometimes three of these areas. Most overlay

solutions, such as Novell and Interlink, have some unique capabilities for monitoring as well as some

broader platform-like capabilities. Most monitoring suites here, such as Netuitive and Compuware,

have capabilities for assimilating information from multiple sources and function in that respect as

overlays. And, significantly, all platform vendors in 2010 are embarking on architectural transforma-

tions that support more of an overlay role across brands, albeit some with more enthusiasm than others

in embracing multi-brand support.

From a BSM adoption planning perspective, this means that you need to optimize value based on your

own adoption requirements. If you have many heterogeneous monitoring solutions and a mix of other

investments, a focus on overlay functionality is optimal. If you need to establish core BSM monitoring

over point solutions, monitoring suites or platform investments may be the way to go. And if you have

strong ITSM initiatives with a clear platform centricity, extending that investment through your existing

platform vendor (and there are seven vendors in this list that might qualify as a least in part “platform-

enabling”) will most likely be your most effective path forward.

In many environments, EMA has seen effective combinations of all three types of functionality for

a total BSM solution, as monitoring, CMDB support and analytics are built up through a variety of

platform and monitoring choices, with a reconciled service impact overlay provided by yet another

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vendor choice. This flexibility has a lot of advantages, but of course can create unwanted levels of

complexity in terms of vendor management and support.

As the BSM Service Impact market matures, EMA expects to see more effective means of consoli-

dation and reconciliation—ultimately along the lines of the overlay model—which will allow for a more

cohesive way to integrate, reconcile, analyze and enable automation across multiple brand choices.

Perhaps the single most promising trend in this respect is the advent of the equivalent of a “universal

service model,” which is poised to become the logical, metadata-centric heart of just such a system.

Since all vendors here are in some respects mixes of these categories, look in the individual vendor

profiles to gauge each vendor’s strengths in each category.

BSM Service Impact Methodology for Evaluation

In the EMA research report, Business Service Management: A Model for Business-Aligned Service Management in

the 21st Century, EMA, November 2009, EMA divided BSM into five overarching areas:

BSM Service Impact: These vendors have their deepest roots in end-to-end service monitoring with

strong business impact analysis capabilities that include but are not usually limited to SLM. Strengths

in user experience management, or application-to-infrastructure interdependencies, are also often

present. In addition to platforms, vendors in this category may range in size from larger vendors such

as ASG, Compuware, Novell (Managed Objects), to smaller innovators such as, Zyrion and AccelOps,

just to name a few.

BSM Financial Optimization: These vendors focus on the financial side of BSM, and are therefore

leaders in the EMA vision of “Next-Generation Asset Management (NGAM)” (See Next-Generation

Asset Management: a Service-Centric Model for IT Financial Optimization, EMA, November, 2009). This

requires taking a service-centric model for asset and financial planning in which assets, including vendor

services, opex and capex investments, are viewed as performing contributors to critical IT/business

services. Platforms are dominant in this group, but there are also smaller innovators such as Digital

Fuel, and SaaS capabilities such as Apptio.

Lifecycle BSM: The BSM model wouldn’t be complete without a strong focus on lifecycle issues, in

particular those targeted at configuration and change and associated requirements for “continuous

service improvement.” As a part of these, CMDB/CMS, configuration and change management, and

service desk capabilities to enforce workflow, governance, and service provisioning (often via service

catalogs) and service lifecycle management are fundamental building blocks. Automation in all of its

aspect is also central for Lifecycle. This includes workflow (human-to-human automation), configu-

ration management (human-to-machine automation) and many elements of Data Center automation,

such as job scheduling (machine-to-machine automation). From an NGAM perspective, these vendors

may also seek to combine IT Asset Management with IT Service Management at the service desk level.

Once again, platforms are major players here, as are some service desk vendors and other vendors able

to combine change, configuration, and service management from a lifecycle perspective.

Ecosystem-centric BSM: Internet businesses have created new models of interdependencies that

require a strong balance of monitoring solutions inside and outside the firewall. These models, including

supply chains and partner relationships, as well as Cloud computing and other service provider relation-

ships, however, are no longer limited to strictly Internet commerce, even if they remain centered in

Web-based applications. Managing a community of interdependent partners, suppliers and service

providers represents new terrain for BSM, and suggests a critical new area for innovation.

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OSS/BSS-centric BSM: There is a whole area of network-centric services, such as telephony,

including, of course, VoIP, video on demand, CDN networks, Internet television, teleconferencing,

and basic infrastructure support for wireless-mobility that require their own unique technology sets for

BSM. The vendors here cross a wide variety of lineages and are too numerous to mention even by way

of example. These are not at present a focus for EMA.

A Methodology Defined by Problem Set:

In the end, fourteen vendors were both selected by EMA and chose to participate in the rigorous evalu-

ations associated with BSM Service Impact. These vendors are: AccelOps, ASG, CA Technologies,

Compuware, FireScope, HP, IBM interlink Netuitive, Novell, OPNET, OpTier, Prelert and Zyrion.

These vendors are heterogeneous in design and market, but are all in various ways optimized to address

the problem set relevant to BSM Service Impact.

To understand the problem set best, readers should try to separate themselves from traditional market

definitions and cast themselves as IT executives out to face this particular challenge: “I have multiple

monitoring tools and a siloed way of working to manage services. Moreover, I don’t have good, cohesive information

relevant to how those services are impacting actual business outcomes. I need a solution that can:”

• Integrate, assimilate and reconcile some of the monitoring tools I have today into a more coherent service model.

• Provide some strong insights into actual application flows and transactions as they impact business outcomes.

• Support and enhance my ability to track user experience management.

• Assimilate my most critical business data for real-time impact analysis.

• Support and help me to upgrade my current service level management and SLA requirements.

• Integrate with my investments in automation to provide more automated reviews, diagnosis and remediation.

• Provide me with historical data to help me to improve trending and governance for optimizing my IT planning and

investments.

• Support not only multiple roles across my operations team and service desk for triage and diagnostics, but also

provide relevant and timely information to my business clients and my executive staff.

• Support a phased approach so that I can achieve some quick-win value in initial phases and build from there.

This of course is an ideal scenario. Not all the vendors in this report can do all of these things – but all

of them can support most of these things, and Value Leaders can to some degree deliver on all these

requirements. From a functional perspective, criteria were targeted in this way:

• Successful assimilation of multiple monitoring sources was viewed as more important than having

complete monitoring suites, especially at the infrastructure (network/systems) level.

• However, having some monitoring support for user experience and/or application flows was

viewed as a clear plus.

• Having a CMDB was not a direct criterion. Many adopters in the BSM Service Impact space

already have a CMDB, or at least a CMDB initiative underway. Reconciling multiple sources to a

service model of some kind was, on the other hand, viewed as core, and being able to participate

in and share information across a CMDB System or CMS was also valued strongly.

EMA Radar™ For Business Service Management (BSM): Service Impact Q3 2010

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Cost, Deployment, Administrative Overhead

If functionality could be assessed fairly directly in dialog with each vendor, assessing how each played

to the above scenario in terms of cost/deployment, administrative overhead – the “Cost Advantage”

axis on the Bubble Chart – was more elusive. EMA did 27 customer interviews to support both

function and cost perspectives, and while the interviews provided significant insights in both areas,

they became essential for looking at the cost/advantage arena.

Moreover, if a variety of design points was, as a visible entity, conspicuous in assessing each vendor

in terms of functionality, its impact on cost and deployment issues was far less overt and nonetheless

impactful. For instance, some vendors had few monitoring tools but were very good at assimilation and

reconciliation, whereas others built up from a monitoring base with obviously different cost founda-

tions associated with them.

General Case

In order to be as fair as possible to each vendor, and as helpful as possible the IT adopter, EMA had

to create a general case that mapped across all design points – some albeit with more of a fit than

others.

1. Capabilities for reconciliation, assimilation and sharing information and service modeling were

included. Strictly CMDB-specific costs were not. As these were typically separate initiatives,

this separation was often easier to gauge through actual deployments than through product

packaging.

2. Support for more real-time insights into application flows and impact on infrastructure were

considered in costs. Classic, configuration-centric application dependency mapping was not.

When a vendor had no capabilities of its own in application transaction monitoring and

impact, a modest cost adjustment was made – a kind of “tax.”

3. Vendor-provided user experience management was included in costs. Once again, if none was

available from the vendor, an upgrade “tax” was incurred for cost of deployment.

4. Core infrastructure monitoring capabilities were not included in any cost assessments, but

could add value.

5. The ability to assimilate business information was given extra value and ranked highly in

functionality, but only factored into costs when it was available. The capabilities to collect

business data as separate from the BSM Service Impact software were not factored in as costs,

but only as values.

6. Support for SLA and SLM management was factored in as costs, and all vendors supported

this.

7. Integration with automation for diagnostics was factored into costs and value directly. Integrated

workflow, configuration management, closed-loop incident and problem management, run

book or IT Process Automation, were not factored in as additional costs, but added to ranking

in value when the vendor provided it directly. Integration capabilities for the above, in so far

as they could be itemized, were included in costs.

8. Trending for optimization and governance was included in costs and value directly.

9. Role support was included in costs and value directly.

EMA Radar™ For Business Service Management (BSM): Service Impact Q3 2010

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Additional Cost criteria

Since this problem set was defined in context with an IT requirement versus a tidily defined market

category, it seemed only fitting to also factor in the following into the costs.

• Maintenance costs

• Deployment and other basic services costs/values

• Consulting costs for more advanced services (Cost/and value. How much were these needed?

How much were they a competitive advantage? How much was their omission a deficit to the

success of the deployment?)

• Responsiveness of the vendor to customer issues

• Deployability of the software

• Stability of the software

• Level of integration effective within the vendor’s own portfolio

• Level of integration effective across a multi-brand environment

• Flexibility of packaging to support fast initial footprints for quick wins (e.g., SaaS, appliance

packaging)

• Flexibility of the design to support phased approaches for phased value

• Administrative overhead associated with the deployment

• Cultural readiness of the vendor to focus on the problem at hand. For instance, as a negative

example, trying to push the IT buyer into a cut and replace mode with existing investments in

systems or network monitoring tools versus partnering to support a truly assimilative service

impact initiative.

EMA Radar™ For Business Service Management (BSM): Service Impact Q3 2010

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