ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®
Analyst Corner
February 2010 EMA Analyst's Corner:
Service-centric Asset Management: a Foundation for Automating Asset Lifecycle Management and Planning
Four years ago, EMA conceived Next-Generation Asset Management (NGAM) around the idea that IT is becoming more of a business over time as real business services and IT services become more closely intertwined. At the core, the NGAM vision is a simple one. IT services are its “products,” so all capex and opex assets associated with IT are investments made to support the creation, provisioning, management, optimization and retirement of those services.
NGAM was very much a vision four years ago, but today it is slowly becoming a reality. EMA is showing strong financial gains can be achieved through pragmatic adoption of NGAM technologies combined with realistic attention to cultural, communication and process issues.
Is there such a thing as an NGAM Market?
To define an “NGAM marketplace” in 2010 would be to create a fiction that currently doesn’t exist. Rather, NGAM is a landscape of many markets and technology, logically associated more in the way that species evolve in an ecosystem than in the way an engineer/philosopher might create a Platonically perfect set of categories from scratch.
EMA views the NGAM technology landscape in two complementary buckets: Foundations and a category called Analytics, Optimization and Business Planning.
EMA is doing a complete mapping of the NGAM marketplace in a free Webinar on March 2 entitled How Asset and Service Management Integration can Accelerate Cost Savings and Improve Business Alignment, but to give you an idea of what we’ll be covering – including relevant vendors – here are some of the more important NGAM categories.
The Foundations
> Inventory and discovery: Inventory and discovery combines multiple markets only some of which are directly linked in the minds of most in the industry with asset management.
> Procurement and contract management: This is at the core of traditional Asset Management and one of the places that some organizations are looking to unify their asset management strategy across IT domains and, in some cases. between IT and the enterprise.
> SW license management: One of the fastest ways to achieve ROI in an asset management deployment is to ensure that SW Licenses are both utilized and compliant with provider requirements.
> Change and configuration management: Change and configuration is central to asset lifecycle management. The growing importance of configuration management has been one of the most transformative factors in supporting IT’s growth and maturity in the last several years.
> CMDB/CMS: A CMS can provide a more reconciled, automated and more easily analyzed approach to managing assets in support of IT services. In more mature IT environments, it can become the very heart of service-centric asset management automation.
Analytics, Optimization and Business Planning
> Chargeback, demand management and customer usage analysis: While traditionally linked – in thought and definition – to bill generation for Lines of Business, some of the products in this market can also support an understanding of service value from a demand perspective and infrastructure optimization from a usage perspective. This will become increasingly important with the rise in virtualized infrastructures and Cloud computing services.
> Capacity management and infrastructure optimization: Capacity management, as separate from traditional performance management, is still a largely under-addressed area with a scattered set of categories and markets. These include a handful of vendors with capacity-oriented if/then analytics, facilities planning vendors, and Green IT vendors, among others.
> Service catalog and service portfolio management: The service catalog can become an actionable contributor to IT efficiencies by automating request fulfillment and approvals, tracking demand and financial information, as well as other relevant parameters.
> Financial planning, risk management and advanced analytics: This is one of the most significant areas for potential growth in NGAM and complementary to more bottoms-up initiatives, such as CMS-driven capabilities for assimilating and reconciling service-to-infrastructure interdependencies.
Again, this list is not complete, but should give you a feel for the pieces of the NGAM mosaic and its components.
Do join us on March 2 for the How Asset and Service Management Integration can Accelerate Cost Savings and Improve Business Alignment Webinar for a more complete discussion of what technologies and vendors are most relevant to your issues, as well as how to pragmatically get started in an NGAM direction with quick tactical/ financial gains.
