BMC Atrium and Remedy ITSM 7.5 provide holistic BSM and add change impact management

BMC sees its new
Atrium 7.5, due for official launch next month, as the platform for delivering
business service management (BSM) going forward. Alongside this is the important
but hard to do addition of applying ‘What-If’ testing of infrastructure changes
before they are actually deployed.

One of the
problems for a large infrastructure management vendor is the sheer volume of
individual products it offers for specific IT infrastructure tasks, with
further third party products typically also deployed within any organisation it
is supplying. To provide a business service, a series of these products may
need to be brought together and orchestrated to run in a particular way.

Atrium, as the
name suggests, provides a central area for integrating all the many information
and functionality sources using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to deliver
BSM. This should allow customers to achieve substantial improvements in cost,
efficiency and speed of deployment.

Atrium’s core
services include: a service catalogue, impact analysis, reconciliation and
normalisation engines, which are applied to discovered configuration items (CIs),
and dynamic service modelling. It provides applications for: discovery, analytics,
service level management, the Atrium Orchestrator to order the tasks and
dashboards to provide visual management.

For BMC the
configuration management database (CMDB) has become the core equipment data
repository and is core to Atrium therefore; BMC is the market leader in this approach
(as most have ‘bolted-on’ the ITIL-championed CMDB which means it gets updated
after the fact).

Matthieu
Laurenceau, BMC’s Lead Technical Marketing in EMEA told me: “We see the CMDB as
a reliable single source of truth on the infrastructure components”.

This leads us to
its Unified Service Model (USM) 7.5, the idea being to provide an integrated
approach for discussing, representing and measuring how services get provided
and consumed. This can help in reaching a point of being able to holistically view
the total cost of delivering services from a constantly updating service model.
Part of this is achieved by the Central Service Catalog (-ue for UK readers!)
which is supported by an extended data model. The dynamic service model is updated
based on queries and templates with cost tracking enabled by Atrium.

Laurenceau
explained that, with an SOA approach, there can be loosely-coupled product
integrations with web services located anywhere in the infrastructure, created
and collapsed without damaging the infrastructure but controlled via the
centralised UDDI web services registry.

By now it will be
becoming clear this is a comprehensive release and a single article could not
do it justice. However, I need to mention another key development. BMC’s Remedy
IT Service Management (ITSM) 7.5—which covers network incidents and problems,
changes, releases, assets and contracts—has been enhanced with decision
support, software licence management and pervasive service orientation changes,
to mention a few.

However, its most
important update is probably change impact management which includes a
‘What-If’ capability for planned changes, so that the effect of the change will
be ascertained before it is deployed in real life. The importance of this
capability to a large enterprise cannot be overstated since 60–80% of
infrastructure errors occur when changes are made.

Application
testing specialists may wonder why this approach is not standard in network management
systems, but it is very hard to simulate live operation—and the more so
because the exact make-up of the network and systems infrastructure is unclear
and often changing. This emphasises the need for a highly reliable and
up-to-the minute CMDB. In that regard, BMC has also included the capability to
automatically track changes when VMware’s VMotion moves a virtual machine.

Not that
everything is in the CMDB; Laurenceau told me that, for instance, capacity
management information is better held elsewhere. However, the company is a
driving force collaborating with others in the development of federated CMDB
(CMDBf) repositories and leveraging COSMOS open source work on certification. It
is leveraging ‘out-of-the-box’ JDBC adapters created by the community (for
example LDAP, SQL Server and SAP).

If this all sounds
very complex, that is because it is; but users will be spared most of this
complexity during implementation. For instance, a company may buy BMC
discovery, change management and asset management—but will get CMDB and other
needed elements as a matter of course as part of this. Laurenceau also
mentioned service management process modelling (SMPM); he described this as
“super-documentation” that helps in understanding how best practices are
actually enforced within the solution. This should significantly ease
management by visualising the infrastructure and dashboards for the CIOs.

There are many
more items I could have mentioned. For instance the service desk includes embedded
best practices with the software updated so that it removes a lot of mouse
clicks and automatically fills in entries. This, said Laurenceau, halved time
for most incidents and divided it by five for complex incidents.

So Atrium and
Remedy 7.5 are a big deal for the company. Despite the credit crunch and the
possibility that decisions to purchase will take longer, Laurenceau sees BMC’s
biggest 2009 challenge as “keeping up with the pace of delivery”. Apart from
existing user upgrades, companies are likely to come to BMC saying something
like: “Our budget has stagnated. Can you help us?”

If the response can be to
show how a rapid ROI can be achieved then there is no reason to doubt his
optimism.