Chris Boos on Automation

After reading about it on TechCrunch I just integrated Google Friend Connect onto 800080; font-family: Calibri;">www.hcboos.net. It might seem a little strange to add additional social web features to a blog – that is a social site itself – but I want to make it as easy as possible to give feedback, add comments and get together.

Google Socla Bar on this Site

After I spent this week entirely getting people together in actual meetings, I think all of us high tech “evangelists” can get great use out of these social features and we should really get down to using them.

If you want to register, just use the social bar at the bottom of the page.

IBM PULSE 2009 was a great conference and a lot of new ideas were planted in my head. If you read my last post you have seen, that the content of most speeches was following the common retro trend and got all of us back to the roots.

After the conference I had half a day to spend in Las Vegas and if you have followed my reports from last year´s PULSE in Orlando, you know what I was up to . I used the time to check out some of the fun rides in the city. There is no way around the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. Three Rides 300m above the city. Definitely the best view of the strip possible.

So first I went up on the free fall tower. Great, because you actually start out looking down and then get shot up into “nothingness”. Unfortunately there are no pictures of this little thrill. BUT after that I went completely insane. Stepping onto a merry-go-round (what a name for something the marketing people at Stratosphere call Insanity) that is put out over the edge and as it turns you are facing the ground – well you are looking down 300m at the ground. See the little video experience here.

After that I thought there would not be much more adrenaline to come. The last ride on the Stratosphere tower is called Scream. Riding in a floorless vehicle along a rail and then tipping straigt down facing the found. Well as in the Dueling Dragons in Orlando I had to sit in the first row. No problem here, there was no one else who had the guts to join me anyway. See another thrilling videl that really gets your thought back together.

I only wonder now, is it the screaming insanity of the rides, the strange weather or is it recession that made the place so empty? Whatever it was, riding there was great fun and I would suggest it to anyone who is in Las Vegas and not as much into gambling (personally I am too much into math to enjoy gambling all the time, but once in a while (read later post) it is fun).

IBM PULSE is definitely the event for ITSM. Compared to other major vendors IBM encourages critics to join in and really tries to get discussion going on this conference. This makes it an event I definitely left with a lot of lessons learned.

This said and me being an attendee of PULSE 2008 in Orlando, I want to share some personal insight comparing these two exceptional events. In 2009 the economic crises and its palpable and coming impact on the IT industry are definitely looming over the event and have influenced it quite a bit. The most obvious change is the choice in examples in ALL IBM and external keynotes. All the examples came from the industries we expect to be least influenced by the economic crises. I.e. case studies these days focus on utilities (especially energy and energy grid), food and medical services.

PULSE 2009 Magic on the Stage

The most stunning change however is the conference bringing IBM Tivoli back to its roots. The hot topic this year is dynamic infrastructure (nice article by Timothy Prickett Morgan). Even though this is a good marketing entry to get people interested in IBM´s approaches to cloud computing and most likely will positively influence sales of Tivoli Provisioning Manager TPM it also makes sure that even in keynotes talk about events, monitoring and system management are frequent and quite technical. Last year the hot topic was to hammer home the key drivers for modern ITSM solutions from an IBM point of view (visibility, control, automation) which was a fairly new and definitely innovative message. These are still around but now serve as a driver to promoting basic services. I, being a “fairly” technical person, enjoyed that shift in topic, because even though there is a lot of marketing and sales feeling around any conference of this kind, IBM PULSE 2009 managed to actually show most of the things speakers were on about rather than just brainwashing attendees to adopt new language and terminology.

Also coming from Germany, where serious issues concerning the job market are never addressed directly, I was positively surprised, that cost cutting, job loss and a growing competition between IT experts was directly addressed by keynote and session speakers. Actually discussing these topics with the affected people seems much less like sticking your head in the sand than anything that is going on back home.

PULSE 2009 Live Demo

Besides all the talk about events, event management, new versions and many many technical sessions for actual learning there were a lot of interesting announcements. Most of them went around the topic of cloud computing and/or dynamic infrastructure. For IBM the first step in cloud computing is mostly IT on demand (as John Willis and Michael Coté said in their first day wrap up video posted as a special edition of the “IT Management Podcast” that term was not bad either) and is now called dynamic infrastructure. I will come back to my interpretation of IBM´s positioning in the cloud market in a separate post shortly.

So the current situation brought forth some very honest words on the IT market, a lot of back to the roots talk about infrastructure, events, process management and managing your IT properly. Pulling the whole techie talk back up into an IT management and business perspective was quite hard for the keynote speakers. Luckily IBM has Doug McClure around to tie the whole technical perspective up to the business view not just on a tool level. Doug seemed to be a little torn on the possibility of actually getting BSM done in a large scale enterprise in the last couple of month and published quite a bit on BTM as an alternative – articles I really enjoyed, because they were really straight forward. But in his PULSE 2009 reviews (overall, day 1, day 2 and BSM special) he is back to connecting all the IT gadgets in ITSM to the real world of profit and service quality.

So my overall recap of IBM PULSE 2009 in the shadow of the economic crises is:

1.       Dynamic infrastructure can prevail as it really offers IT on demand and IBM is actually able to deliver and made that quite clear on the conference.

2.       The strategy is much back to the roots, talking a lot about system management, event consolidation and the like with BSM pulling these topics back onto a business level.

3.       IBM strategists are obviously very closely following economic development, which can be seen from all the examples picked from utilities, food and medical services.

4.       Automation is a key topic in all tracks (event consolidation, dynamic IT, service management, …) and getting rid of swivel chair interfaces via automation solutions is actually in the crosshairs now.

Talking about automation on the way to IBM PULSE 2009 got me some interesting insights. I did know that most people do not really feel comfortable, when a machine actually acts autonomically. But that most people would expect to actually get a tool that forces them to click though their whole IT infrastructure and application landscape in order to DO something was really astonishing to me.

Why? Well because we have been working so differently for many years now. Thus I feel obliged to give some examples of automating tasks in an environment like the one I have been writing about for almost a year now. Maybe some of the things you found quite interesting will become clearer after reading this practical example.

Ok, let us think you would want to automate the task of deleting a user across your IT landscape. A rule we have entered years ago and have been using ever since. In an automated environment like ours all you would have to do is set an „issue“ onto the automation engine bus that says „delete user XYZ‘. This issue will be set upon the graph of the IT dependency model and look for any node that has rules attached to it that know how to handle „something“ with the data „user“ and the action „delete“. For this issue the graph of the IT dependency model will reduce itself to these nodes that know how to handle it. The issue will then map out a road though the nodes –this is what the engine does and this is the real secret behind automation. Each node the issue visits will perform some action – in accordance with the rules – and will return some input to the engine. The engine can  make out whether it needs to add additional nodes onto the issue’s travel list, remove nodes – because some other action has already taken care of the demands of the issue requesting action, or whether the issue in resolved, because there are not more actions to be taken. If the latter is the case the engine will look for any other issue that may be able to use or issue’s data and if that isn‘t the case, dismiss the task as completed.

So what does this mean practically?

For every OS you have to write one action rule that specifies how to delete a user. For every kind of directory or IAM application you have running you will have to write a rule respectively. That‘s it! These are probably scripts you have anyway and you simply upload them into the engine with the rules. The engine will determine what nodes the rule should attach itself to and will execute the rule for any issue that seems suitable.

So compared to a system where you actually have to define what to do where before it will delete a user across your infrastructure this is remarkably simple. Not only the time for deleting a user will go down from 40 minutes to 1 as some other vendors say, but the time for installing this neat gadget will go down from 2 days to 0 because the rule is already there for most OS and IAM solutions. If you really want to add some exotic system, then you will probably need 10 mins to do so.

So the next logical step in automation is not just improving the tool that lets you execute some commands, maybe remotely or maybe with a good archive of scripts, but to have an intelligent tool that will actually work for you. You tell it the result you want, in this case remove user, and it will find out how to go about to achieve this result.

Deleting a user is a change and most likely an unplanned one as such. The same technology can also be applied when reacting to incidents, problems or user error reports. Then you can tell the engine that the desired end result is that you want the problem to go away. It will find out what to do where in your IT infrastructure by itself and it will do it – well maybe it will go and ask you for permission though integration into a process management system, (that is the way we do it) for some critical actions, but other than that it actually goes on and does the job – it actually figures out what to do, follows through and documents all actions taken.

So there is not much difference between what you use as automation today and what AUTOMATION can actually do from a „do I have to be afraid“ point of view. But there is a great difference in result. An automation technology, that will actually figure things out will much better align to business requests, work with a changing IT landscape and will integrate into all the ITIL operating processes.

000080;">Got you interested? See some examples at IBM PULSE 2009 tomorrow. Conference Center 123, 3:30-4:40pm. See you there….