Chris Boos on Automation

Coming to PULSE 2010 almost felt like coming to a friend I had not seen for a long time. The setup is very similar to last year´s with some little improvements. Obviously the conference committee was actually reading many of the suggestions given. For example the temperature in the conference center is no longer below freezing… Well PULSE started off as usual with Al Zoller coming on stage and getting all of us on track. “All of us” means more than 5.500 IT professionals who have come to Las Vegas despite tight budgets and economic crises. Al Zoller announced that this year IT service management at Tivoli is all about integration. After the idea of breaking down silos of competence integration – between the remaining silos (?) and especially between all the tools and processes we find in IT service management today is a great idea and actually long overdue. The scenarios and examples presented in Al Zoller´s and other first day keynotes are still very much in the shadow of economic downturn. Even though every manager is emphasizing that we are in a recovery phase their choice of case studies in the keynotes either shows that they are still skeptical (like most top managers) about the sustainability of the recovery or that in 2009 Tivoli did only do successful projects in more or less crises resistant sectors like energy, government or PPP. Since I do not believe the latter (Tivoli is just too big for that) I would say Tivoli top management is on the same page as many other executives, who make a great public appearance telling everyone that the crises is over but do not quite believe so internally – at least not yet. Following Al Zoller´s keynote address we had the chance to look at an example of integrated service management or rather an example of the applied theory of smarter planets. The demo was about Las Vegas and the Venetian as a smarter city or building respectively. The demo was quite staged and the Tivoli executives on stage had to struggle with their acting skills. Personally I do not believe in the usefulness of the kinds of dashboards shown in the presentations, but it seems this is what customers are looking for at the moment, so IBM was right on spot showing what could be done and how these dashboards interacted with all the data sources and process management systems. Speaking of data sources, I think if we are really going into the direction of a smarter planet and the internet of things, the term information overload will gather new meaning over the next couple of years.

The guest keynote given by former vice president Al Gore was the best guest keynote at any PULSE so far. I had heard that Al Zoller was criticized harshly for inviting Al Gore as an environmentalist, because IBM has such a strong customer base in the energy and traditional industry sector. Well guys, get real – oil will only be there for about 50 years (if that long) and Exxon et al are also looking into other concepts. Personally I would prefer if everyone was doing research about nuclear fusion as the energy source of the future, but taking nature as an example is maybe too far out for parts of the environmental movement. Al Gore was absolutely authentic, convincing and just fun. And he got everybody to think about their behavior, especially giving a speech on energy efficiency in a city like Las Vegas. As Al Gore said, the next generation will ask us either the question “How did you do it” or “Didn´t you see it coming”. So congratulations for Al Zoller for taking the initial heat when inviting Al Gore. More than 5.500 attendees at the opening session of PULSE 2010 were enthusiastic about the speakers and the integration message of IBM as well as the sustainability message of Mr. Gore on behalf of mankind.

Looking at PULSE I have seen many more client presentations and case studies than last year. And – coming back to a point I made before – these presentations are mainly not about state funded endeavors, but about companies dealing with the economic down turn successfully in one way or the other. Tivoli has also introduced the opportunity to meet reference customers in one-on-one talks and start an exchange on their experience with Tivoli products, which I think is a great idea – especially after seeing the customer panel discussion as part of the second day´s general session and the positive audience feedback to the panel. Even though the CIOs of several major international companies were not really sharing any news when talking about their efforts to deal with integration issues and reengineering their IT business alignment, getting these guys up on the main stage to openly declare that IBM was helping them to achieve their goals made everybody else walk out with a secure feeling. Not just great marketing, but obviously also a job well done on the part of the IBM Tivoli engineers, project teams and account managers.

Some of the session presentations were of a little less quality than the ones I had seen in previous years. Maybe that is because everybody was very busy fighting IT budget cuts and the economic crises itself, but the content of most presentations was as good as I have gotten used to over the last three years. The only thing I am a little disappointed about so far is the track on Cloud Computing. This track is still very much about why clouds make sense and other theories that have long since been proven by reality. But some of the customer presentations (e.g. CSC or ITricity) had really good cloud examples. Maybe IBM feels that they still have to pick up the cloud skeptics by introducing them from the beginning, but I think the PULSE attendees are more cloud worthy than that. I have had no time to take a look at the new track on medium sized business, because the first two days are so packed with must see presentations that I simply could not spare the hour. But I am sure I will get around to the topic tonight.

The second day´s keynotes were dominated by Harriet Person – or as I said Ms. Security. Her presentation on regarding the integration of security into embracing change as an opportunity rather than being paranoid about all the things that could happen was authentic, fun and well received by the audience. The presentation also made the best points so far on the integration topic and its actual business effects (apart from all the effects of technical integration that I will not mention here, because those should have been addressed a while back). I already mentioned the customer panel which was a great idea of the conference designers. Some of the other talks in the 2nd day´s general sessions were a little dull to me.

I must give a little note on the usage of social media at this year´s IBM PULSE. Twitter screens all over the place, blogger meetings and lots of coverage on all kinds of channels have made it clear that IBM is serious about the social media community. Not integrating twitter into the main sessions however also shows that there is still skepticism about the uncontrollability or the enormous demands of interaction required by social media. I am sure the very positive coverage PULSE has gotten so far on twitter and blogs will give Tivoli´s senior management a hint as to the topic of being skeptics.

For arago as a small vendor and as a company servicing larger providers it is always a good idea to keep track of the big players and add that extra innovation and quality that makes a difference to the customer. This post will share some of our insight on how the big four vendors of IT service management deal with “automation” in their product portfolio.

To keep you from thinking we are out of our minds going against vendors like HP or BMC I can safely say that we work together very well with e.g. IBM and that none of the big four has anything close to our IT autopilot. In fact the big vendors seem to aim more at building tools for technical staff. Following this sentiment most automation tools from these vendors take some tedious task and drastically reduce the number of keystrokes you need to perform it with their tools. This approach is commonly sold as automation. Rightfully so, because some manual effort is performed by the machine after the tools are properly implemented. Another main feature of such tools is guiding the actions performed by IT service management staff by enforcing policies or providing runbooks and thus reducing the margin of error. But with all these tools the brainwork is still done by the guys sitting in front of the screens. IT experts only get a park of instruments to play on, rather than something that will play the basic rhythm and the background music automatically, letting them focus on playing the lead instrument. The autopilot approach as used by us and as described before provides for the intelligence that plays the background music on all available instruments. The only larger vendor I have come across putting some of the brainwork into their tools is EMC with its intelligent root-cause analysis platform SMARTS (now EMC Ionix Operations Intelligence).

So let us take a look at the product portfolios of the big four vendors in IT service management – BMC, ca, HP and IBM – and how they deal with the “automation” buzzword:

Table 1: Big Four - Automation Tools

 The concept of automating a single “kind of task” at a time automatically leads to many facets of automation. So there are many different “kinds of automation” on the IT service management tool market right now and many of the ITSM experts keep talking about these different automation concepts as a kind of baseline. There are for example ff0000;">data center automation000000;">, runbook automation000000;">, process automation etc. 

 Table 1 shows what tools from the big four vendors support which kind of automation approach. I will not go into philosophic descriptions on the different kind of automation. You may follow the links and take a look at some of the blogs I read where intelligent guys have wrung out their brains to come up with a definition. You can however see that you will need quite a few tools when you are trying to automate everything possible. You can clearly see who is hunting which buzzword with their latest acquisition or newest product. Every vendor except CA has focused their efforts and put or is currently putting a lot of work towards integrating their solutions. ca has acquired a zoo of very good tools and thus has the ability to provide any kind of automation tool approach. It is viable to ask about the outstanding integration aspects however.

Table 2: Big Four - ITIL Support

 As looking at buzzwords usually makes my eyes hurt, let us take a look at the actual work that is done in IT operation from an ITIL point of view. The operational processes at the core of ITIL v3 (and V2) are Incident Management and Problem Management as reactive processes, Capacity Management and Availability Management as proactive processes and Change Management as the only way to modify the IT currently in service. As automation should focus on taking all or at least some of this operational workload we have looked at the same vendors and checked which tools you need to support each of these processes that make up the everyday life of IT service management staff – see table 2. You can see that in order to support all your operational processes with automation approaches you will need the whole park of instruments to play on. I have come across many companies trying to minimize the risk of vendor lock-in by supporting different parts of their operational processes with tools from different vendors. Well, this is replacing the risk of vendor lock-in b the risk of bad integration plus it is giving away all the thought some of the brightest engineers have put into integrating one vendor´s portfolio.

In my opinion, if you really just want the instruments to play your IT service management band all by hand, you should at least get the instruments that are delivered in tune. But if you want better results, you should only play the lead instruments and leave the background music to a machine – that itself plays the instruments available. If you have this machine (the autopilot and/or other more solutions that do some brainwork), integration becomes a 2nd tier problem and you can go along with a heterogenious toolset. As there is no legislation concerning the working conditions for machines, there is no problem in bothering such a machine with sub optimal inter-vendor integration. The reaction speed of the autopilot will make up for the few extra steps needed to bring tools from different vendors into tune.

The terms 000080;">003366;">tool and 003366;">automation do not go well together. Taking a look at other more mature sectors a tool is an item used by either a human or a machine and automation in this context it means that work is done by a machine rather than by a human.

Still the IT industry is lively talking about automation tools and a great many to start with. For a long time I could not get a grip on what all these tools were good for and why so many categories are around. This is why you find a map of the classes of tools around. I chose 003366;">two 003366;">dimensions to lay out the map of tools. Since we are talking about a 003366;">map of tools naturally the users of these tools are the first dimension. The second dimension is the part of IT the tool in question is focused upon.

The user dimension starts at actual IT administrator, continues with business users and ends at managers. The IT dimension starts at the facility level going on to infrastructure, network, systems, services, applications and ending in business processes. You will find this map in the figure included below.

Automation Tool Map

Looking at this map, I have come to the following conclusions:

1.       NSM covers the smallest piece of the map while being the oldest toolset around. When NSM tools came out they were supposed to be used by everyone and save the world. Becoming a mature setup of tools they have clearly found their niche and will definitely stay and important piece in the big IT puzzle. Not much revolution is to be expected here, but some continuous refinement can still bring big steps in effectiveness of these tools.

2.       BSM on the contrary covers the biggest part of the map and surely is one of the newer approaches. I think BSM is a great idea but it has to go though some iterations of focusing in order to be applicable to an average IT and business landscape. Introducing BSM not – the way in should be – means turning everything inside out and even though the economic crises does put a lot of pressure on companies businesses have more important things to focus on that having themselves turned inside out by a changing IT.

3.       BTM is a practical approach to achieve some of the goals – especially in the accounts of visualization and quality management – set by BSM without having to turn over every stone in our IT.

4.       I really do not understand the hype around DCA and Run Book Automation. While DCA seems a logical step (is not IT centralization itself, so its management should be centralized) Run Book Automation actually solves the “problem of missing documentation” – maybe. Other industries would never start their processes without having a clear set of procedures in place how to handle foreseeable situations. Imagine what we would tell an energy provider running a nuclear power planed if they came up and says “sure, we develop best practices how to react to glitches in the systems we go”. No way Hose! So the big buzzword of Run Book Automation is just a fancy way to get the sometimes anarchic IT guys to document what they are doing…

5.       All these tools claim to be focused on automation and most of them may carry some minor seeds of automation in them, but they are in the end clearly focused to be tools. They want to be used by someone (or something) to perform their tasks and they do not act by themselves. So in this map of software used in IT delivery or IT operations the actual automation engine is still missing.

003366;">Part of the latter conclusion makes me happy, because this means we are one of the few people who actually have a machine that operates It by itself and does it automatically at that part. On the other hand this give me the creeps, because this means a lot of people and companies are not ready yet to have IT delivery run in large part autonomously. Looking at al other industries this is the way they have gone and I do think it is about time we get the noting in the IT world.. Let´s get rid of all the boring tasks and let them be handled by the machines. Yes this means giving some control to an engine but on the other hand it means your business is much more in control because reaction becomes predictable and is documented, as well as IT jobs become more interesting since the everyday stuff is nothing IT gurus have to deal with.

For those of you not quite so familiar with IT delivery buzzword bingo here is the elaboration of the abbreviations: NSM = Network and Systems Management – tools aimed at facilitating tasks performed by network and system administrators. ITSM = IT Service Management – tools aimed at supporting the ITIL Service management processes from a delivery point of view. RBA = Run Book Automation – tools aimed at giving staff the proper procedure for handling a given situation. DCA = Data Center Automation – tools used to perform tasks from a central point of administration rather than having to connect to all servers or services involved. ITPM = IT Process Management – tools used to track and escalate processes and communication between the silos of It delivery and also business users. WLA = Work Load Automation – a much spoken set of tools to automatically provision IT resources and distributing workload across these systems as required. BPM = Business Process Management – tools used to improve IT´s alignment with business processes though modeling It from a business point of view. BSM = Business Service Management – a set of tools used to manage IT services from a pure business point of view. BTM = Business transaction Management – a quite new approach to tools created to manage IT with business transaction as the controlling parameter. This seems to be a practical approach to narrow down the too broad view of BSM as you can read at Doug McClure´s blog.

Everyone knows the big four auditors (Deloitte, Ernst&Young, KPMG, PWC) for a long time. In recent times, while our favourite topic becomes more important from week to week, there are the IT Service management big four aka BMC, CA, HP and IBM (alphabetical order!).

As Erin Joyce on enterprisestorageforum.com describes <here> EMC is integrating two solutions they acquired in recent years (Smarts in 2005 and Voyence 2007). Voyence Control is a solution for Automated Configuration and Change Management, while EMC Smarts is a solution for fault isolation and root cause analysis. In combination with the in 2006 acquired nLayers solution for Application Discovery, which is now labelled as EMCs ADM (Application Discovery Manager), it looks like they added ITSM and BSM (Business Service Management) to their interesting product portfolio.

So if I were Cisco and had 45bn$ to spend, I definitly would take a deep look into EMC. I guess together with Cisco, we would see the Big Five.

Roland