Mike Vizard

IT Systems Management Comes of Age with Social Media

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:27:09 GMT

Like it or not, social media is starting to influence the way we consume information, even in the relatively staid world of IT systems management.

For instance, Nodeable has come up with a way to track IT systems events using a metaphor that borrows heavily from the way messages and status updates are shared in social media environments. According to Nodeable CEO Dave Rosenberg, this approach is not only more effective because it makes it easier to track specific IT system processes, it’s also a lot more appealing to a new generation of systems managers that find legacy systems management consoles difficult to decipher.

Nodeable may be on to something if for no other reason than the people tasked with performing IT tasks tend to be the younger members of the IT staff. It’s pretty apparent by now that younger workers are a lot more comfortable sharing information in the context of a social media application than just about any other medium.

But perhaps more importantly, a more social approach allows the management of IT to be organized around specific processes, such as all the elements of an application, rather than trying to separately monitor each component without any real overall context being provided. In fact, the same concept is also starting to be applied to business processes.

Of course, it may take older workers some time to get used to managing IT systems using a social media paradigm. But the folks at Facebook would tell you that folks over 50 are among some of their most prolific contributors to the site, so it just may be that IT managers of all ages are more than ready to try something new and different.

DBAs Need to Evolve into Data Scientists

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:59:13 GMT

Nine Best Practices for Efficient Database Archiving

Database administrators basically optimize database performance by managing the distribution of data across an environment that is complex to manage. That generally requires a lot of arcane skills, not the least of which is partitioning a database, also known as “sharding,” so that the database can more easily scale across multiple processors and systems.

As database performance has become a bigger issue in the era of the cloud, the need to shard the database has increased exponentially. But databases that are sharded are not only complex to manage; they are prone to the introduction of errors because there’s just simply more that can go wrong.

But what if there was never any need to shard a database or, for that matter, perform most any other arcane database optimization task? That’s the thinking that went into the development of the Clustrix distributed database system, which allows MySQL applications to transparently run on a database appliance loaded with solid-state disks (SSDs) that eliminate the need to shard the database.

As part of an effort to increase exposure to its technology, Clustrix this week made available a free software-only version of its technology that developers can use to create applications for the Clustrix appliance. According to Mark Sarbiewski, chief marketing officer for Clustrix, applications built using the Clustrix Development Kit will allow developers to get familiar with the technology without having to commit to the expense of buying the Clustrix platform until the application is ready to be deployed in production.

Part of an emerging “NewSQL” movement, which calls for the continued use of SQL to access Big Data by replacing existing database engines with platforms that are built on parallel database architecture, Clustrix can invoke sophisticated algorithms for managing data that allows applications to scale without relying on sharding.

That level of automation raises the specter of a lot of DBA unemployment in the future. But in reality, Sarbiewski says most businesses don’t want DBAs who generally concentrate on database maintenance tasks. Instead, they want DBAs to evolve into data scientists and chief data officers who focus on generating the most business value possible out of all the data they collect. DBAs are not the only group within IT that aspire to take on that role, but they do have the inside track when it comes to understanding how the company's data is currently managed.

In the coming Big Data era, it’s clear that IT organizations are going to need to automate the management of massive amounts of data more than ever. There’s no place better for that to happen than within the actual database itself.

Building Next-Generation Social Intranets for the Cloud

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:41:21 GMT

Five Core Tenets of the Social Intranet

The new intranet will be a heterogeneous environment of systems across the whole company.

When you think about the evolution of the Web technologies inside the enterprise, it becomes pretty apparent that a lot the intranets deployed inside the enterprise are a little long in the tooth these days. In fact, not only does there tend to be a lot of dormant intranets inside the enterprise, many of them are little more than dormant repositories for documents that most employees rarely use.

According to Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo, a provider of an application development environment that is optimized for building applications in the cloud, the real issue with intranets these days is that for the most part they are not very social. IT organizations could obviously embark on a program to modernize their intranet environments, but that would usually entail buying additional software and infrastructure to run them, or moving to a packaged application environment delivered as a service in the cloud that might not exactly fit the way the company operates. A third approach, says Mestrallet, would be to build a custom social intranet application that could run on any one of several platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings in the cloud or be deployed in a private cloud environment.

To facilitate the development of those intranet applications for the cloud, eXO this week formally released version 3.5 of the eXo, which can be used to build multi-tenant applications in Java, PHP or Ruby on Rails that can be deployed on public or private clouds, and it comes with support for a variety of built-in social network integration features.

Refreshing intranet applications may not immediately spring to mind as a high priority. But the amount of money spent on supporting existing intranet applications could be used to pay for the creation and ongoing maintenance of a modern social intranet in the cloud that employees and other business associates might actually want to use. And once that happens, there’s no telling what might actually happen from an employee productivity perspective.

Debating Philosophical PaaS Differences

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:06:25 GMT

As with any new movement, there is a lot of debate as to what constitutes the right approach to creating a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. There are those like Salesforce.com that argue that the goal should be to abstract IT infrastructure issues away from the developer all together. Others, however, say the real goal should be to give application developers as much transparency and control over the underlying IT infrastructure as possible.

One of the leading proponents of that PaaS approach is Engine Yard, which today announced that it will be upgrading the Engine Yard Orchestra PHP Cloud service this month to provide greater configurability through APIs and improved performance via stack images that have been optimized for the PaaS platform. In addition, the auto-scaling of elastic configurations is now better tuned to track variations in workloads.

According to Mark Gaydos, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, the thing that makes Engine Yard different than other PaaS platforms is that while the company allows developers to exploit shared infrastructure like any other cloud, each application instance on the Engine Yard cloud is given “dedicated tenancy.” That means that developers not only have full transparency into the environment, says Gaydos, but they can also work with Engine Yard engineers to optimize that environment any way they see fit.

Gaydos says Engine Yard is trying to provide developers with all the benefits and simplicity of the cloud without compromising their flexibility. That approach, says Gaydos, is what allowed Engine Yard to generate $28 million in revenue from over 2,000 customers looking to create and deploy PHP and Ruby on Rails applications in an open source environment.

As PaaS continues to mature, the battle for the hearts and minds of developers is well under way. There's obviously nothing that would prevent one cloud provider from offering different levels of PaaS services to different classes of developers. But in the short term, it's the PaaS platform that attracts enough developer support that will continue on, while a host of others will succumb to an inevitable wave of merger and acquisition activity. In the meantime, IT organizations need to ask themselves what they really want in the cloud before they can really start separating PaaS providers from the rest of the pack.

Enterprise Social Networking: Talk Is Still Cheap

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:45:28 GMT

The Rising Social Networking Security Threat

End users are more aware of the potential threat, but awareness does not necessarily translate into a change of behavior.

The trouble with social networks in the enterprise is that they are generally not that well integrated with any process or activity that actually drives revenue for the business. The objective for deploying a social network should be to optimize the sharing of knowledge across the business. Most social networks in the enterprise today amount to little more than a less expensive way to provide real-time communications as an alternative to expensive, asynchronous email systems.

The future of social networking in the enterprise, says Tom Kelly, CEO of Moxie Software, a provider of enterprise social networking software, should be to provide a real-time communications system that is tightly coupled to the base of knowledge that drives the business. Using social networks as an alternative to email systems is a good first start. But the real business value only emerges when employees are able to instantly provide customers with answers to questions. Businesses are built to serve the needs of customers. It’s only when social networking is tied to business activity streams that the real value of investing in that social network becomes apparent, says Kelly.

Kelly claims says Moxie is specifically designed to address that issue with Employee Spaces and Customer Spaces editions that make it easier for company employees to more readily access company knowledge repositories and subject-matter experts.

The degree to which Moxie can carve out a space in an already crowded social networking space that includes everyone from Jive Software to IBM remains to be seen. But the one thing that is for certain is that “communications” is cheap. Businesses need a framework through which workflow and the sharing of knowledge becomes more efficient. Just about every organization laments the fact that its employees “don’t know what we already know.” While that’s an age-old problem, solving it is going to take a lot more than rolling out a new platform for collaboration that winds up being divorced from the processes that actually make the business run.

Agile Development Accelerates Journey to the Cloud

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:08:12 GMT

Selling Agile to the CFO: A Guide for Development Teams

Seven tips to get your CFO on board for agile development.

One issue that IT organizations consistently encounter when weighing their cloud computing options is that most of their existing applications were not developed with the cloud in mind. Most existing applications expect to have access to dedicated resources. Running them in environments where they have to share access to IT infrastructure generally has an adverse impact on performance.

This is the reason that Department of Defense for the Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) recently enlisted the Agile Platform development environment from OutSystems to not only build new applications for the cloud, but also rewrite their existing ones.

CECOM is building its own private cloud. As part of that project, CECOM has embraced an agile development methodology that should greatly reduce the amount of time it will take CECOM to develop applications for the cloud.

According to Jeff Newlin, OutSystems vice president and general manager for North America, OutSystems worked closely with CECOM to train their developers on all the nuances of agile development in the context of a cloud computing environment. While interest in cloud computing initially came about as way to save money, it’s increasingly apparent that the real benefit is going to be increasing the ability of the IT organization to dynamically respond to requests for new services from the business. But IT infrastructure is only half the battle. In order to make the IT organizations truly agile, new development methodologies are going to have to be embraced.

Whether the application is running on a public or private cloud is almost irrelevant. What is really going to matter is how quickly the IT organization can deliver meaningful value to the business.

Mobile Computing and Mitigating Risk

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:28:31 GMT

The State of the Consumerization of IT

Study finds that usage of personally owned devices is growing, but they're still pretty much used to augment traditional PC usage.

As it becomes clearer that mobile computing and the cloud are two ends of the same spectrum, IT organizations are increasingly coupling these technologies. Most IT organizations have little experience with creating mobile applications that need to be constantly updated. By developing and then hosting them in the cloud, IT organizations can not only minimize the risks associated with developing these applications, they can also more easily introduce new agile development methodologies.

To address the specific challenge, IBM recently moved to acquire Worklight, a provider of application development tools that allow IT organizations to create these applications and offers tools for managing them. At the same time, IBM also announced that its BigFix managed services platform includes support for a range of tablet PC devices in addition to smartphones.

According to Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM Tivoli, IBM is trying to put an end-to-end mobile computing framework in place that spans everything from internal IT systems to the cloud and back again. Increasingly, says Hebner, it clear that mobile computing applications are one of the dominant classes of cloud computing applications. It’s also clear, adds Hebner, many IT organizations don’t really have an effective way to manage those applications and the devices on which they run.

It is important for IT organizations to start thinking these issues through now, says Hebner, because thanks to the “consumerization” of IT, many of these devices are already being brought into the enterprise by employees. Rather than continuing to drive usage of those devices underground, Hebner says IT organizations would be better off putting a framework in place that allows these devices to be managed in a way the conforms with IT policies and corporate compliance requirements.

Whether they are acquired by the company or brought to work by employees, it’s clear that mobile computing devices are increasingly becoming the preferred way that end users want to interact with information. IT organizations may find that behavior risky. But the reality of the situation is that with or without IT support, those devices are being used, which means the better part of IT valor now is to try and mitigate a risk that is already being taken.

Building the Modern Data Center in the Era of the Cloud

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:09:38 GMT

Six Tips for a Greener Data Center

Create better airflow in the data center.

IBM is announcing today that it designed a 900,000-square-foot data center in India that only took 10 months to build. Created for Tulip Telecom Ltd., the facility, known as “Tulip Data City,” consists of 20 IBM Enterprise Modular Data Centers installed in a four-tower building that consists of multiple stories.

According to Steven Sams, IBM vice president of global site and facilities services, the Tulip facility is now the third largest data center in the world and is designed to provide up to 100 megawatts of power.

Given the rise of virtualization and cloud computing, you might think that the number of data centers that need to be built would shrink. Sams says that the data center infrastructure market is worth about $47 billion annually, with an expected growth of another 17 to 18 percent by 2015. He adds that IDC estimates that data managed by enterprises will grow 50 times over the next decade, and in the next two years alone the number of servers installed will increase by 49 percent.

Much of that growth is taking place outside of the U.S., which raises questions about the future competitiveness of IT organizations in the U.S.. The Tulip facility, for example, has a power usage effectiveness rating (PUE) of 1.5, which compares to a rating of 2.5 for the average data center. Sams adds that every piece of equipment in the Tulip data center are redundant paths for power and networking to ensure high availability.

Tulip will allow customers to house their own servers in the data center in addition to providing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings that will be managed using IBM SmartCloud software and services.

It’s pretty clear that in the last few years major advances have been made in terms of building efficient data centers that are more resilient than ever. The choice that a lot of companies will face in the years ahead is determining whether they should rebuild their data centers, or take advantage of cloud computing services running inside state-of-the-art data center facilities built by someone else. Obviously, there are a lot of security and compliance issues that need to be addressed before making that decision, but one thing that is for certain is that economics of building data centers at scale are increasingly favoring the cloud service providers.

Taking the Complexity Out of Managing Data Storage

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:15:21 GMT

Ten-point RFP Checklist for Enterprise Storage Technology Refresh Initiatives

A lot of midmarket IT organizations these days are drowning in a sea of data. It used to be that only large companies with dedicated storage administrators struggled with storing large amounts of data. But today there is no correlation between the amount of data that needs to be managed and the relative size of the organization.

As a result, Carter George, executive director of storage strategy at Dell, says there is an acute need for ways of managing storage at scale that effectively automate the management of data. That goal, says George, is what’s driving the development of Dell Fluid Data storage architecture that is based on technologies that Dell gained via its acquisitions of Compellent, EqualLogic, Ocarina and Exanet.

Dell is gaining traction in the storage space, says George, because the combination of those technologies allows Dell to offer file, block and object storage products that will increasingly be integrated under a common management system that automatically decides what tier of storage a particular piece of data should be stored on based on the policies set by the IT organization and the usage patterns of that data. That level of automation not only makes it easier to manage large amounts of data, says George, it in many cases eliminates the need for high-priced, dedicated storage specialists to manage the data.

As higher levels of automation are being brought to bear, it’s clear we’re beginning to see a convergence of data and storage management that has been long overdue. Too many IT organizations think about managing storage systems with little regard to optimizing the management of the data that consumes all that storage. And yet, when they examine where the dollars in their IT budgets are being allocated, it’s becoming increasingly clear that most of those dollars are being consumed by storage systems that are far from being optimally managed. It might not be possible to reduce the size of the storage budget, but most organizations should be able to arrest its growth by rethinking what data is stored on inexpensive secondary and tertiary storage systems versus what needs to be readily accessed on primary storage. In many cases, IT organizations will find that not only is there a lot of data sitting idle on a primary storage system, but a lot of that data has also been duplicated across multiple storage systems.

George says the combination of more advanced compression and data deduplication technologies, coupled with object file systems that manage data more efficiently, are making it possible to now bring high-end storage system technologies to market at prices that midmarket IT organizations can afford.

In terms of storage, Dell has come a long way since serving as a reseller of EMC products. There’s obviously no shortage of competition in the storage space. But Dell’s Fluid Data architecture at least shows the company does understand the magnitude the challenge ahead.

Salesforce.com: A Million Cloud Apps and Counting

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:51:08 GMT

How Salesforce.com Masters the Cloud

Companies continue to find successful methods for integrating with the Force.com platform.

The battle for control of the cloud is ultimately going to be determined by the platform that wins the hearts and minds of the most application developers.

With that goal in mind, Salesforce.com is already playing host to over 1 million cloud applications that are running on its Force.com and Database.com platforms, or on the cloud computing platform managed by its Heroku subsidiary, says Byron Sebastian, CEO of Heroku.

Each of those platforms, adds Sebastian, is targeted at a specific type of application. Force.com is aimed at developers who are creating data-centric applications that are similar in nature to the customer relationship management (CRM) application that Salesforce.com markets, while the Heroku platform is designed to run custom applications that are rewritten in multiple languages. Database.com, meanwhile, gives developers who need a relational database access to a cloud service. Sebastian says Salesforce.com sees Database.com as the platform that unifies the Force.com and Heroku platforms under a common set of federated cloud services.

But the thing that will ultimately differentiate the cloud offerings from Salesforce.com, says Sebastian, is the level of automation that the company is bringing to bear on the cloud. The goal, says Sebastian, is to abstract operations to a level where the actual servers in the cloud are invisible to the developer. The reason that the Salesforce.com cloud platforms have over a million applications running on them, says Sebastian, is because Salesforce.com allows them to concentrate on building the application rather than worrying about managing the servers the application runs on. That’s especially critical in an era of agile development that requires developers to not only quickly create code, but also continuously update those applications.

That approach, adds Sebastian, is what is attracting a raft of next-generation mobile, social media and event-driven applications to the Salesforce.com platforms. And it’s those classes of applications that will dominate the cloud computing landscape for years to come.

Cloud computing, he says, is really about enabling the development of new classes of applications that previously were difficult to build, deploy and manage. As such, the platform that best enables that to happen without any language limitations is ultimately going to win the day.

As cloud computing ecosystems continue to evolve, it’s becoming pretty clear that the platform that gains the most developer support is going to gain critical mass in the cloud. And once gained, the providers of those services are going to be indispensable in a way that will be largely invisible to the average end user.

Tracking Super Bowl Sentiment in Real Time

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:23:28 GMT

There’s obviously a lot riding on the outcome of the Super Bowl game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots this Sunday night. But what’s at stake goes well beyond who gets to claim the Lombardi Trophy and the rings that go with it. There are millions of dollars in endorsement contracts that will go to the stars of the winning team.

Increasingly, it’s becoming easier to leverage advanced analytics software to measure the popularity of a given person, team or organization. IBM, for example, is working with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab to track the relative popularity of Eli Manning and Tom Brady, the star quarterbacks of the opposing teams, in real time before, during and after the game.

While this effort is just the latest in a series of sentiment analysis research projects that are being conducted by IBM and USC, it does indicate just how important perception is becoming on social networks. In fact, Rod Smith, IBM vice president for emerging technology, says it won’t be long before sentiment analysis is routinely consulted by marketers looking to sign professional athletes to endorsement contracts. What’s making this possible is that not only are the analytics tools becoming more sophisticated, but the cost of acquiring the data that needs to be analyzed is dropping thanks to the rise of Big Data frameworks such as Hadoop.

Sentiment analysis is hardly an exact science yet. But Smith notes that the concept can be applied to both online data and data that is collected by traditional methods such as polling. That means that as sentiment analysis continues to evolve, marketing is increasingly going to involve more science than art.

That should lead to a long overdue rapprochement between IT leaders and the marketing professionals. It’s no secret that the relationship between these organizations is often strained given the proclivity of the marketing department to invest in isolated applications and associated IT infrastructure. In the meantime, it is apparent that new technologies are reshaping the way marketing is managed. Whether that results in better marketing remains to be seen. But at the very least, it should be a lot easier to attach a return on investment to marketing activities that historically has been elusive at best.

Making Hadoop an Integral Part of the Enterprise

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:19:55 GMT

Why the Hoopla over Hadoop?

Hadoop in nine easy to understand facts.

While there’s obviously a lot of interest in the Hadoop data management framework as an alternative approach to storing massive amounts of data, more than a few enterprises have found the fact that Hadoop currently requires dedicated storage systems a bit troubling. What they are typically trying to avoid is creating islands of storage systems within their organizations that need to be managed separately.

To address that specific issue, EMC this week announced that it has isolated the underlying file system for managing Hadoop from the rest of the Hadoop environment. That file system has then been integrated with the company’s Isilon network attach storage (NAS) systems.

According to Sam Grocott, senior director of product management for EMC Isilon, this means that customers of EMC no longer need to dedicate specific storage to Hadoop. Instead, the EMC Isilon systems now treat Hadoop as if it were any other application.

EMC is also moving to bundle Greenplum HD, its implementation of Hadoop that provides additional analytics capabilities, with its Isilon storage system. But the support for the native support for the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) means that the Isilon storage systems can be seamlessly integrated with any distribution of Hadoop, says Grocott.

IT organizations in the enterprise have never been big fans of anything that requires dedicated IT infrastructure and specialists to manage it. After all, the single largest cost of enterprise IT is labor. By integrating HDFS with its Isilon systems, EMC is signaling that rather than being something that stands apart from the rest of enterprise, Hadoop is about to become part of the IT mainstream.

Zen and the Art of IT Infrastructure

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:37:37 GMT

Ten Key Actions to Reduce IT Infrastructure and Operations Costs

Reduce costs by as much as 25 percent with these tips from Gartner.

Like any complicated ecosystem of machines, the art of managing a well-run IT environment comes down to maintaining balance between all the elements of the environment. Unfortunately, thanks to the rise of virtualization and a massive spike in the amount of data that needs to be managed, achieving any level of zen-like balance in the data center is going to become increasingly hard to achieve and maintain.

The real issue is bandwidth. As more virtual machines come on line, they compete for network and storage resources. Right now, most IT organizations are just beginning to maximize available bandwidth, but the writing is clearly on the wall as to when they will need new IT infrastructure to keep pace with demand for more capacity.

The good news is that next-generation IT infrastructure technologies are on their way. Cisco, for example, this week at its Cisco Live! event in London unveiled new offerings that include a Nexus 7000 M2-Series 2-port, 100 GbE Module with XL Option that delivers 100 GbE across 32 ports for the Nexus 7000 switch and a Nexus 7000 M2-Series 6-port 40 GbE Module with XL Option that delivers 40 GbE across 96 ports.

Cisco is hardly the only vendor bringing this class of networking equipment to market. But it does signal a general increase in networking throughput that will become increasingly more critical as cloud computing continues to evolve. According to Shashi Kiran, Cisco senior director for data center and enterprise switching, it's mostly early adopters and providers of cloud services that are interested in the class of networking gear at the moment, but he expects adoption rates to pick up significantly going into 2013.

Obviously, the availability of higher bandwidth networking gear is one thing; making it more affordable is another. Mellanox Technologies, a provider of the interconnect silicon that many vendors rely on, recently cut pricing on its 10GbE products. That should soon result in 10GbE price points in the range of $188 to $257 per port. As 10GbE pricing falls, David Barzilai, vice president of marketing for Mellanox, says customers should also expect to soon see drops in 40GbE products as well, which means some organizations may decide to skip 10GbE products in the core of the data center to eliminate the network as a bottleneck for years to come.

What is unclear is to what degree 10, 40 and even 100 GbE products will take hold. There’s obviously a lot of interest in the networking community, but storage vendors are arguing over the merits of 10 GbE versus next-generation 8 and 16 Gigabit-per-second Fibre channel systems. That’s a debate that will most likely continue through the rest of the decade.

In the meantime, vendors such as PMC-Sierra have unveiled next-generation 12 Gb-per-second controllers, which means that available bandwidth between SAS drives and the controller is about to substantially increase as well. Derek Dicker, vice president of product marketing for PMC-Sierra, says that throughput capability will prove to be especially important as IT organizations begin to rely more on solid-state drives that can generate a hundred times more I/Os per second than a traditional hard drive.

It may take all of 2012 for all these changes to the IT infrastructure to play out. But one thing that is for certain is that by 2013, a level of balance should be returning to IT environments as the costs of acquiring the next generation of IT infrastructure starts to significantly decline in 2012.

Time to Rethink IT Systems Management

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:43:12 GMT

Managing IT on a daily basis has never been more challenging. With the advent of virtualization, the number of virtual and physical servers that IT managers are being asked to regularly manage is increasing by a factor of 10 or more. There are, of course, plenty of tools to manage those servers, but most of them are outside the cost range of many IT organizations.

Historically, IT organizations have been faced with three choices, none of which have been exactly ideal. There are major systems management platforms that are not only expensive to license and complex to learn, but also require a lot of dedicated hardware. The other options are to cobble together a lot of comparatively inexpensive point products to manage the environment, or rely on the skills of administrators who can write custom scripts to manage the server environment. The problem with either of these approaches is that they don’t scale particularly well, and should the administrator who wrote the scripts leave the company, chances are that nobody remaining knows how those scripts exactly work.

The folks at SolarWinds, a provider of network and server management tools, say they want to disrupt this status systems management quo with the launch of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) , which now includes modules for automating patch management and Windows management utilities based on technologies that SolarWindows acquired by purchasing the assets of EminentWare and DameWare in late 2011. SAM was previously known as SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor.

According to Denny LeCompte, vice president of product management for SolarWinds, SAM provides a complete systems management framework that is not only easy to master, but provides all the major features and functions of any other management platform at a fraction of the cost. Pricing for SAM, for example, ranges from $11 a server to a couple of dollars depending on the volume of licenses involved, says LeCompte. In addition, LeCompte adds that SolarWinds makes community editions of its software available for free as part of an effort to increase exposure to its tools.

IT organizations of all sizes are increasingly being asked to do the impossible these days. The scope of the IT environment is increasing exponentially, while size of the IT staff remains flat or in some cases is actually declining. IT automation can make up for a lot of that disparity. But at the end of the day, IT administrators are going to need access to more affordable systems management tools. After all, it’s no longer about making the job of the IT administrator easier, but rather possible.

Project Management Meets CRM in the Cloud

webadmin@itbusinessedge.com — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:17:18 GMT

Seven Steps to a Successful ERP or CRM Launch

Keep your project team on track.

More often than anyone cares to admit, salespeople are selling a services capability that doesn’t exist — at least not yet. This is usually because the customer has asked for something unique or the services group within the organization doesn’t have the capacity available to support that particular request.

Almost invariably, however, contracts get signed and the people charged with delivering on the services promise to walk into work every morning to see what surprises are in store next. But sales deals are not done in a single day; more than likely contract service requirements terms are bandied about with a customer relationship management (CRM) application for weeks, if not months. The issue is that the folks in charge of delivering those services have no visibility into the CRM application.

In order to give the people responsible for delivering services visibility into the sales process, Clarizen, a provider of an online project management application that is delivered as a service, announced today tighter integration with the CRM applications from Salesforce.com. According to Clarizen CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski, services organizations that rely on project management applications are routinely blindsided by sales organizations that manage their activities inside a CRM application. To prevent that from happening, organizations can pay to either have their services organizations get access to a CRM application, or more logically, the project management applications they rely on can be more tightly coupled to the CRM application. Given the expense of the former option, most organizations are going to prefer a less-costly approach that tightens the integration between CRM and project management applications, said Nowogrodski.

Because Clarizen and Salesforce both have a set of well-defined application programming interfaces, integrating the two software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments can be handled by the two companies managing those applications, versus requiring an internal IT organization to manage the task on their own. The end result, says Nowogrodski, is a level of integration that includes real-time synchronization of dashboards to access Saleforce.com social networking tools such as Chatter. That level of integration between Clarizen and other applications, argues Nowogrodski, is ultimately going to change the way people collaborate across the enterprise.