IT Management & Cloud #48 – BSM, Tivoli Partners, Hadoop Uses, Splunk 4.0, Conferences

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John and I review the week’s IT management cloud news:

• Lunch with Doug McClure. What’s going on in the BSM world now-a-days? IBM BSM stuff.
• What’s the BMC offering? “Working with BMC, IT organizations will be able to extend their internal datacenters to Amazon EC2 via a unified, integrated BSM management solution. Enterprise customers can request computing resources – either internal (physical or virtual) or external from Amazon EC2 – through an integrated self-service portal. Those requests are tracked through BMC’s robust ITIL®-compliant change management system and automatically provisioned and configured in minutes. This self-service interface also supports service de-provisioning and service change requests.” John says this seems like a better start than what IBM has been doing (or not) in this area.
• IBM Tivoli partner conference – selling a lot of modeling and event correlation stuff, so partners speak to that. What types of partners: government with identity management and other area, storage is classically a strong partner, energy management.
• Tivoli foundations products – virtual appliances with full-stack. Pre-integrated Tivoli stack.
• Rackspace’s API announcements (first, getting beta ones, then releasing the spec) – having them and then Creative Commons’ing the spec. As John says, Amazon is Apple and Rackspace is Google AppEngine.
• Maybe PaaS is about easier deploying for developers – EngineYard and Heroku. “All I want is to take a WAR and deploy it”: we need a PaaS for Java, where are they?
• “Skip cloud, go right to Hadoop” – John’s experiments with Hadoop and IT Management performance metrics, 6 months worth. It’s easy to add new, unstructured data to existing data sets (a smart, new insight). For example, tracking email campaigns for effectiveness based on state, etc.
• All of the Hadoop examples I can think of are something along the lines of “retrospective causality analysis”: figuring out why complex chains of events happened and then trying to do things in the future to profit from that knowledge. As ever, I try to get more examples of what you’d use this kind of tool for. There’s also some storage optimization things with Hadoop.
• Beautiful Data book coming out, I have a review copy on the way. Also, the video from John, like this one of Chris Curtin.
• Personal metrics crossed with the old BMC airport example.
• RightScale: doing DB2 management, RightLink (chef plus Nanite).
• Open Source Cloud Computing Forum with RedHat – which explains all of John’s KVM, Xen, libvert Twitterings… cobbler & puppet, and more! And yet, John says, there’s no uber-cloud strategy from RedHat.
• I ramble on about how the adoption of public cloud computing in big enterprise accounts are not culturally ready for it: it’s the “our customers are not asking for it” answer.
• In enterprises, we need some more CTO input in addition to the CIO role: innovation vs. keeping the lights on.
• We do some cross-podcast pimping to The Agile Executive, esp. the recent podcast episode on Agile Operations.
• Splunk 4.0 and the consumerization of IT.
• I was at the Adobe Industry Analyst Summit this week (see here, here, and here for more), where their CIO showed off a custom UI on-top of their service desk. This raises the question: why did she have to go through customizing it? Why aren’t service desks good looking already?
• We go over the OpenSourceWorld and CloudWorld conference coming up. I’ve got a code for free passes if you want one. John’s going to a Java conference in Bulgaria to speak to cloud. And also, Antwerp. See the John M. Willis Summer/Fall line-up over on his blog.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, see the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.