In working on a paper, I thought I’d troll the blog here for IT management ideas and moves I’ve suggested (not always from me, but just written up) here. Let’s see what nutty things I’ve said:

• 07/26/2007 – Symantec partner or M&A with someone to capitalize on their mid-market brand power. Also, provide IT management as a SaaS
• 07/25/2007 – BMC open source the BPM SDK, AR, CMDB, provide reference implementation(s) for the CMDB Federation, PowerShell adaptors and scripts, do SDM/SML work, and/or Marimba. And then providing IT management as a SaaS, again.
• 07/23/2007 – HP use the OpenView brand to umbrella all their products, SunRays could get some after-glow marketing from application virtualization. More open sourcing from HP. And, again, providing IT management as a SaaS.
• 05/17/2007 – find technologies developers want to use, but that don’t have proper IT management and ALM wrapped around them. Sell that: “This is the key issue that I see FiveRuns trying to address: enabling wider rails use by giving IT departments the tools it wants to deploy, manage, and maintain rails installs.”
• 04/27/2007 – use CMDBs for storing more ALM info.
• 04/04/2007 – moving IT management modeling closer to the developer is a great idea. But, so far, Microsoft’s SML seems too complex; a more open approach could address this. That said, PowerShell is a good honey-pot to draw people in to creating “management packs.”
• 04/02/2007 – collaborative IT management (my wider phrasing for “collaborative systems management”) could include the sorts of workflows and processes we see in Run Book and Service Catalogs. Why? “Like all co-creation and knowledge/effort sharing based ideas, the effect on the bottom-line for companies [vendor and customers] is spending less money.”
• 03/27/2007– Microsoft System Center needs to do more, now when it comes to providing IT management as a SaaS. Developers need a compelling story to get involved in the “early” stages of IT management modeling. Again, PowerShell: “thinking of PowerShell as a sort of action-over-model driven approach to making IT more manageable is a fun through-path to go down.”
• 03/20/2007 – things are wide open for companies that provide IT management for SaaS. [This has been rapidly changing with people like OpSource, LeCayla, and recent startups like eVapt and Conformity] . How does IT management change when the IT being managed is updated multipule times a month, a week, daily?
• 01/25/2007 – advice for new IT management companies: focus, market on the web [SolarWinds seems to be gang-busters here], partner to make a suite, know how to talk about scaling, make an open platform, have a “realistic” story about the Big 4 instead of cliché FUD.
• 01/16/2007 – build an open platform to grow your user, developer, or “people-base.” The more people and technologies in your “ecosystem,” the more value there is to monetize.
• 01/15/2007 – no one is too good, big, or successful to help their community spread the word. See SpiceWorks for examples of how.
• 01/12/2007 – “ITIL vendors” are selling the glue between the ITIL books and actual implementation (including the software that provides the “implementation”). ITIL is good as a data point and organizing tool (among many) in understanding what IT management does.
• 12/11/2006 – Need better “widget” and mashup interfaces, esp. when it comes to IT management as SaaS.
• 11/29/2006 – “[T]he dead horse of systems management consolidation and simplification seems to have gone zombie.”
• 11/21/2006 – from Mark Hinkle: “The key to improving systems management is to figure out how to engage the user in creating systems with better content. Improving the content and capturing user knowledge is what will make ‘Systems Management 2.0’ interesting vendor driven systems management has reached a plateau.”
• 11/20/2006 – tagging can help in IT management. Tagging would be especially nice in CMDBs. A REST/URL-friendly interface on-top of CMDBs would be even better.
• 09/27/2006 – give the lowest level sys admins a sense of how much things are costing so that you can push decision making down as far as possible.
• 08/14/2006 – “breadth,” monitoring and managing a lot of stuff, is key to appeal and long term success in IT management.
• 07/28/2007 – give away free copies of your software to prominent open source projects for word-of-mouth.
• 07/06/2006 – more on why open platforms are more valuable all around: “value can be added to your platform at run-time: plugins can be added, users can extend interfaces, and even things like exporting data or search results to RSS allow users and third party people to literally make your product more valuable to your customers without your involvement. Indeed, that’s part of the advantage of open source.” And more in a briefing note around the same time.
• 06/15/2006 – PowerShell is wide-open for better ways of interacting with Windows-land. Cross-launching to perform actions, however. [I’ve been surprised (naively, perhaps) at how slow IT management vendors have been to at least talk about using PowerShell.]
• 04/26/2006 – AssetMetrix sure looks good for a basis for generating CMDB Configuration Items. 300,000 of them? [Now, the cloud-nature of AssetMetrix fits well into Microsoft’s “connected service” view of SaaS.]
• 04/26/2006 – Jon Collins suggests that the operating system may not matter too much soon. Thus, IT management must re-focus on the layers that do. [I.e., virtualization.]
• 04/25/2006 – Microsoft IT management is committed to Windows-land first, everyone else second. [This position has continued to be hammered home since then: interoperate vs. heterogeneous, “connected software” vs. SaaS, to name a few. Interesting point there: Microsoft often re-frames new “IT innovations” as a feature to it’s existing software rather than a new type of software.]
• 04/05/2006 – quick discovery and then use of default options is great for getting up and running. Allow changes, but “just work out of the box” instead of being a flashing cursor, waiting for user input. Earlier, using virtual machine images as default configs and setups.
• 04/02/2006 – Collaborative IT Management. Opening up the firewalls to collaborate around IT management information would be beneficial for everyone. Microformats would be nifty here.
• 03/31/2006 – it’s quite possible to cobble together open source offerings to take care of your IT. Reporting is a bit lacking, though.
• 03/10/2006 – using RSS in IT management. And then, later on, Hyperic’s use of RSS with mention of putting actual “actions” in feed items.
• 02/21/2006 – once/if networks have strong identity, what then?

After-thoughts

While combing through the above, I thought:

• Man, I sure do like SaaS + IT Management, be that providing IT Management as SaaS or providing IT Management for SaaS.
• I like PowerShell as well.
• Developers seem to have a diminished role in IT management. Compare this to the rosy view of the past, for example, of the OpenView community. James has noticed this of late. At least, it’s been some of his commentary of late highlighted and solidified the idea in my head)
• There’s a general theory of open platforms and “extensibility” running through most of the ideas.

Anyhow, there’s that. Now back to the paper this was all research for ;>

Disclaimer: BMC, FiveRuns, Microsoft, SpiceWorks, IBM, and are clients. I’m friends with one of the founders of eVapt.

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