Getting the quick wins!

How often is it that companies talk about quick wins, and then the project schedule shows 3-4 months before the first quick win can be realized in a production environment?   When it comes to ITSM projects – this is certainly not uncommon.  Defining your ITIL processes that align it to the capability of the underlying ITSM technology and business so often involves a significant amount of over-engineering and analysis paralysis – sometimes with good outcome, but mostly, just wasted time and effort that could’ve been spent doing something more productive.

As much as I’d like to attribute the ability to shorten project life-cycles and getting the quick wins to a technology choice (which certainly can assist), it really all boils down to a company’s culture, processes, the type of leaders, managers and the commitment to getting things done (GTD) within an organization.  Don’t forget that the same culture, leadership style, etc should also be reflected in the supplier organization culture so that gains made by one aren’t lost by the other. So how can using an efficient, simple and easy to use solution such as ServiceNow make a difference if your organization is prone to over-analyzing and procrastinating on everything?  Well the good news is, when you start the actual implementation, you won’t waste any more time.  The bad news is, the rest of the process is still going to be long and painful, and hopefully you’re not stuck in having to deal with this type of organization daily. But what if you are…

How do you change this type of culture? The answer is simple – but a lot of patience and persistence is required….   It happens one step at a time!   Start by demonstrating your own commitment to the culture change and how that change will benefit the organization if everyone adopts the same attitude.   In other words – focus on the quick wins, and do everything in your power to make them QUICK WINS – and then market the success of those quick wins, the benefits, and what’s needed to repeat the process on the next project.

I wish you the best of luck.

Bruce

Addressing your ITSM needs

We’ve been very busy in recent months finding innovative cost-cutting ways to help customers derive more value from their IT Service Management processes and disciplines.

Some key (and probably very obvious) drivers for our customers have been:

1. Reduce direct vendor costs (software licenses and maintenance costs)
2. Faster time-to-market for new features and benefits
3. Reduce implementation time & cost
4. Improve service quality
5. Improve alignment of Service Delivery team to the Business

To achieve these we’ve had to overcome a few key challenges:

Legacy Challenge #1: Cost & Complexity

The legacy ITSM solutions are about as cumbersome and complex as the typical organizational specific ITSM processes and workflows themselves.   Granted the legacy vendors are trying really hard to re-invent the front-end usability, ease of implementation, etc, but there’s no way they can just overhaul a complex ITSM product overnight.  It’s a bit like trying to change the wheels on a moving vehicle.   The challenge with using these legacy solutions [as powerful as they may be] is that the license, maintenance and implementation costs are prohibitive for smaller organizations.  Even large organizations – especially in the current economic climate – are desperately looking for innovative ways to reduce costs while improving their service delivery capability and quality.

Our Solution:  Change the underlying technology.   Service-now.com is a web2.0 [modern] solution, built from the ground up, is cloud based [no more operational babysitting and system administration nightmares], and was designed with ease of use and implementation as a fundamental guiding principle.  This means we can design, build and test the ITSM solution in third of the time of what we traditionally could and did.

The Benefit:  Reduced cost and complexity – and significantly so.  Our Service-now.com customers are ecstatic with their choice of technology and our ability to deliver.  Once delivered, the administrative overheads are substantially reduced and the fact that Service-now.com is offered through the cloud, means that the painful and costly exercise of upgrading and remaining current evaporates into thin air [excuse the pun].   I always used to maintain that technology is “just technology” and no one technology can make a huge difference… well I’ve been proven wrong.  I was actually astonished as to how big an impact the changing of an underlying technology can have on the key drivers listed above.

 

Legacy Challenge #2:  Engineers & Consultants

We “grew up” in an industry where organizations relied on consultants to help define their ITSM processes (and requirements) while an independent reseller or systems integrated implemented the ITSM solution.  There appears to be increasing frustration with misalignment between the perfect [often over-engineered] ITSM processes, the business needs and what the technology is able to deliver within a reasonable time.  To avoid this misalignment, a more inclusive consultancy approach to solution delivery has become paramount.

Our Solution:   Our delivery teams increasingly rely on experienced ITSM solution experts, business analysts and consultants that understands the underlying solution capabilities.  This means we guide the customer through a design process using a far more pragmatic approach.   Our experienced business analysts and consultants work together to engage [interrogate] the business users and capture the true business requirements.   They either design or assist in the design of the customer’s processes and ensure that the user and business requirements are converted into well defined technical delivery requirements.

The Benefit:  Our customers are now getting more value from the process design through to implementation.  Our pragmatic approach means the processes are designed to bring simplicity, ease of use, achievable results and are quick to implement, directly achieving many of the key drivers identified above.

 

When next faced with questions on your improvement strategy, you should be considering a lot more than simply how to improve current processes.  By using an innovative solution like  Service-now.com and an agile implementation/consultancy partner such as Marutech, you’d be surprised how easily you can swop out the underlying legacy technology AND improve your processes for less than what you would have spent on your next big upgrade.

CERN Delivers People-Centric Service Management Using Service-now.com

CERN, being one of the world’s most respected centres for scientific research, and now also a Service-now.com success story represents the essence of what we see Service-now.com as being.  A solution that drives people-centric service management through improved efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

As with our own implementation, CERN are benefiting from the hugely beneficial service-culture that a Service-now.com solution is able to create.

Read the full press release here…

CloudWashing – a recurring topic

I can’t tell how many times I’ve read articles and blog posts about the differences between legacy vendors and “true” cloud vendors.

Legacy vendors tend to hop on the cloud bandwagon by simply hosting their legacy applications and then [sometimes] building some fancy wrapping and automation around it.  And then there are those that think because they’ve hosted their application on some virtual infrastructure (aka VMWare or other), that they now have a pure cloud offering?  (They even believe it themselves)

On the other side, [true] cloud vendors do things differently by taking the time to build their solutions from scratch.  They tend to use modern technology and programming techniques and most importantly, the tend to focus on the ease of use for the end-user.  The more modern paradigm is what cloud computing and Software as a Service is really about, but few of these new and small startups or vendors have the marketing budget to compete with the large legacy vendors that have managed to white-wash the cloud paradigm [or is it brain-wash their clients?] with a “hosting is also cloud computing” idea.  True cloud vendor’s products are simply better suited to the 21st century – they’re simpler to use, quicker to implement and give you better bang for your buck almost every time.

All the early adopters and thought leaders out there will know what I’m talking about…  The rest, well, I suppose we’ll see you onboard [or is that enlightened?] sometime in the future…  perhaps just in time to get confused by the next big thing.

 

Going Cloud… Thinking Security (part 2)

This series reviews 4 ‘things’ you should take seriously when considering cloud solutions.  Part 1 looked briefly at Application Integration – critical if your cloud solution needs to form part of an integrated IT strategy.

Now, we look at security.

Even though we have written about and discussed security a number of times it is still of extreme relevance and importance in the move to a cloud based service.

Most security consultants have had to deal with a huge shift in focus regarding security, but the basic security fundamentals for users of cloud services still apply. As a first step, assessing the risk in security and compliance is imperative. Core security topics such as control and manageability, tracking records of actions, trust and incident management, liability and support, misuse and data leakage, these are all more critical than ever.

According to Nico Popp, VP of product development at Verisign “This requires layers of security, including multifactor authentication, identity brokers, access management and, in some cases, an external service provider who can provide that high a level of administrative control”

“Security and cloud hosting are two separate things, but the cost of entry is so low, and often so simple, that customers may not do as much due diligence as they should to find out who’s responsible for security,” says Ezra Gottheil an analyst who covers server issues for Technology Business Research.

Too many times companies assume that their cloud provider is taking care of security – leaving themselves vulnerable to attack, and all too often, ignorant of the fact.

Customers must demand transparency, avoid vendors that refuse to provide detailed information on security programs. Ask questions related to the qualifications of policy makers, architects, risk-control processes and technical mechanisms and the level of testing that’s been done to verify that service and control processes are functioning as intended, and that vendors can identify unanticipated vulnerabilities.

Here are seven of the specific security issues Gartner says customers should raise with vendors before selecting a cloud vendor.

1. Privileged user access

Get as much information as you can about the people who manage your data. Ask providers to supply information on the hiring and oversight of privileged administrators, and the controls over their access.

2. Regulatory compliance

Traditional service providers are subjected to external audits and security certifications. Cloud computing providers who refuse to undergo this type of scrutiny must only be used for the most trivial functions.

3. Data location

Ask providers where your data will be stored, and if this data centre has sufficient security measures in place to obey local privacy requirements on behalf of their customers.

4. Data segregation

The cloud provider should provide evidence that encryption schemes were designed and tested by experienced specialists to ensure data integrity.

5. Recovery

Even if you don’t know where your data is, a cloud provider should tell you what will happen to your data and service in case of a disaster.

6. Investigative support.

The vendor needs to assure you that they can investigating inappropriate activity and must show that they have already successfully supported such activities.

7. Long-term viability

Ideally, your cloud computing provider will never go broke or get acquired and swallowed up by a larger company. But you must be sure your data will remain available even after such an event.

Remember we need to qualify the vendors we want to do business with, that is why Marutech and Cornastone have invested a considerable amount of time to cut through all the hype and get to the point. To ensure that our customers know full well that the solutions in our stable really do meet the above requirements.

In the next article we look at storage, which continues to be one of the weak points of many a provider.

SaaS not easy for everyone

The terms “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Service” have been flying around in IT circles for a while now, and have become a local buzz word, so much so we even having conferences based on these buzz words. Yet a number of people still do not understand what the core of Cloud Computing / SaaS is supposed to deliver ?

In short, Cloud Computing is simply to access shared resources, software over the internet, and Software as a Service (SaaS) to make that software available to customers via the same channel and thereby the vendor or supplier, charges a type of a leasing fee (depending on the vendors business model) for utilizing their software or resources.  [Edit: Of course - this model has at its core - the ability to scale massively and on demand - something that not all 'legacy' vendors are able to do.  BC]

The conceptual idea of selling software has become a model of the past, most companies are moving to a software as a service model allowing their services and software to be made available to customers at a fraction of the cost while they still maintain the ownership of the software.  [Edit: unfortunately not always at a fraction of the cost, but the long term TCO is generally considerably lower due to the simplified approach.  BC]

This has obviously changed the strategy and operations for the smaller to medium size vendors who have been more flexible in growing their own market share within the SaaS business model.

But this does put strain on the larger [legacy] vendors who do not have the flexibility of the smaller [younger - SaaS specific] companies, they have to incorporate their current business model and build that into a Cloud-based / SaaS model moving forward, which has kept a number of BA’s up late at night trying to figure out how to move this large ship with fixed processes and models to a flexible Cloud Based customer centric solution. For some local and international companies this is still a slow and difficult transition.

OPNET is a company that we have partnered with for a number of years, and are certainly a leader in the APM space.  They too are in the process of slowly changing their business model within the Network and Application Performance arena to ensure that they move forward with the changing trend in IT [edit - but as mentioned above - this isn't always easy. BC].

OPNET was founded in 1986 by brothers Mark and Alain Cohen, have a number of software packages in three categories of application and network concerns. Application Performance Management, Network Engineering, Operations, and Planning and Network R&D.

Its flagship product is APM (Application Performance Management) suite, which consists of three solutions: ACE Live, ACE Analyst, and Panorama.

ACE Live performs network monitoring, measurement, and detection of SLA violations. It gathers data about application performance, resource utilization, route quality, and other metrics and monitors network flows through passive Ethernet connections. It integrates seamlessly with ACE Analyst, which performs analysis of network packet traces, intermittent application problems, and other data in order to troubleshoot application performance problems.

Panorama does transaction tracing within the Java and .NET platforms and uses correlation technology and a statistical correlation engine to detect patterns in metrics and events. It monitors metrics with established ranges for normal behaviour and identifies deviations based on how far from normal they are.

OPNET’s products are slowing moving towards a SaaS model, but this will take some time, although the company can install its products on site for a customer and operate them on the customer’s behalf, they are still a way off from having a truly Cloud Based / SaaS offering.   [Edit - Unfortunately - APM type products just don't lend themselves to SaaS that easily, and Alain's comments below reflect this dilemma. BC]

Alain Cohen CTO of OPNET :

“For the most part, our solutions need to operate in the environment where the business transactions are processed and the network traffic is present,”

“They’re processing a lot of data, so to transfer it across the Internet would not be the best approach, and some of our solutions just wouldn’t work well that way, particularly in some aspects of reporting.”

So for a number of larger well know vendors who are trying to incorporate the SaaS model into their business, it will definitely be a slow and painful process.

For the immediate future Cohen says “OPNET’s mission is to keep looking for new levels of capability for application performance management. It will search for new ways to give all levels of IT staff visibility into the performance they’re getting and to expand the software’s analysis and troubleshooting to every nook and cranny of the IT environment”.

What is Service-now?

So here’s a a pitch on Service-now.com for the uninitiated. This is most certainly not the best, most comprehensive or only angle to consider, but I tried to touch on many of the aspects that local business in South Africa are concerned with and areas that I believe need real consideration.

As Marutech we have a few great products that enables you to offer better IT services while cutting costs and Service-now.com (SNC) is our flagship product that is taking the world by storm.  SNC has in fact shown exponential growth over the past 5 years – reaching the $50m revenue mark even quicker than Salesforce.com.

Service-now.com is a comprehensive IT Service Management (ITSM) solution and more.  In fact, it’s been seen more and more as an ERP for IT due to all the great features that are being added such as Project and Portfolio Management, Sale Force Automation, Runbook Automation, Development Lifecyle Management, etc. – far more than a just an ITSM solution. It competes directly with your current Remedy, HP Service-Manager, CA Service Desk or Frontrange HEAT solutions.  The great advantage of this solution is

that it was developed purely as an internet based service (i.e. Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) and is thus an off-balance sheet solution to which you subscribe on an annual basis rather than having to purchase licenses and hardware which you have to then maintain yourself.  The fact that it’s web2.0 type design allows you to access it from anywhere and at any time using virtually any browser (including smart-phones) is just an added bonus and adds great value to all your IT users.

Service-now.com has been replacing legacy systems worldwide at an astonishing rate (see attached competitive snapshot) because people are after solutions that are simpler, easier and best practice aligned – solutions that offer similar or better features, flexibility, customizability and benefits that legacy vendors just can’t match.  The amount of time and resources required to maintain or enhance existing legacy systems is costing more than what the systems [sometimes] seem to be worth, hence, the advantage of using a robust solution to which you simply subscribe.

I encourage you to review this solution before renewing maintenance or spending more time and effort on your current system.

Core Functionality

Service-now.com currently offers eleven Pink Elephant verified ITIL (v3) modules (i.e. Incident, Change, Problem, etc) and a whole bunch more – all inclusive of the subscription.  You can choose to enable each functional area as your organization matures and needs arise to utilize additional processes.

Architectural [default] features that most can’t afford in legacy systems include full disaster recovery, 3-5 different instances (depending on your size) so that you can separate your development and test platforms from production, numerous integrations and a high level of security and even encryption of the data if required.

Services Considerations

Probably the biggest differentiator to legacy solutions is the reduced effort (resources and time) to get the system going, aligned to business requirements and keeping it running.  The intuitive interface and ease of use means that customers are sometimes up and running and fully functional in a matter of weeks rather than months (or even years).   Service-now.com manages all hardware and software components so the effort, resources and risk of managing the systems, upgrades, etc yourself are all taken away.   As an example of the value of a great architecture, Service-now.com did the last upgrade of over 1500 instances (spring release) in under 2 days – with zero failures.   Service-now.com has been going since 2004, they releases 4 upgrades a year and continue to add great new features with virtually every upgrade.

Case Studies

Some of the world’s largest and most famous organizations are using Service-now.com including Facebook, New York Stock Exchange, Google, PWC, Hyatt Corporation, Pepsi, VeriSign, Myspace, Best Buy, Deutsche Bank, Juniper, Cisco…   the list just goes on.   In 5 years, Service-now.com have gained over 490 customers globally and are currently signing up between 5 and 10 new customers every week – this says a huge amount about the success of the product and the need out there for a fresh approach.

Costing Overview

The pricing model couldn’t be simpler.   Pricing is based on a subscription per process-user per year.  (specifically process users –  self-service users and people simply logging or monitoring their requests are at no cost).  The only ‘other’ component that is priced separately is the discovery option which requires the installation of a ‘probe’ in your environment and which will help with effectively populating the CMDB if you don’t have that info.  Discovery option pricing is currently based on the number of servers you have, but this is possibly subject to change in the near future.

The biggest consideration however with regards to cost remains the long-term value and savings achieved in reduced resources needed to maintain, develop and support the system.  This is where most organizations really see huge benefits.

To wrap up…

If you have more time to explore this, I’d encourage you to visit the website: www.service-now.com.   You could even go as far as getting your helpdesk manager or team to test the look and feel of the solution on the global demo instance (but be aware that others may also be playing around on it so you might find some funnies appearing.  This instance is reset one a day at 12:00 SA Time back to defaults.)

If this sounds good – you’d be right.  It’s a great product and Service-now.com are a great vendor to work with.

If you have any queries – please feel free to contact us on +2711 287 1501.

Marutech ad iWeek

Take a look at our latest full-page add that featured in the ITWeb iWeek 11 August publication… (inside back cover).

Take a look!

The message is hopefully quite clear.  The world is changing, and if you’re not changing with it – you’ll end up as a fossil.

Is Cloud Computing still Cloudy?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been quite tied up with [continued] research into cloud computing services, architectures, vitualization, business models, opportunities, market trends and more. I’ve also been quite busy figuring out how to utilize the press and marketing more effectively for building our brand and getting our message out there.  Consequently, I’ve also been far more in tune with what vendors and other IT organizations are ‘punting’ under the cloud computing banner.

Through this process I realized that there has been a significant increase in quality and quantity of material on the subject over the past 12 months. Last year this time, it seemed like the world had just woken up to Cloud Computing. Large vendors had nothing to offer – yet.  They had marketing messages, but nothing with which to substantiate them.  Vendors were scrambling (in a mad panic) to get their solutions ported to some cloud derivative. At the same time they were trying desperately to muddy the water, knowing good and well (or perhaps not!) that their cloud solutions were not really fitting into the massively scalable “cloud computing” paradigm as defined by Gartner et al. Instead, they were creating some half-baked managed service offering using the same legacy solutions they had purchased (for millions or billions of dollars) but for which they failed to retain the critical skills that helped create the solutions in the first place.

Now I can’t quite figure out if they actually succeeded in muddying the waters or if the paradigm has always been as broad as it is. Virtually every service out there today is being re-branded with “as a Service” suffix to take advantage of the cloud computing SaaS, PaaS and IaaS acronyms.  I’ve even seen in-sourcing type services taking advantage of the hype.

Now I’m not saying they don’t meet some of the requirements to qualify as cloud services, but I certainly question whether these solutions meet the fundamental scalability requirement. Let’s take “Testing as a Service” (TaaS) for example. I honestly can’t see how its ‘right’ to market a service which is very human resource dependent as a cloud service and categorize it in the same way as Software as a Service (SaaS).  In theory, SaaS solutions are able to scale ‘massively’ in a matter of hours or minutes.  Now – unless you can clone human resources overnight, I recon you have a problem meeting this paradigm objective with TaaS.

Sure, TaaS is still a service and is being offered remotely via the Internet, but does that qualify it as a cloud service?   Cloud services in my book are services offered using a cloud computing platform (although that would be contested by many), I believe TaaS is mostly an outsourced solution using licensed products such as HP quality centre and the like and actually has nothing to do with cloud computing.

With that long digression, I get back to my topic… Is cloud computing a bit cloudy?  I think the the answer depends on your source of information.  If you are specific about who’s message you believe, the answer is NO, but if you trust the general marketing messages out there, the answer will have to be YES.   Research organizations such as Gartner, Forrester, etc have very clear and effective definitions for cloud computing, but vendors, resellers and even integrators that don’t have clear understanding of what it is but want score on all the hype have done well to sow confusion.

Consider this: how many times have you heard or read opening statements like “everyone seems to have a different definition of cloud computing”?    I say  be wary – half of those statements are made by people who don’t have the foggiest idea (intended pun) of what cloud computing actually is all about. They are ten to one lost between the hype, false marketing, vendor influence, and misinformation from a host of other lost souls.

Vendors and service providers that woke up to cloud computing idea too late to have their own true cloud offering, have IMHO actually succeeded in branding quasi-cloud based services as cloud computing.  Some have even succeeded in convincing the world of their points of view, all in the interest of protecting their own sales figures from taking a dive.

So, perhaps the final answer to my question is a vague ‘maybe’.  Although i have a clear vision and understanding of Cloud Computing and the associated services, the waters have been muddied. The general tech-savvy person out there has finally figured out what it all means, well, kind-of, depending on the source of information.

Clear as mud.

Mistakes made by cloud vendors… (insight #3)

David Linthicum wrote a great article on Infoworld’s Cloud Computing blog entitled “The top 5 mistakes cloud vendors make – and what you should watch for“.  It’s a long title, agreed, but its a great read – and not too long at that.

For the impatient and execs that don’t have 10 minutes to spare, here are the 5 points summarized:

1. Not focusing on API’s:  API’s are critical for adoption in the enterprise and shouldn’t be an afterthought.
2. No integration strategy:  Don’t treat integration as a bad word to be dealt with by the consultancy team.  Have a strategy that will enable customers to do it themselves.
3. Outage defensiveness:  As a service provider, don’t be naive and think you won’t ever have downtime.  And don’t go on the defensive when you do.
4. Confusing SLAs:  Lawyers tend to set these up – make sure they can talk English.
5. Spinning standards:  Don’t just talk and write about standards – make sure they’re implemented.

Looking at these points objectively, I think that David got it right.   In the same way that traditional software vendors out there are rushing to put forward their cloud computing alternatives (generally cloud-washed implementations of exactly the same stuff they sold before), both traditional software vendors and ‘pure’ cloud vendors that are making these mistakes seem to be all over the place.  The ones not making these mistakes are making huge strides into the enterprise market.

That being said – it’s easy to talk and criticize – but we’re also selling cloud computing solutions – and I have to admit that we don’t always get it right either.  But what I can say, is that when our solutions have shortcomings, we feel it our obligation to highlight these, as our integrity is more important to us than the deals we may lose by being honest.