mhudnall's blog

Technology as a Commodity Utility Keeping the Lights on OR
Technology as Innovation Driving Business Growth

Two articles from last week have caught my attention as well as the continued pressure in corporate objectives to use technology to drive business growth and be an enabler, differentiator in the market and not just a utility running the business like electricity as a commodity. It catches my attention both from a marketing perspective and the role of technology to drive business growth. Read On......

The Intuit outage on Tuesday night, June 15th that lasted 36+ hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers and one third of the $1.607 B in revenue as reported for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering of it's Turbo Tax Online, Online Banking , Small business Accounting, Online Payroll and Intuit Website spurs this much awaited blog entry - Do SLA's matter? YES!

Read on.......

Virtualization, Cloud, Fabric, Heterogeneous Complexity, Mini-Suites, Business Alignment!

I am back from my annual trip to Orlando for the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations conference. Always time to re-charge and ponder positioning of my product and solution. This year's conference was particularly exciting with the adoption of new computing options: virtualization, cloud, fabrics and the list continues. Techies love their new toys, business seeks growth options through agility and then there is always that afterthought of management - control with flexibility and agility! It is possible! Read On . . .. .. ..

4 Letters that inspire Holy War IT Debates

The CMDB, more importantly the CMS, is the inner mechanism within IT organizations that will enable agility, control, silo to service transition, and the list goes on. However, it is the topic that stirs passion on the magnitude of discussing politics or religion in mixed crowds! I have been speaking on the topic for several years now and often spoke of the coming complexity that has now arrived in the data center and IT management world, virtualization has left the “development lab” and moved into production. If you didn't have your CMS strategy in place, it just exploded a magnitude of difficulty higher with a virtualized infrastructure AND the coming next magnitude of difficulty with a mixed private and public cloud infrastructure!

The article that prompted this blog asks the question “Is the CMDB irrelevant in a Virtual Cloud Based World?” ( http://virtualization.info/en/news/2010/06/on-the-... ) It's not the CMDB that is relevant, but rather what comes out of the CMDB and how it enables the IT organization. Read on........

Has BSM crossed the chasm?

John Dragoon's blog post (http://www.novell.com/company/blogs/cmo) got me thinking about a common discussion that occurs regarding BSM. The Novell Business Service Management technology has been in the game for >12 years now and one would think it is mainstream by now, especially in terms of how fast technology updates come to market. It's interesting in that BSM isn't a technology, but rather a practice IT organizations are attempting to achieve in aligning to the business and speaking in terms of services. It's hard to believe that in >25 years (I started at age 12) this nut still hasn't been cracked. Yikes! “Glue and a View” technology is as close as I can think one can come to addressing the alignment with a pure play technology, however, takes the clever IT leader to best understand how to use the “glue” to create a “view” that enables the team to acknowledge-assess-act in market time to market conditions leveraging the technology to call these audibles before the game goes awry as the next outage headliner. I see the daggers in the hearts of my developer friends with this over simplification of a “rich” integration engine that presents metrics as information about services in real-time to have a “view” of technology as services in the most complex of environments. Read on.........

Can cloud computing break the tension? Or will it bring increased chaos?

CIO Magazine published a nice article this week, “8 Ways to Measure Cloud ROI” http://www.cio.com/article/595179/8_Ways_to_Measur... , which prompted some age old thinking about the laziness in IT to quantify business value and contribution to the top line over the the bottom line through cost reductions. I say lazy over inability because there is capability, it requires “work” over “playing” with new technology toys. Why would I want to create my own “report card”, unraveling the “IT Hero Cape” to just an ordinary Joe? Business Service Management – threat or Super Hero Maker?......read on.....