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If your attending Burton Catalyst July 26 - 30, don't miss out on the Novell Identity Manager 4 reception and make sure you invite your customers that are attending!

Join us for fantastic food, awesome prizes, an open bar, entertainment by magician David Harris, and a chance to win an HP Mininote!

Operate, Control & Deliver Services through Technology is the Job of IT Operations

Cloud and Virtualization brings Agility - At What Hidden Cost and What Value?

When the Novell Business Service Management product team was on the cusp of releasing an integration to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service (EC2) this month the very first thing that came to my mind as a one time (century's ago in the dark ages of mainframes, assembler, CICS and COBOL) application developer was, "if dialing up a VM is free in the cloud, what is to stop me from calling it continually, on a whim and just leave it running?". If I don't see the cost, how would you expect the costs to be managed conscienciously and with frugality? Why would that occur to me? Coming from the dark ages, I worked for a large outsourcer where size of the code, how fast it ran, how many requests for the same data was scrutinized (read once, use often), etc.

Reminds me of having a mobile phone, sent to Europe to travel and told, just use the phone. Then I found the roaming charges as I investigated my own usage one month in an attempt to estimate what I might require on a personal plan. WOW! The hidden roaming cost would have changed my behavior had I known ahead of time.

Read on for quick run down of these hidden costs brought on by new technology...........

When I was younger I played lead guitar in a heavy metal band. I also co-hosted a radio show on a community radio station. I remember how incredibly empowering it was at that time to be able to have an audience for my thoughts and ideas. Music and radio were mediums that allowed me to go from being a consumer of ideas being fed to me, and become the author of my own thoughts.

The Novell Data Synchronizer product has now entered public beta! Support for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and other ActiveSync enabled devices is now in the final stages of engineering.

We are pleased to announce that the SEP Basic Training (SBA) and SEP Certified Administrator (SCA) training will be held this year at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business Campus in beautiful Boulder, Colorado July 27th-30th 2010.

IT Operations often Maliced as a "Roadblock" - Time for Datacenter Redemption! Next Generation of Business Service Management

BSM is more of a "market" than a tool as is IWM, both with areas of focus that deliver the goal in the end. Both have requirements of marrying many IT metrics and turning them into actionable information as well business aligning IT technology silo's as services. Infrastructures supporting the market of IWM bring in the added complexity of portability, dynamic configurations, policy driven, identity aware, mixed environments (many outsourced to Cloud service providers), the likes IT operations and datacenters have yet to experience. Daunting no doubt.

The question becomes, will your Operations Center be the "roadblock" or the "catalyst" for agility with control, business alignment and responsiveness to take action in real-time?

Read on....first of several blogs to address the IT operational topics of Operate, Control and Deliver services in the new paradigm of Intelligent Workload Management................

After the fact "reporting" is merely just reporting the score of the game!

Bold statement, I know. Let me explain. When asked about where BSM or IT to business alignment projects begin, I can generally categorize in 3 buckets:

• Fixing "Boo Boo's" - Availability & Performance - ROI tangible, tied to revenue impacted by outages
• Process Efficiency - Automation, Change, Control - ROI is tougher and more "cost management"
• Service Alignment - Service to Business Impact - ROI tangible, tied to manual cost reduction

Service alignment driven projects tend to the final stage of maturity, however, this does not need to be the case as defining these service objectives defines the objectives and behavior of the previous 2 project categories and has the potential to drive bigger bang for the buck by driving top line revenue versus bottom line costs.

Read on to find out how to make your SLAs matter.............

Hype and Bubble Burst for the CMDB Finally - Fall of the Dreaded 4 Letter Word!

They fall as fast as they rise. What is the "value" of static data from the past in a database? Outside of tracking how many, cost and depreciation value, I cannot think of a single thing. Although as I watch the Nats play the Mets, baseball is all about metrics and stats from the past without relative value for the novice watcher. Number of homeruns in relationship to how many others have hit or the most ever hit brings a whole new perspective. It's the relationship and relativivity of the metric that brings "value" by creating "information".

The topic of CMDB can bring holy war, lengthy debate, but tonight I am going to be short and sweet with luck and slightly controversial.

Read on..........

Will history repeat itself with a "busting" explosion of rolling thunder from dotcom days?

CIO Magazine reports from a recent Economic Impact Study (April 2010) that 39% of the 410 respondents say that the economic recession has accelerated their organization's use of alternative IT models (e.g., cloud, on-demand services, SaaS). As an ex-analyst from the sourcing era of ASP's, ISP's, MSP's, etc. in the dotcom rush to get to the web via hosting providers, this is a reminiscent trend and one that repeats with each new technology trrend.