Business Service Management

You already know that to effectively manage end-to-end IT availability and performance you must first manually correlate vast quantities of siloed heterogeneous IT management, asset, and configuration information. Often the time and resources required to sort through the mountains of event and alarm data associated with a typical IT issue can significantly impede problem diagnosis and lengthen IT outage duration. In fact, survey respondents recently reported typical IT outages lasted, on average, one half day or more. That's 4 to 12 hours of reduced productivity, negative publicity, or worse, lost revenue for the business.

Novell offers relief for information overload—without the need to rip-and-replace any of the IT investments you have already made. Novell Business Service Manager gathers and correlates key diagnostic and performance data from your multi-vendor IT management tools. It then consolidates this information into a centralized, Web 2.0 dashboard-based application.

Using the IT tools you already have in place today, Novell Business Service Manager automatically models your end-to-end IT infrastructure—mapping everything from physical IT components such as servers and networks, to the logical services, applications, and workloads that your infrastructure supports (e.g. order processing, online trading, and e-mail). We also model important relationship and dependency information for each component and service—along with critical rules for governance when IT issues arise.

Most importantly, the Business Service Manager model incorporates real-time health information about your services and infrastructure components. IT health information such as availability and performance, is viewed and analyzed through the Novell myMO Dashboard. Using this intuitive, customizable, Web 2.0-based interface, IT operations, service managers and business executives can access the details that matter to them. And thanks to the robust reporting and analytics in Novell Business Service Manager, IT organizations can identify and address IT issues, quickly and accurately.

By slashing the time to diagnose and fix IT issues, our Business Service Management (BSM) solutions reduce IT downtime by up to 50 percent to 70 percent. Shorter outages, in turn, save in IT operational costs while allowing IT personnel to devote more time to value-added initiatives.

So, what's going on here? Quite simply, IT and configuration managers need a complete end-to-end picture of their IT infrastructure. This view must include all applications, services and IT components, along with insight into the relationships between each. Without these details, it's difficult to accurately predict the impact of a change on the production environment.

Novell myCMDB is designed for challenges like these. It combines all essential CMDB capabilities into one easy-to-use package. Features include:

• Federation
• Reconciliation
• Visualization
• Synchronization
• Real-time state
• Advanced functionality for complex data modeling, analytics and reporting

Novell myCMDB automates key implementation, configuration and operational aspects of CMDB management. And it does all this while leveraging your current, trusted IT management data sources. As a result, Novell myCMDB is one of the easiest CMDB solutions to deploy. In fact, less than 90 days are generally required for the initial project.

In addition, myCMDB introduces a new visualization paradigm to solve the CMDB data accuracy issue that imperils most CMDB projects today. By combining Web 2.0 and social networking principles into a simple community-based environment where users can more easily interact with CMDB data—and other CMDB users as well—myCMDB transforms the CMDB into a more valuable, user-friendly environment. Greater usability drives greater CMDB usage across the enterprise. And having more users, of course, makes the CMDB a more accurate representation of the IT infrastructure.

Also, by addressing the critical usability and accessibility challenges that are inherent in large, complex CMDB implementations, myCMDB makes the CMDB not only easier to view and navigate, but also easier to update, and report upon as well allowing IT organizations to realize more value from their CMDB investments.

Finally, myCMDB is an open, vendor-neutral solution that fits perfectly into any existing IT environment—without requiring expensive re-tooling or locking you into a single solution or vendor.

Used in tandem, our Business Service Management (BSM) solutions provide the thorough insight you need to reduce planned downtime by up to 60 percent to 80 percent. Better yet, these open, vendor-neutral solutions fit seamlessly into any IT environment.

The introduction of service level agreements (SLAs) offered some hope for IT organizations eager to prove their worth. But still, IT had no way to prove compliance with contracted SLAs. Until now, that is.

Novell has two solutions that let you convey the value of IT.

Novell myMO Dashboards provides a customizable, role-based view into IT management data gathered from multi-vendor systems. Business executives and others can view accurate, updated snapshots of IT activities using an intuitive and interactive interface. Included are such details as critical network or systems availability along with key trading application performance.

In addition, Novell myMO Dashboards feature bi-directional command and control capabilities. As a result, IT users enjoy an actionable view into IT infrastructure and service management tasks.

Novell Business Service Level Manager allows organizations to easily define Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and to automatically measure and report on IT service level quality in real-time. Pairing this tool with Novell myMO Dashboards gives IT organizations a robust solution to monitor and measure SLAs—both in real-time and historically.

With Business Service Management (BSM) from Novell, IT organizations don't have to settle for reporting on SLA compliance after the fact. Now, IT can leverage accurate, timely SLA reporting to be more proactive in preventing noncompliance situations. It's just one more way Novell helps IT to communicate its business value.

One major problem with the current scenario: Due to technology limitations, most SLAs are measured manually. IT staff must take the time to retrieve and review helpdesk trouble tickets each week or month. As a result, IT assumes a passive role in dealing with SLA compliance. This, in turn, makes it very difficult for IT to be proactive in preventing noncompliance in the first place.

Novell Business Service Level Manager is turning the tide. Our solution allows IT organizations to monitor and report on SLAs, both in real-time and historically. Armed with this information, IT organizations can ensure they meet committed levels of service quality.

In addition, built-in predictive algorithms offer early warning of impending noncompliance issues. Root cause analysis is included to let IT know how to prevent the breach. By keeping revenue-generating services and applications up and running, IT can position itself as a profit center—not just a cost center.

Looking to show how IT meets and even exceeds business needs? With Novell Business Service Level Manager, you can. Start creating SLAs with terms that business actually cares about. These agreements guarantee IT delivers the services the business needs—and that the business understands how these services improve the business. It's a much more compelling approach than pursuing a "management-by-the-nines" strategy.

Finally, our solution lets you serve customers better by reporting on service delivery in real-time or in overtime. Now, you can find and fix IT issues before they affect your customers. It's a great way to prove—and improve—the value of the services you provide.

Customers report that as many as 60 percent of outages are caused by planned changes to the IT infrastructure. When you also factor in unplanned events, it's easy to understand why IT must approach any data center consolidation or split with caution. Potential risks include:

• Interruption of revenue-earning processes, safety systems or customer-facing systems
• Disruption of governance and regulatory systems
• Adverse publicity
• Harm to customer goodwill

How can you avoid the dangers that come with data center consolidations or splits? For one thing, you can ensure your company has comprehensive end-to-end knowledge of your IT infrastructure. This understanding must include all applications, services and components, as well as the relationships between each IT infrastructure element.

Novell myCMDB is a complete Configuration Management Database (CMDB) solution that can deliver this level of insight. Leveraging existing IT management investments, our solution automatically generates and maintains a complete, accurate model of the IT enterprise. Deployment is easy and quick—usually less than 90 days for the first project. And Novell myCMDB provides the key impact and dependency analytics needed for accurate consolidations and splits.

myCMDB also incorporates essential state attributes for configuration items (CIs) across the CMDB implementation. In fact, most of our Business Service Management (BSM) solutions use "state" attributes to track key IT element, service, or application status. As such, state can be used to monitor and manage a variety of characteristics within the CMDB—from configuration item availability and performance to the state of actual physical element change (e.g. identified, moved, tested, in-production, etc.). In this way, IT can record or track change and configuration-management process information while the consolidation or split takes place.

When used along with Novell Business Service Manager, Novell myCMDB can produce an accurate and complete model of existing and target IT configurations. As a result, you can more easily and efficiently deploy necessary network, application- and service-related components.

Novell Business Experience Manager is changing the game. Our synthetic solution for monitoring end-user response time performance is affordable and easy to implement. Active, passive and application monitoring are all part of the package. So, too, is the power to integrate, correlate and visualize real-time and historical application performance results.

Besides measuring performance, Novell Business Experience Manager allows companies to prevent performance decline. Using the solution, you can proactively spot and resolve problems before they harm the business.

If you need to integrate and correlate data from Mercury Interactive Topaz and/or SiteScope, Novell Business Experience Manager has you covered. As a result, businesses can continue leveraging their existing performance monitoring investments while using our solution to get a more complete and effective performance picture.

Most companies today agree that understanding application performance from the end-user's point of view is critical to improving quality of IT services. With Novell Business Experience Manager, you get all the power and capability of an enterprise-level performance monitoring solution at about half the cost.