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EMA Product View
? 2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Why the IT Infrastructure Library is
Catching on
With its roots in the British Civil Service in the 1980s and a focus
on better use of IT services and resources, the IT Infrastructure
Library (ITIL), http://www.itil-itsm-world.com/, has become
a de facto standard for IT organizations seeking to optimize to
business requirements. In recent years, interest in ITIL, long
strong within Europe, has become dramatic and significant
within the U.S. and worldwide.
There are multiple reasons for ITIL’s ascendancy, not the
least of which is the collapse of the technology bubble at the
beginning of this millennium and the subsequent need for
IT to not only assert, but to actually demonstrate value. The
notion of technology for technology’s sake was passed over for
accountability and business relevance – a transition long overdue
but ignored by many IT technologists loathe to bridge the gap
between technological innovation and business value.
ITIL’s libraries focus on processes and process interdependencies
in support of IT Service Management (ITSM). As such, ITIL is
providing many IT organizations with a consistent lexicon for
communicating across siloed skill groups – such as network, or
data center, or application specialists – in support of initiatives
directed at managing the full infrastructure holistically, in
support of customer-valued services. In this way, ITIL has
become a powerful catalyst for change and transformation that
is not only impacting IT processes directly, but management
technology and organizational trends – indirectly.
ITIL’s Seven Libraries
While ITIL offers training and certification, at the core of its
offerings are its seven libraries. These include:
•
Service Support – is primarily the day-to-day assurance
of services, which ITIL defines as “ the practice of those
services that enable service to be provided effectively.”
Along with “Service Delivery,” it is one of the two mainstay
libraries around which many ITIL process definitions and
best practice recommendations were built.
•
Service Delivery – focuses more on readiness planning
and the monitoring of financial impact on critical business
services. It includes a wide array of strategic business and
operational planning processes.
How Evident Software Makes the Business of
IT Transparent – in Support of ITIL Processes
Executive Introduction
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) promotes best practices
globally for what it calls IT Service Management or ITSM.
ITIL’s notion of ITSM demands that IT organizations step up
to their role as “service providers” within the businesses they
support, with a focus on customer service quality, IT-to-business
alignment and accountability. ITIL’s seven libraries, which have
become a resource to many IT organizations worldwide, capture
a fairly complete set of processes and process interdependencies
required for effective ITSM. These process definitions and
process flows help to provide IT with a consistent lexicon for
how processes should come together to support more effective
collaboration in support of business and service goals.
This report provides a quick reference guide for understanding
what ITIL’s libraries and processes are, and maps them to
Evident Software’s capabilities in asset auditing, demand
profiling and service pricing. Evident Software occupies a
distinctive position with the enterprise IT marketplace, focusing
on understanding how services and assets are used – and
capturing consumption and demand as it impacts cost and
quality. These insights are essential for ITIL-driven planning,
as they are a core foundation for IT accountability, service
assurance and business-aligned optimization.
Product Summary
Vendor name: Evident Software
Product name: Evident Enterprise
Product function: Provide transparency into the usage,
costs, and business drivers of IT infrastructure
Operating system under which it runs: Windows,
Linux, and Solaris
URL for product information:
www.evidentsoftware.com
Vendor contact information: U.S.: +1.973.338.2300
U.K.: +44 (0)20.7877.4005
Pricing information: Per deployment configuration
Availability: Generally available
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EMA Product View
? 2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
•
Application Management – targets lifecycle application
service planning, including pre-production and post-
production planning, monitoring and management.
•
Security Management – defines process and process
interdependencies relevant to data confidentiality, data
integrity, and data availability.
•
Planning to Implement Service Management – is
really a preparatory set of disciplines targeted at getting
the critical processes and assessments in place for effective
Service Support and Service Delivery.
•
ICT Infrastructure Management – “ICT” stands for
Information and Communication Technology, and this
area focuses on the provisioning and support of the
infrastructure as an enabler for IT Service Management.
•
The Business Perspective – focuses on understanding
and documenting the business requirements for IT – and
aligning those requirements, processes and priorities. It
demands clear insights into IT requirements and behaviors,
coupled with attentive customer dialog.
ITIL’s CMDB
ITIL’s notion of a Configuration Management Database
underscores the emphasis that ITIL puts on managing across
interdependencies. While the CMDB comes out of ITIL’s
processes surrounding what it calls “Configuration Management,”
it is also an enabler that goes far beyond conventional notions
of configuration and change and supporting directly or
indirectly virtually all disciplines central to ITSM. According
to ITIL, the CMDB should “hold the relationships between
all system components including incidents, problems, known
errors, changes and releases. It also contains information about
employees, locations, suppliers and business units. Automated
processes to load and update the Configuration Management
Database should be developed where possible so as to reduce
errors and reduce costs. Discovery tools, inventory and audit
tools, enterprise systems and network management tools can be
interfaced with the CMDB. These tools can be used initially to
populate the CMDB, and subsequently to compare the actual
‘live’ configuration with the records stored in the CMDB.”
In terms of asset management and financial planning, ITIL’s
CMDB suggests that the walls limiting asset and cost planning to
spreadsheets only should eventually become a thing of the past.
For while it is process-centric with ITIL, the CMDB concept
nonetheless implies a structural, virtually an architectural
approach – to managing costs as they pertain to services
delivered and services consumed, in which costs and assets
inform and are informed by other disciplines such as capacity
management, service level management, and even availability
management. The implications for this in terms of planning
ITIL initiatives when it comes to financial impact are dramatic
indeed. They suggest a very different approach to satisfying
ITIL’s best practice objectives in Service Support and Service
Delivery than those classically defined within Service Desk-
centric asset management in the past.
Evident Software:
Creating a “Transparent Enterprise”
Evident Software offers a unique approach in combining service
usage information, what it terms “Demand Profiling,” with
asset and inventory information, or Asset Auditing, on the one
hand, and Service Pricing information on the other. This enables
enterprises to correlate asset utilization with service impact
and consumer groups in a flexible manner through On-Line
Analytical Processing (OLAP).
Evident draws its information about service usage, and asset
discovery primarily from a wide variety of metrics including
flow-based or traffic information, such as that provided by
NetFlow. Through ongoing, real-time awareness of flow-based
information, Evident can view every asset on the network
in terms of IP address, port, traffic protocol and bytes of
data transferred. This can then be correlated to documented
asset inventories from other software management solutions,
including directory services, to round out insight into what assets
exist, where they are, who owns them, and how they are being
utilized. Similarly, this and other detail across the network and
within the data center provide impact on systems, database and
bandwidth demands, and costs based on individual consumer,
departmental, partner and other customer groupings.
Figure 1: Asset Auditing, Demand Profiling, Service Pricing
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EMA Product View
? 2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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This visibility or transparency into consumer behavior as it
maps to service requirements and costs, in terms of both the
application services themselves and the infrastructure (asset)
components supporting them – is central to ITIL’s demands for
accountability and quality. The flexibility to look at investments
as performing contributors to services – in support of active
consumer demand – creates a multi-dimensional view of IT-
to-business interdependencies that EMA has documented in its
2001 report, “Asset Performance Management.” EMA views
this nascent market as an area of intensive potential growth
over the coming five years.
Mapping Evident’s Solution Set to ITIL
Best Practices
In order to more specifically plan for deployments using
Evident’s suite of applications, EMA is providing a mapping
to those ITIL processes where Evident’s benefits are most
pronounced. It should be stressed that this mapping is not
exhaustive, as one way or another the dimensional insights that
Evident’s products can provide can support an even broader
array of ITIL processes than indicated here.
The Business Perspective:
This is one of ITIL’s seven libraries, already defined above
as those requirements to support IT-to-business alignment,
including informed dialog between IT and its business
constituencies. Evident’s distinctive ability to capture consumer
behavior (e.g. departmental, individual, line of business, partner,
etc.) provides in itself a valuable and proactive set of data with
which IT can proactively inform its business clients about
how its services are valued, and how they are supporting the
business. This in itself is essential for effective service planning.
The added ability to marry cost information (in terms of both
overall services and contributing individual assets) significantly
enriches the context for this IT-to-business dialog.
Service Support:
The following supported processes through Evident solutions
are within ITIL’s library for Service Support:
Change Management:
Change management is a process-centric discipline designed to
ensure that changes (both planned and those made in response
to unplanned incidents) are implemented in a manner beneficial
to the enterprise, and with minimal risk. Change management
is closely related to configuration (which documents existing
conditions) and release management (in which changes are
actually implemented). Evident’s dynamic awareness of asset
utilization and service consumption provides a valuable context
with which to assess how to plan and implement changes in
order to minimize impact to service quality and minimize
infrastructure and operational costs, as well.
Problem Management:
While Incident Management involves change requests as
well as such things as unplanned events or trouble tickets,
Problem Management targets the resolution of persistent
problems, as is the case with many performance issues in
particular. Evident’s insights into where component assets are
and how they are impacted by service demand is contributive
to Incident Management and strongly supportive to Problem
Management.
Configuration Management:
In ITIL, Configuration Management includes the documentation
of all relevant components supportive of critical services,
including capturing their interdependencies and relationships.
ITIL views this as a core foundation for a wide range of
processes and disciplines, as articulated in its Configuration
Management Database (CMDB). Evident Software’s capabilities
to correlate accurate asset inventory between existing inventories
and its own flow-based discovery is directly supportive of
Configuration Management.
Service Delivery:
Evident’s portfolio provides core support for the following
processes within ITIL’s library, Service Delivery:
Financial Management for IT Services
This area of ITIL includes virtually all of asset management,
from chargeback accounting for service usage, to software
metering, and is closely related to change and capacity
management from an optimization perspective. There is little in
the marketplace today that could offer a broader set of insights
into service-relevant costs than Evident with its mix of asset
auditing, demand profiling and service pricing.
Capacity Management
ITIL’s Capacity Management is intended to ensure that
the infrastructure can meet existing and future service
requirements, as well as support the introduction of new
technologies, such as VoIP, or conversely, Web Services.
Evident’s insights into service consumption and demand as it
impacts the application infrastructure overall, and individual
assets in particular, provides a solid context for informing on
Capacity Management decisions.
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EMA Product View
? 2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1017.110305
Enterprise Management Associates
2585 Central Avenue, Suite 100
Boulder, CO 80301
Phone: 303.543.9500, Fax: 303.543.7687
www.enterprisemanagement.com
Service Level Management
The aim here is to ensure that service quality is maintained or
improved. Service Level Management leverages Service Level
Agreements (SLAs) to capture the relationship between the
customer and the service provider. Evident’s ability to actively
capture how services are being used and by whom, as well as
to capture their impact across the IT infrastructure, makes
service planning and monitoring more informed and relevant
to business priorities and operational planning.
Availability Management
ITIL defines this area as monitoring the infrastructure for
effectiveness and efficiency in supporting the availability and
performance of services in support of existing SLAs. If done
correctly, it is informed by problem management and helps
at the same time to minimize recurring problems. Evident’s
ability to correlate service usage with infrastructure impact is
strongly contributive to addressing Availability Management
requirements.
Conclusion:
This report demonstrates the very real relevance of understanding
service demand as it impacts service planning and pricing, costs
and infrastructure optimization, and asset investment planning.
EMA is delighted with Evident’s expansion into the asset
arena as a natural extension of its “Demand Profiling,” and its
core, flow-based enabling technologies. This makes Evident’s
relevance to ITIL even broader and more profound.
Evident Software occupies a unique position in the industry. It
is not a new company, and so has a mature and sophisticated
set of offerings to address the strategically critical intersection
of asset, performance and service management. However, this
is a relatively new market area in terms of market readiness and
market awareness. As a result, Evident faces very few direct
competitors and occupies a clear and leading role in answering
these industry requirements.
Evident has also demonstrated its ability to scale its asset metering
and service pricing solution to very large enterprise networks. As
Evident continues to evolve towards more real-time presentation
and reporting (its summaries are currently targeted at daily-
granularity), and as it matures further in ease of deployment and
administration, EMA expects Evident to accelerate its position
of leadership in this virtually emerging market.
About Evident Software
Evident Software provides transparency into the usage,
costs and business drivers of enterprise IT infrastructures.
Evident’s solutions meter, aggregate and correlate usage data,
in the context of a business-centric information model, to
tell you what you have, how it is being used, and what your
costs are. Used by some of the world’s largest Enterprise IT
organizations - including Fidelity Investments, IBM, and British
Telecommunications - to conduct Asset Auditing, Demand
Profiling, and Service Pricing initiatives, Evident’s solutions
deliver an ROI of 3%-5% of annual IT operations spend and
transform the IT infrastructure into a driver of business process
efficiency, growth and profit.
Corporate Headquarters:
1455 Broad Street
Bloomfield, NJ 07003
Phone: +1.973.338.2300
Email:
info@evidentsoftware.com
Web:
www.evidentsoftware.com
Europe Office:
Level 7
Tower 42
25 Old Broad St .
London, EC2N 1HN
Phone: +44 020 7877 4005