2010 The Year Of The Service Provider
Finally - the post I promised Valerie I would do 2 months ago when we first used the phrase '2010: The Year of the Service Provider'
. She has kindly refrained from getting on my case about this - she's just that nice - but now that we're right around the corner from FOSE where we going to do a 'sneak peek' of the EM7 Integration Server, it's definitely time.
If you've read the posts I write from the Gartner shows, you might notice the increasing frustration I had with their lack of focus on and coverage around service providers. Understandable perhaps - since their customers are for the most part enterprises. But all that talk about Real-Time Infrastructure, Dynamic Infrastructure, Cloud Computing with Virtualization, Automation, Chargeback, Self-Service Portals, etc - it's the service providers that are leading the charge on all of this. Distinguished Analyst Tom Bittman even mentioned in one of his sessions that his virtualization/cloud super-users told him that they look to service providers, not vendors, to get code for building their own enterprise self-service portals.
The reason why: most service providers have been running (or striving) to run their operations like a private cloud for years - far before the term 'private cloud' ever darkened the Gartner doorstep. They really had to find ways of doing more with less - running lean and efficient IT operations because margins matter in their hyper price-competitive and severely resource-constrained world. They had tens, hundreds or even thousands of customers that needed to be supported in a multi-tenant environment based on shared resources. The consumption of these resources (bandwidth, memory, storage, etc) had to be measured, billed, monitored and displayed at an individual customer level. And to support all these customers in the manner they expected to be served, service providers built self-service portals where compute resources were available on-demand, using virtualization and automation technologies, not because these are cool but because they had to meet the requirements of scale, speed and service their customers (and the market) were driving them towards.
Sound familiar? With automation and self-service portals in particular, we've now entered the realm of the private cloud.
This is the year that many enterprises and government agencies get serious about cloud computing and start running their IT operations like service providers.
We've watched with interest the ongoing dialogue and progress made in cloud computing. One by one, our service provider customers have made their own announcements about cloud offerings. There's a reason why service providers (in their different forms) make up about 40% of our customer base. Many of us here at ScienceLogic, including all three founders, come from a service provider background. In fact, those experiences - running lean, efficient IT operations, being resource-constrained, first-hand frustration with too many point solutions or framework modules that cost too much (in terms of valuable engineering time and money) - are at the heart of why ScienceLogic and EM7 even exist.
The original product was designed with service providers in mind - multi-tenant from the start, bandwidth billing engine for chargeback, a services catalog of customizable SKUs, a holistic view of infrastructure performance and availability reaching all the way down to individual operator views of devices, integrated service desk that automatically tied actual operations issues to workflow and resolution. And last year, on top of the years of perfecting EM7 as the complete monitoring platform for service provider (type) operations, EM7 G3 added the scale, security, continuity of monitoring operations and more necessary for today's extreme cloud requirements of the largest service providers, government agencies and enterprises building their own private clouds.
At FOSE we're showing a sneak peek of the EM7 Integration Server, which does pretty much what the name says it does. It provides an elegant, secure and powerful way to pull data out of and push data into EM7 systems. Sounds simple but the possibilities are enormous. For anyone building a self-service portal for their private cloud, Integration Server supports automated monitoring provisioning; once VMs are provisioned, EM7 can automatically set monitoring policies according to what a customer has 'purchased' via the self-service portal and, taking this one step further, work with a software release/distribution tool to ensure that the right software is installed and then monitored to the specifications already laid out by your engineers.
I'm running out of room here - this post is already pretty long, so I'll save the public cloud monitoring story for another one. But I'll wrap it up by saying, that EM7 stays true to its original vision to Simplify IT Management by now simplifying data center and cloud management in a single, easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy solution. It provides a holistic view of computing assets wherever they are - in data centers, remote and mobile assets, or public, private and hybrid clouds. With the demands of agile IT, it's never been more important to see the full picture because end-to-end IT services delivery now spans multiple computing environments, and resources are increasingly shared, dynamic and expected to be available on-demand. You need the full picture for capacity, planning, troubleshooting and optimizing performance and availability. Multiple solutions that don't talk to each other don't cut it anymore, if they ever did. Best of breed solutions have their place, but without that view across everything, you really are only seeing a piece of the ever broadening picture.
by: Julia Lim
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