In the wake of IBM's zEnterprise announcement I've seen and heard many
different reactions. On one end of the spectrum is "ho hum, another attempt
to make the mainframe relevant." On the other end is "why would anyone choose
zEnterprise as a hardware platform when the whole point of cloud applications
is that users don't know what's under there."
Those extremes miss the point, as extremes often do. From my perspective,
users are not the direct consumers of these large server platforms. Users
consume application services -- users shouldn't care whether the hardware
platform is commodity, proprietary or hamster wheels. The people delivering
and operating application services (be they ‘as-a-service' providers,
enterprise IT organizations, or outsourcing companies) are the real consumers
of these large server platforms. The people delivering and operating
applicatio... (more)
Recently I listened to a large enterprise customer talk about their four
years of experience with IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM).
They noted that ITCAM had proved to be extremely valuable from the standpoint
of proactively troubleshooting production applications. Which is what I
expected to hear. After all, ITCAM enables you to do both:
End-to-end monitoring, so you can better understand how your customers are
experiencing the application, and
Detailed diagnostic monitoring you'll need for the truly gnarly performance
problems.
However, I wasn't expecting the... (more)
True business agility is not about doing more application updates faster.
True business agility is about doing more application changes faster without
sacrificing the application's performance or service quality.
From my perspective, achieving that second part of business agility means
preventing application performance and service quality problems. For the
longest time IT operations have focused solely on remediating problems, which
is not the same thing. When someone's focus is on remediation, they quickly
realize that it is easier to remediate problems when the environment ... (more)
HP's acquisition of Fortify looks like a quick filler for a hole in HP's
testing portfolio. However, it seems to me that the move is indicative of
the changes in how enterprises are looking to manage their applications. Just
as achieving business agility is more than rapidly developing software,
managing business risks is more than complying to SOX or PCI regulations.
Managing business risks is about embedding security policies in how IT
activities are completed. Some enterprises have started operationalizing
their security practices, by improving the way their security and ope... (more)
Last week I had the opportunity to have a hallway conversation with a CTO of
a large software company about how the interactions between development and
operations teams are changing. I asked his opinion on measuring the benefit
of that collaboration. He noted while they did not have direct metrics for
their teams, they found that having a rating system for applications under
development did effect how developers approached their projects.
Their rating system incorporated the expected operational characteristics of
an application. For example, applications that must be as resili... (more)
Jasmine Noel is a founding partner of Ptak, Noel & Associates. She has over 15 years experience analyzing and consulting on IT management issues. She currently focuses on technologies and processes that organizations require to design, engineer and manage the performance and service quality of business applications, workloads and services. Noel served previously as director of systems and applications management at Hurwitz Group, where she formulated and managed the company’s research agenda. She was also a senior analyst at D.H. Brown Associates, where her responsibilities included technology trend analysis in the network and systems management space. Noel is regularly quoted in and contributed articles to several leading publications and content portals on various IT management topics. She holds a bachelor of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master of science from the University of Southern California.
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