Infrastructure Management Report

Butler Group believes that there is an increasing need for sophisticated management tools to manage the IT infrastructure. Enterprises and service providers are facing huge demands to improve their service levels, but have to contend with increased pressure on their infrastructures from applications such as content management, data warehousing, and enterprise portals. We believe that the complexities now present within the average IT infrastructure will be dwarfed in the medium term as new technologies such as Web services and Grid computing are introduced.

There is a strong move in the market to provide business service management, which is variously described by vendors as service assurance and business impact management. This is shown in Butler Group's Business Level Infrastructure Performance (BLIP) Management Model that identifies the following layers:

Stage 1: Component Management.
Stage 2: Problem Management.
Stage 3: Performance ManagementPerformance Management.
Stage 4: Service Management.
Stage 5: Customer/Business Impact Management. Alles zu Performance Management auf CIO.de

Traditionally, Infrastructure Management products have addressed Stages 1, 2, and 3, but there is now a new breed of products taking a business service management approach, addressing Stages 4 and 5. This is causing a considerable shake-up in the market, and forcing the established vendors, such as IBMIBM, Computer Associates (CA), and Hewlett-Packard (HPHP), to reshape their product offerings to meet this challenge. However, while they may have a strategy to extend their product offerings to include customer and business impact management, the tools are not necessarily yet available from these major players. Alles zu HP auf CIO.de Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

There is a move towards the management of the IT infrastructure for business, with the Web sites of enterprises becoming an important and sometimes crucial channel to market. There is no way that these complexities can be managed through skilled staff alone, even if they are available. The shortage of skilled staff will continue and the problem will get much worse unless they are supported by technology to enable them to perform a more proactive role. More and more enterprises are becoming global and they require the capability of being able to manage their infrastructure centrally.