EMC's Project Bourne morphed into ViPR at the EMC World 2013 event at Las Vegas last week. It seems like everyone has a different take on what should be included in SDS, and my definition and implementation guidelines can be found in this report. Like other vendors, EMC is promising to revolutionize the way customers will provision, manage and create storage resources using ViPR, which will become a key component in the vendor's Software Defined Data Center strategy for virtualizing compute, networking, and storage resources.  Unlike other years, where EMC bombarded its attendees with dozens of product launches, this year's show focused almost entirely on ViPR, which makes sense given the importance of this technology. ViPR is expected to become generally available in the latter half of 2013, and like all other SDS implementations, ViPR is designed to reduce the number of administrators it takes to manage rapidly growing data repositories by using automation and self-service provisioning. So what's under ViPR's covers?

This blog has been kindly provided by Sandy Winschief, a vendor/supplier management specialist at TCS, who previous provided: A Late New Year’s Resolution: Be Nice To A Supplier And See What Happens. They are Sandy’s words with just a little editing on my part. Enjoy…

Service integration?

Service integration (SI) is already one of the IT buzzwords of 2013; you might also hear service integration and management (SIAM) which brings in an IT service management (ITSM) perspective. However, just because it is one the most talked about ideas in the IT industry does not mean it is understood.

For now let’s just say that if you could take your E2E IT operations and the complex multi-supplier environment in which it sits and give that pain to someone else to manage while you concentrate on what you do best, on your customers and their needs, then why wouldn’t you? This, in essence, is what pure-play SI is (Stephen – at Forrester we are also speaking to clients about internally operated SI).

Sounds attractive, doesn’t it?  The good news is that it can be. The bad news is that my experience to date has shown SI implementation can be a painful experience if those involved are not prepared.

Planning for service integration

The transition to an SI model is a lot easier if time is invested upfront to:

• Housekeeping key areas of the IT environment
• Engaging a potential SI provider earlier to work with the organization – to help organize and plan for transition readiness.

Yesterday, BMC Software announced that has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by a private investor group led by Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital together with GIC Special Investments Pte Ltd (“GIC”) and Insight Venture Partners (collectively, the “Investor Group”).

Under the terms of the agreement, affiliates of the Investor Group will acquire all outstanding BMC common stock for $46.25 per share in cash, or approximately $6.9 billion.

This is one of the largest M&A operations in a long time. Significantly, it has been prepared for quite some time, which culminated in a restructuring a month ago, by which the five product groups operating under BMC Software became one. Instead of having several categories reporting their gains (or losses) we have now one happy family where the gain of one member balances the loss of another. We have also a unique opportunity to have these former product lines working together for a better integration of BMC Software solutions with a corollary prospect of having more R&D investments in previously “weak” categories. Being free of the short term mandatory “good results to satisfy the street” will also participate in building a better BMC Software.

Although fourth quarter results were below the Street expectation by a hair (-$.06 per share and -.04% in Revenue), BMC Software bookings grew 14% from a year ago, with an encouraging result for ESM which was up 9% from a year ago.

Over the past ten years, BMC Software has made its mark on the IT Management Software (ITMS) market, and is today only second to CA Technologies. From what we can see, the privatization of BMC Software provides an opportunity to invest into the future of ITMS and to become a serious contender for first place in the years to come.

As a follow up to his presentation at the 2013 itSMF Norway conference, Stuart Rance of HP has kindly donated some practical advice for those struggling with availability.

Many IT organizations define availability for IT services using a percentage (e.g. 99.999% or “five 9s”) without any clear understanding of what the number means, or how it could be measured. This often leads to dissatisfaction, with IT reporting that they have met their goals even though the customer is not satisfied.

A simple calculation of availability is based on agreed service time (AST), and downtime (DT).

If AST is 100 hours and downtime is 2 hours then availability would be

Customers are interested in their ability to use IT Services to support business processes. Availability reports will only be meaningful if they describe things the customer cares about, for example the ability to send and receive emails, or to withdraw cash from ATMs.

Number and duration of outages

A service that should be available for 100 hours and has 98% availability has 2 hours downtime. This could be a single 2 hour incident, or many shorter incidents. The relative impact of a single long incident or many shorter incidents is different for different business processes. For example, a billing run that has to be restarted and takes 2 days to complete will be seriously impacted by each outage, but the outage duration may not be important. A web-based shopping site may not be impacted by a 2 minute outage, but after 2 hours the loss of customers could be significant. Table 1 shows some examples of how an SLA might be documented to show this varying impact.