We are sometimes so focused on details that we forget to think clearly. Nothing new there; it’s still a story about trees and forest. A few years ago, this was clearly the case when I met with one of the first vendors of run book automation. My first thought was that it was very similar to workload automation, but I let myself be convinced that it was so different that it was obviously another product family. Taking a step back last year, I started thinking that in fact these two forms of automation complemented each other. In “Market Overview: Workload Automation, Q3 2009,” I wrote that “executing complex asynchronous applications requires server capacity. The availability of virtualization and server provisioning, one of the key features of today’s IT process [run book] automation, can join forces with workload automation to deliver a seamless execution of tasks, without taxing IT administrators with complex modifications of pre-established plans.”In June of this year, UC4 announced a new feature of its workload automation solution, by which virtual machines or extension to virtual machines can be provisioned automatically when the scheduler detects a performance issue (see my June 30 blog post “Just-In-Time Capacity”). This was a first sign of convergence. But there is more.

Automation is about processes. As soon as we can describe a process using a workflow diagram and a description of the operation to be performed by each step of the diagram, we can implement the software to automate it (as we do in any application or other forms of software development). Automation is but a variation of software that uses pre-developed operations adapted to specific process implementations.

I am starting to see signs of important changes in technology and IT organizations. The increased complexity of IT and business services forces the industry down a new path. In this context, there are signs reminiscent of what happened to the mainframe vendors in the late 80s and early 90s, when the transition from proprietary to open systems was usually not very successful. In fact, the major players of today (with the exception of IBM) were small potatoes in the 80s, while the major players of that time are either gone or dying. And some vendors today seem to be following the same recipe for eventual disaster.

What’s happening, in the case of a major change of market direction in a company with revenue based on old technology, is what I would call a “sales force failure.” This is the inability of the sales force to get out of its base of usual customers and compete head to head with new vendors in the new market.

Usually these organizations are technically capable of building up-to-date products, but the sales results often don’t meet expectations. Since the new product created internally does not sell, the company management may be tempted to fix the problem (i.e., satisfy the shareholders in the short term) by cutting the cost center, that is the engineering organization making this new product. With R&D gone, the marketing group  may license another product to replace the one that it killed. Of course, the margins are not the same, but the cost is almost nonexistent. Eventually, this product does not sell either (the sales force is still in the same condition), and, when the old legacy products are finally dead, the company is no more than a value-added reseller.

While it may have taken humans thousands of years to progress from oral to written to audio and then to video communications, in the past five years, the Internet has accelerated at a breakneck pace through all of these different communication transmission stages. It started as a way to post and communicate text and still pictures, then moved to digital voice and music, and then took a giant step to video delivery, bringing you news, sports, movies, whenever and wherever you wanted to view them. The Internet is now the prime platform for distributing video content, effectively replacing your video store and your cable or broadcast distribution.

The choice between different formats of cloud computing (IaaS, SaaS mostly) and their comparison to internal IT business service deployment must be based on objective criteria. But this is mostly uncharted territory in IT. Many organizations have difficulties implementing a realistic chargeback solution, and the real cost of business services is often an elusive target. We all agree that IT needs a better form of financial management, even though 80% of organizations will consider it primarily as a means for understanding where to cut costs rather than a strategy to drive a better IT organization.

Financial management will help IT understand better its cost structure in all dimensions, but this is not enough to make an informed choice between a business service internal or external deployment. I think that the problem of which deployment model to choose from requires a new methodology that will get data from financial management. As I often do, I turned to manufacturing to see how they deal with this type of analysis and cost optimization. The starting point is of course an architectural model of the “product”, and this effectively shows how valuable these models are in IT. The two types of analysis, FAST (Function Analysis System Technique) and QFD (Quality Function Deployment), combine into a “Value Analysis Matrix” that lists the customer requirements against the way these requirements are answered by the “product” (or business service) components. Each of these components has a weight (derived from its correlation with the customer requirements) and a cost associated to it. Analyzing several models (for example a SaaS model against an internal deployment) would lead to not only an informed decision but also would open the door to an optimization of the service cost.

I think that such a methodology would complement a financial management product and help IT become more efficient.

The marriage of Gomez and Compuware is starting to bear fruits. One of the key aspects of web application performance management is end user experience. This is approached largely from the data center standpoint, within the firewall. But the best solution to understand the real customer experience is to have an agent sitting on the customer side of the application, without the firewall, a possibility that is clearly out of bounds for most public facing applications. The Gomez-Compuware alliance is the first time that these two sides are brought together within the same management application, Compuware Vantage. What Vantage brings to the equation is the Application Performance Management (APM) view of IT Operations: response time collected from the network and correlated with infrastructure and application monitoring in the data center. But, it’s not the customer view. What Gomez brings with its recent version, the “Gomez Winter 2010 Platform Release” is a number of features that let IT understand what goes beyond the firewall: not only how the application content was delivered, but how the additional content from external providers was delivered and what was the actual performance at the end user level: the outside-in view of the application is now combined with the inside-out view of IT Operations provided by Vantage APM. And this is now spreading outside the pure desktop/laptop user group to reach out the increasing mobile and smart phone crowd. IT used to be able to answer the question of “is it the application or the infrastructure?” with Vantage. IT can now answer a broader set of questions: “is it the application, the internet service provider, the web services providers?’ for an increasingly broader range of use-case scenarios.