The End of Legacy: An Easier, More Agile Alternative to BMC There is obvious value for organizations that can tightly integrate both IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM). Each point of integration eliminates considerable manual effort and potential for inaccuracy while also speeding up IT s ability to respond to business requests and changing conditions. For the past twenty years, the Big-4 (BMC, IBM, HP and CA Software) have dominated the enterprise management market as they were perceived to be the only path to achieving an integrated approach to IT Management. However, new technologies have emerged that have not only transformed the way IT delivers user experiences, but have necessitated a transformation in the way that technology is managed. Specifically, these transformations include: Virtualized compute and storage technologies, automation capabilities and Agile operations have slashed the time it takes to deploy new services; from months to minutes. However, IT is still responsible for maintaining appropriate performance and service levels. Business owners are increasingly more knowledgeable about technology and increasing scrutiny of technology budgets, demanding greater transparency and clearer returns on investments. Modern APIs are simplifying integration projects, enabling greater flexibility in vendor selection and better mobility to move to new vendors. Off-premise cloud providers are becoming realistic alternatives, in terms of costs and capabilities, to traditional on-premise data centers. The combination of the previous two is enabling organizations to shift workloads frequently, potentially on-demand, to new providers to take advantage of better cost and efficiency opportunities. As organizations embrace one or more of these transformations, the legacy architectures of their Big-4 management suite investments are showing limitations that threaten to hinder their ability to maximize the potential for competitive advantage of these new technologies. BMC in particular, after following a Development through acquisition business model over the previous decades, is struggling to prove that it s legacy architecture is relevant in today s modern enterprise. This document will describe why BMC s complex suite of diverse products is constraining its customers potential, as well as describe an easier, more cost effective and agile approach to IT Service Management through the tight integration between and Service Management. www..com
BMC s Acquisition History The Limitations of Legacy Very few of the products sold by BMC were actually designed and developed by BMC. As you can see in the time line to the left, all of their core products were introduced as a result of acquisitions, including the foundational BMC Patrol and BMC Atrium products. As a result, few BMC products share common design patterns, data models, development approaches or dependencies. With each acquisition, additional scripts or patches had to be developed specifically to enable integration or communication with other products in BMC s portfolio. Per Gartner s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Management, August 2012, BMC s large portfolio of APM-relevant technologies remains fundamentally a collection of disjointed technologies with some level of click-through integration and event data flowing into BPPM. This is a key weakness in the solution set that cannot be fixed through additional acquisitions. What s More: It takes longer to instrument a new service in BMC s suite than it takes to deploy the service itself. While integration with BMC Atrium and Remedy are marketed to automate the instrumentation of new resources as they are introduced to the CMDB, the truth is that additional configuration in silo-specific products (e.g. Storage Manager, EUEM, etc.) are still required. This can result in scenarios where a new service is brought online in a few days, but effective monitoring and instrumentation requires weeks of effort, during which incidents and issues go undetected unless reported by users. BMC s approach to event enrichment is exceedingly inefficient. In a nutshell, each product in the suite evaluates a subset of the infrastructure and identifies events, with a lot of this work being performed by the production servers being monitored. These events are then sent to Event Manager for correlation with other events from other products, with considerable processing required in between due to the disparate format of events from the various products. This leaves numerous possibilities for critical events to slip through the cracks that would be identified if all of the raw attribute data across silos could be evaluated. Troubleshooting issues requires consulting multiple interfaces, causing issues to last far longer than when compared to organizations that could leverage a single dashboard to access all of their IT metrics. Multiple databases, from multiple vendors, are required to support a typical deployment, requiring maintenance in addition to denying opportunities for new insights due to data segmentation. Too much work is required to establish and maintain the various integration points necessary in a typical BMC deployment. Updates to individual products can break integrations, adding to IT s already massive workload. Although BMC has introduced a SaaS offering of their suite, BMC Patrol remains the backbone of the architecture, constraining the solution to the same limitations of the on-premise version. www..com 8 7 7. 7 8 0. 3 4 7 3
A Modern, Cost Effective Alternative Although many monitoring, management and ITSM products exist on the market, a lack of integration has prevented most vendors from delivering a complete approach to IT Management. However, the recent integration between and Service Management (CSM) has finally enabled organizations to have a clear alternative to the complex BMC suite. The and CSM integration combines best of breed Incident Management, CMDB from with s award winning Enterprise Monitoring and service dependency discovery for a fully automated, cloud-based management platform that provides a 360-degree view of your technology-based business services. Through this integration, organizations only need to maintain a single service model that can be used for ticketing, monitoring, reporting, capacity planning and incident response. How +CSM Avoids the Limitations of the BMC Enterprise Suite: Tight integration via web services at the CMDB and Incident layers. s IT service dependency discovery maps critical services and their dependencies and synchronizes these maps with CMDB. As issues in the health or performance of these assets is identified, automatically generates Incidents in and continually synchronizes updates between the two solutions, including the ability to automatically close an Incident when normal operating conditions are identified. Because this integration is performed through modern, REST-based APIs, it faces none of the challenges and risks inherent in the BMC strategy. Fewer products are needed to achieve the same outcomes. Whereas BMC requires well over a dozen products to deliver end-to-end management, and CSM incorporate a wider capability set with just two products. This simplifies training, implementation projects, maintenance tasks and licensing. Web Service integration embraces open standards. This enables fewer integration challenges between the two. Additionally, s inclusion of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), enables seamless expansion of its capabilities in terms of data collection and normalization. All data collected by, whether from SNMP, Syslog, WMI, optional agents, VMware API or through direct database connectivity is managed through the Enterprise Service Bus which facilitates normalizing the data for easier analysis. This is how is able to achieve, with a single product, the same visibility and alerting as over 18 BMC products. No Need for Event Enrichment. All data captured through monitoring is normalized and written as rich objects stored in hierarchical documents. These documents use a flexible schema and can change dynamically as the data itself changes. This allows data across traditional silos to be analyzed in a single, cohesive way. Where BMC s Event Manager attempts to aggregate and analyze events identified by downstream monitoring tools to identify service impacting events, is able to evaluate the raw data collected from its various data collection methodologies to identify issues that can slip by BMC Event Manager. www..com
Single interface simplifies root-cause analysis. Even with integration, BMC users often must consult multiple interfaces to trace issues. In the case of, all monitoring has been centralized into a single dashboard, enabling organizations to drill down to root-cause in just two clicks. This helps to significantly reduce the time it takes to resolve issues. Automated configuration eliminates considerable manual efforts. Extensive use of automation and built-in discovery enable both and CSM to automatically configure themselves in most environments. When this needs to be extended for custom monitoring requirements, organizations need only access a single interface. Where weeks are required to fully instrument a service in BMC s suite, the same can be achieved in less than an hour with. In addition to avoiding the limitations of BMC s complex suite, the combination of + CSM also delivers new capabilities: Support for financial and business data. In addition to traditional technology monitoring, actively collects key business data that is then correlated with technology performance to inform users of the business implications of events. This enables organizations to better align their management of technology with the business and raises the organizational credibility of IT. Predictive Analytics. s Analytics product, a client-side predictive analytics tool that leverages the vast amount of data collected by Stratis, includes numerous algorithms to help operators identify previously unknown causal patterns and evaluate future resource requirements Simpler, more predictable licensing. Both and Service Management follow a simplified licensing model based on actual utilization, with none of the add-on components or integration products that make BMC licensing challenging. On-demand scalability. The Big Data architecture of both and Service Management allows organizations to expand or contract their implementations on demand, with no need to re-architect the deployment. For example, in the lead up to the holiday season many retail organizations expand their e-commerce infrastructures to support expected spikes in traffic. can easily be scaled on demand to manage these additional resources, and then contract afterwards as necessary. Future capabilities without integration nightmares. The modern platforms that both and CSM are built on are designed with considerable flexibility to support future emerging technologies. Stratis leverages an Enterprise Service Bus that simplifies the process of integrating new data collection methodologies without requiring extensive development or design. This enables customers to purchase one solution with the knowledge that it can support their future strategies. www..com 8 7 7. 7 8 0. 3 4 7 3
Replacement by BMC Product To better understand how the two solutions, and their integration, can effectively replace a BMC implementation, the following outlines the products that comprise the BMC suite, their function and how they would be supplanted. Please note that the following assumes that the currently implemented product is utilizing out of box functionality to support publicly documented use cases. In scenarios where the currently implemented product has been extended through custom development or professional services, a deeper discussion will be necessary to evaluate how or CSM could achieve the desired outcome. BMC Product Function Replacement Comments BMC Application Diagnostics Real-time monitoring of application middleware. BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) BMC Atrium Analytics Reporting capability for BMC Atrium & Both include native report generation capabilities BMC Atrium Discovery & Discovery of environment and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) dependency mapping BMC Atrium Orchestrator Runbook automation BMC Atrium Service Level Management Define and manage service levels and service level agreements BMC Bladelogic Automation Suite Automated deployment and configuration of infrastructure BMC Capacity Optimization Capacity analysis and planning BMC Dashboard for BSM Dashboard views of service health BMC End User Experience User experience monitoring Manager (EUEM) BMC Event Manager (BEM) Consumes event data from the various BMC products to correlate events across silos Unnecessary as approaches event enrichment in an entirely different way. Please see previous section. BMC Patrol Monitoring BMC ProactiveNet Performance Monitoring Management BMC Remedy Action Workflow and process management Request System (ARS) and automation BMC Remedy Asset Management Tracking of asset inventory BMC Remedy Change and Change request management Release Management BMC Remedy Knowledge Management Knowledge base & Both include knowledge base capabilities. BMC Remedy Service Desk Incident ticketing and management BMC Service Impact Management (SIM) Event correlation from a Service perspective approaches event correlation from an entirely different perspective, see previous section for more details. BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time Application monitoring www..com 8 7 7. 7 8 0. 3 4 7 3
Complete Support for ITIL Functional Areas +CSM offer organizations a complete solution for supporting all of the key functional disciplines of ITIL, enabling a cloudbased and highly automated 360-degree view of the complete service life cycle. The following diagram outlines each of the functional areas of ITIL, with the corresponding solution that provides support. Migration Roadmap Migration from BMC to +CSM follows an evolutionary approach designed to minimize disruption to your organization. As both and CSM are designed around modern software delivery approaches, both solutions can be stood up in about a day, eliminating weeks of work building servers, installing applications and seeding databases. In fact, it is the goal of to deliver our first dashboards on the first day, a goal that is consistently accomplished. Initial migration efforts typically start with s IT service dependency discovery, with the resulting Configuration Item (CI) data and relationship information bulk transferred to CMDB. This allows multiple simultaneous migration efforts to follow, as the ServiceDesk can begin transitioning while establishes self-adjusting baselines for normal service performance to identify service-impacting events and degradations. From here, the individual BMC monitoring tools can be taken offline in a orderly state as final configuration is completed in. To further facilitate a smooth transition, s ESB can leverage BMC products as data sources or push event data to BMC products such as Event Manager (BEM). For example, as PATROL servers are decommissioned in areas that is monitoring, events can still be sent to BEM to maintain event enrichment for automation efforts. This ensures constant coverage of production environments and frees organizations to take their own pace in transitioning between solutions. More information about s ESB can be found in the white paper titled Are Silos Killing Your Cloud? How a Leverage and Augment Strategy Can Help You Achieve Your Cloud Vision. www..com
Return on Investment When evaluating a transition from BMC to +CSM, 5 key factors contribute to a significant return on investment. 1. Licensing Costs - While the licensing costs of BMC products alone is significant, any ROI analysis should also include the licensing of dependencies such as database applications, operating systems and any other third-party software as none of these will be required with +CSM in place. Not only does the modern replacement come in at a considerably lower price, but the monthly subscription model offers a more predictable and sustainable expense. 2. Supporting Infrastructure Costs - It is not unusual to see BMC deployments in excess of 150 servers, just to run their various products, requisite databases and integration applications. A private network is often required as well. In addition to the up front expenditure, these resources consume power and air and require significant man hours to maintain and update, all of which can be either decommissioned or re-purposed for business-contributing projects. 3. Professional Services - In a constantly changing technology environment, the need to update or customize BMC products to support the change can lead to massive professional services expenditures. The average enterprise engages in 4-8 professional services projects each year, with each project easily reaching six-figures. 4. Training - Certification in BMC products requires months of classroom lead instruction, carrying significant costs in terms of registration as well as the work hours lost due to the people being trained are inaccessible. And when certified employees move on to new careers, their replacements require training. The easier configuration and administration of and CSM solutions carries the benefit of considerably lower training requirements, enabling your team to get up to speed on both solutions at less expense and less time out of the office. 5. Operational Efficiencies - The consolidation from 18+ products to 2 carries with it the potential for numerous efficiency improvements. The fewer interfaces that needed to be consulted to resolve an issue, the less time it takes to restore services. Fewer databases to maintain also means less opportunities for inconsistency or error. Duplication of effort is also considerably decreased. It all combines to help your team focus on driving business and spending less time and effort to manage your management tools. www..com
Conclusion Integrated IT Service Management has long been a high priority goal for enterprises across the globe, but traditionally it was perceived that the only way to achieve it was through a massive, complex implementation of a Big-4 suite such as the one offered by BMC. Unfortunately, BMC s suite is struggling to remain relevant in a period of massive technology and business transformations. These same transformations have enabled and Service Management to revolutionize the industry and offer an easier approach to achieving a 360-degree view of the IT service life cycle. Takeaways: + deliver an easier, more cost effective alternative to a complex BMC implementation. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model offers significant ROI and eliminates the need to configure and maintain infrastructure dedicated to management tools. Seamless migration process minimizes potential for disruption, leveraging s Enterprise Service The combination of + CSM is the only fully automated, cloudbus to feed event data to BMC tools or leverage them based management platform that empowers enterprises to manage the as data sources. complete lifecycle of their critical services with best of breed Incident Organizations gain considerable operational efficiencies Management, CMDB and Service Performance Management. At a by consolidating from 18+ products to two, tightly lower cost point and complexity than required to implement BMC s integrated solutions. enterprise management suite, your organization can easily get on the same page with a consistent and highly accurate understanding of your critical services and their health, performance and business impact. For more detailed information about how +CSM stacks up against BMC s suite of products, visit http://www.firescope.com/compare/stratis/ today. Now, imagine what it could do for you. Get started today by visiting http://www.firescope.com//. www..com