Enabling the Real-Time 'Holy Grail' Philadelphia PA

provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.com

The drive toward process maturity ultimately will lead IT organizations to managing business services across a real-time infrastructure, say experts.

For now, though, the percentage of IT organizations actually doing anything meaningful around the real-time infrastructure is in the low single digits, says John Scott, vice president of marketing and product development at RealOps.

With good reason: The progressive paradigms of real-time infrastructures, or utility or on-demand computing, require some serious coordination on the change management front. As any IT pro knows, change to servers, network devices, and other systems leads to more service failures than any other problem. And manually resolving those issues, which can result in Service Level Agreement violations, can potentially take hours - if not longer - from looking up the device in one system to checking the services attached to it to checking the change logÂ…you get the picture.

Now imagine developing the ability to handle changes to all those configuration profiles in real-time in the typically siloed IT organization, where various teams have their own sets of tools and processes. Imagine trying to extend the patchwork of custom integrations that organizations often depend on now to help automate the process in this environment. That approach is unlikely to be sustainable or scalable. The job of CFC (chief fry cook) at the local diner is starting to look pretty appealing, no?

It doesn't have to be this way, according to some new and familiar vendors in the automation space, including RealOps.

"When you think about the logical conclusion of paradigms like the real-time infrastructure, you need to have the capacity to handle real-time change without leading to a complete debacle on the incident problem management front," says Scott. "So you need an extreme degree of process organization that's codified through automation."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but automation, it may be, will be the enabler of what Scott calls the "holy grail" of the real-time infrastructure.

RealOps just released AMP v. 2.5, its run book and IT process automation technology that's designed to bridge the gap across technology silos. As a first step, it can help automate defined processes, handling the data aggregation and either taking corrective procedures or presenting the information to an operator for action.

But the goal for organizations is to move from automating existing processes to achieving process maturity with best practices, such as ITIL. Scott says AMP helps in a couple of ways. For one thing, automating those daily procedural activities frees up resources to explore ways to move up the process maturity curve. For another, the product includes hundreds of ITIL-based workflows, called Auto Pilots, for common, day-to-day processes, as well as KPI measurements to ensure IT still understands what is going on operationally, even as the process is automated.

In April the company received $8 million in Series B financing led by Palomar Ventures and additional investments from Valhalla Partners. The competitive arena includes other start-ups, such as Optinuity. The big four network and systems management vendors are eyeing the space closely, as well. Those guys have been there before with the framework battles of the '90s, Scott points out, which never panned out as real out-of-the-box solutions for integrating across their respective systems.

"What we do today with RealOps is take a different approach but attack the same problem, recognizing there is no such thing as homogeneity of the enterprise management environment," he says. "No one has all IBM or all HP - they have three, four or five, if not 25 or 100 different point tools. You need to be able to plug things together very quickly to look at holistic process design." Also critical, he says, is RealOps product's ground-up design for scaling to millions of processes a day.

You can't discount the technology issues, but the biggest challenge to adopting ITIL or COBIT or ETOM is largely one of IT organizational structure, culture and politics.

"That challenge has really been the critical challenge that has hampered IT's ability to better align with the business," Scott says. "That's why so many IT organizations continue to have a fragmented set of different silos they run. The constant complaint from business is IT is too slow to move and it feels like we have to figure out what piece of the IT organization we have to talk to deal with different problems."

Automation of processes across technology silos can help change that picture, but first step is to get buy-in in the face of resistance, based on fears of loss of control. Do it, Scott says, by starting small, with a critical area that's causing a lot of pain, costing a lot of money, and degrading service quality. "Deploy, demonstrate success and get political capital to expand the automation into other areas."