October 2007

Managed Objects, which offers tooling for mapping the impact of infrastructure events to applications like SAP, is in the throes of beta testing a new change detection tool that deals with custom-built apps on which sectors like financial services heavily rely. And it’s introduced a new UK survey conducted by Vanson Bourne that quantifies the extent of the problem in banking and finance.

Custom apps hit banks in the pocket

Give me CMDB before I die

15 May 2006

Martin Banks, IT Week: Martin Banks opens the article noting that he recently 'suggested new performance metrics would be useful to indicate how well systems provide the services that users actually want on an ongoing basis'. He goes on to explain how Managed Objects has since put forth the argument for 'a metric to indicate how systems can make management easier over the long haul, and perhaps one to indicate the complexity of the processes they can manage'.

09 May 2006

Staff, Computer Weekly: Managed Objects has partnered with German-based Realtech, a developer of SAP performance tools, to offer users a SAP monitoring service. Managed Objects' Business Service Management software will use RealTech's TheGuard! Application Manager to enable businesses to monitor, manage and measue SAP services.

03 May 2006

David Norfolk, The Register: 'IT: – Still the Black Hole of the Balance Sheet?' was the title of an interesting media roundtable organised by Managed Objects (http://www.managedobjects.com/). It discussed measuring the cost/benefit of IT in the business, although a research survey (of almost 300 IT and business managers) commissioned by Managed Objects as a basis for the discussion, appeared to concentrate mostly on the cost side of the equation and the granularity with which costs could be measured.

20 February 2006

ITWeek: Sean Larner - Letter to the Editor: It's not surprising that IT gets better results when IT chiefs have seniority in the organisation (Firms reap benefits of board-level IT chiefs, 6 February, www.itweek.co.uk/2149780). IT is more fundamental to business than its leaders are often willing to admit. Although the quoted research shows IT leaders need the ear of the CEO, it doesn't prove that those who gain such access will say the right things. To be effective, IT leaders must speak the CEO's language. This will only happen if they are able to provide a transparent and objective view of IT's value. It is encouraging to see the age-old argument about IT on the board being supported with some practival evidence. Now we as an industry have to provide the tools that will make it common practice.

01 February 2006

Network World: As interest in and adoption of the ITIL framework peaks, industry watchers advise those bringing the best practices in house to take their time and incorporate them in stages. Today business service management (BSM) vendor Managed Objects hosted an Accelerating ITIL Webinar featuring Forrester Research vice president and research director Thomas Mendel, who broke down the best approaches to adopting ITIL processes. According to Mendel, 20% of $1 billion companies are looking into ITIL. And he says best practice frameworks can challenge even the most organized IT shop, and IT managers should consider breaking the adoption into smaller chunks. "One of the key learnings about ITIL is that you can't do it all at once. You need to slice the beast and eat it in digestible pieces," Mendel said on the Webinar. He proposed companies first adopt incident and problem management -- two process sets that he explained are so intertwined they should be considered together. Next IT managers should take on configuration management and then release management, Mendel suggested. Other ITIL processes will follow, and vendor tools would help automate the established processes, he said.

Potomac Executive Biz In the 07/06/2006 edition of ExecutiveBiz we had a chance to catch up with Siki Giunta, President and CEO of Managed Objects. With over 15 years of industry expertise, Siki Giunta joined Managed Objects as president and chief executive officer in 1999. She is fluent in four languages and has lived in six different countries, holding key positions with international companies in Europe and the U.S. EXCLUSIVE CONTENT The complete interview is only available to registered readers. Please register to access the full interview. Registration is free and takes less than 1 minute.

Helen Beckett, Computer Weekly: It is no surprise that IT is often perceived to be the black hole of the balance sheet. Although the value of IT is expounded by analysts and suppliers, there is still no hard and fast way of making the connection between the cost of IT systems and the value of the benefits they deliver. Research by Vanson Bourne on behalf of IT services monitoring and management group Managed Objects found a high degree of sensitivity instead to the cost and costing mechanisms of IT. Among the 285 organisations surveyed, it found a lack of confidence in the measurement of IT costs: fewer than 10% believe the IT department does a good job of controlling costs, and 33% believe the measurement of IT costs is inaccurate. Although concentration on cost seems out of synch with a company's quest for value, the findings do at least show a degree of maturity. "If the same questions had been asked 10 years ago, there would not have been the same sensitivity to cost," says Will Cappelli, research vice-president at analyst firm Gartner. He supports the view that more sophisticated measures of IT have enabled a new cost consciousness and that this is a precursor to quantifying business value.

Potomac Executive Biz In the 07/06/2006 edition of ExecutiveBiz we had a chance to catch up with Siki Giunta, President and CEO of Managed Objects. With over 15 years of industry expertise, Siki Giunta joined Managed Objects as president and chief executive officer in 1999. She is fluent in four languages and has lived in six different countries, holding key positions with international companies in Europe and the U.S. EXCLUSIVE CONTENT The complete interview is only available to registered readers. Please register to access the full interview. Registration is free and takes less than 1 minute.

Intelligent Enterprise: To help companies provide a complete, accurate and up-to-date view of all IT assets, Managed Objects has taken a federated approach. Instead of copying IT asset data from various places--such as from BMC Control, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView and helpdesk software--CMDB360 links to all those sources and provides a layer of reports and business intelligence on top. Managed Objects says the system can help companies start using ITIL best practices for change and configuration management.

Michele Hudnall in Computerworld: If yours is like most IT organizations today, improving the quality of services that IT delivers to the business has become your mantra. As a result, you may be turning to business service management (BSM). A key component of a BSM implementation is the creation of a configuration management database (CMDB), which contains information about infrastructure components, their interdependencies and their "state." CMDBs are important for one simple reason: If you want to find and fix infrastructure issues before end-user satisfaction, business performance or availability are affected, you need access to accurate, real-time and comprehensive IT information. A clear view of configuration is key to the effective management of services as they evolve.

Bruce Boardman, Network Computing: We asked 11 service management vendors 9 critical questions to sort through the crazy quilt of offerings. Here's how to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Amy Larsen DeCarlo, SystemsManagementPipeline: Managed Objects Outlines a Strategy For Speeding Configuration Management Database Time-To-Value. Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) play a fundamental role in helping companies better align technology with their business goals. However, implementing a CMDB is not exactly an overnight process. This deployment challenge can be off-putting to companies that fear it will be years before they see any return on their investment. However, this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Dustin McNabb, vice president of technology management vendor Managed Objects says companies don't necessarily have to wait years to recoup their investment. McNabb, whose company debuted its new federated CMDB last week, spoke with Systems Management Pipeline Editor Amy Larsen DeCarlo about how enterprises can accelerate the time to value from their CMDB.

Martin Banks, The Register: CMDB? That's Configuration Management Database in long-hand, and it is the tool through which IT managements can keep a handle on the increasing complex melange of applications, tools, utilities and the rest that go to make up the operational IT infrastructure of a business or organisation. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in particular will be pretty hard to manage, especially when it comes to building the essential composite applications, without a repository of some sort that knows where every tool, utility and application component can be found, how it interacts with everything else, and what it needs to work. Now the big names of IT infrastructures are circling around the growing CMDB sector. IBM recently announced the upcoming arrival of Tivoli Change and Configuration Management, while Computer Associates has MDB, and BMC offers Atrium. HP is currently lagging behind in this area, with a roadmap pointing to 2008 for a CMDB offering to appear. These are now being joined by companies like Managed Objects which are, according to its CEO Siki Giunta, approaching the CMDB requirement from the top down rather than bottom up.

Staff, SystemsManagementPipeline: CMDB360° promises the asset reconciliation, synchronization, and visualization capabilities businesses need to make education technology decisions. Managed Objects unveiled CMDB360°, its next generation Configuration Management Database (CMDB) which provides a repository for asset information companies can use to assess the potential impact of technology initiatives before they institute them, and improve IT service quality in their organization. The federated database takes in configuration information from multiple sources, making it possible for businesses to get an accurate enterprise-wide representation of all of the hardware and software assets on their network. Managed Objects says that federation technology combined with CMDB360°'s service modeling and visualization capabilities help speed the time-to-value for businesses from years with typical Configuration Management Database (CMDB) solutions to weeks with its asset repository.

Paula Musich, eWeek.com: Implementing a true Configuration Management Database is not for the faint of heart. But business services management provider Managed Objects on June 14 stepped in to try to help IT streamline the process. The McLean, Va., company on June 14 introduced its new CMDB360 offering along with version 4 of its namesake software that makes it possible to implement a federated CMDB in weeks, rather than months or years. The new federated CMDB360 can speed implementation time because it can be dynamically generated from existing IT configuration data and service models.

Martin Banks, The Register: CMDB? That's Configuration Management Database in long-hand, and it is the tool through which IT managements can keep a handle on the increasing complex melange of applications, tools, utilities and the rest that go to make up the operational IT infrastructure of a business or organisation..

James Murray, IT Week: IT directors find it hard to make the right investment decisions because they do not have enough details of how their budgets are spent, according to experts at a recent roundtable discussion. Speakers at the event, hosted by business service management (BSM) software vendor Managed Objects, argued that the IT deprtment remains a "black hole" on the balance sheet of many firms.

Cliff Saran, Computer Weekly Online: A third of organisations are unable to calculate the financial cost of their IT systems, a survey from Vanson Bourne has found. The survey of 113 senior business executives and 170 IT professional commissioned by Managed Objects, a company specialising in business service management, found respondents lacked accurate cost data (53%). Respondents also admitted they were unable to allocate costs by service (48%). One in three business managers (35%) said that the current method of measuring the cost of IT applications was not very accurate. While 55% of IT managers said they did a sufficiently effective job of controlling costs, nearly an equal amount of their business counterparts disagreed. Fifty three per cent of business managers said that IT did a somewhat effective job but could use improvement. Only 7% of the overall sample agreed that IT did an extremely effective job of controlling IT costs. More granularity in the measurement of IT costs would yield improved decision making regarding IT cost management (60%) and better business alignment of IT spend to corporate goals (54%) according to respondents. The problem with measuring IT costs becomes apparent when users try to cost any form of shared service, web service or even a shared IP-based network. Will Cappelli, research VP at Gartner said, "There is a huge gap between the way IT is bought and consumed by organisations." In Cappelli’s experience the financial model used to measure return on investment has been too simplistic. The business has generally focused on the cost of the IT asset, without linking this to any improvement in business. What this has meant, according to Cappelli, is that users found it difficult to measure the cost benefit of buying additional functionality. Sean Larner, managing director for Europe at Managed Objects, said, "Given the industry average cost of a server is £40,000, businesses want a means to measure return on investment."

USA Today: Such behavior is an accurate predictor of character because it isn't easily learned or unlearned but rather speaks to how people were raised, says Siki Giunta, CEO of U.S. technology company Managed Objects, a native of Rome who once worked as a London bartender. More recently, she had a boss who would not speak directly to the waiter but would tell his assistant what he wanted to eat, and the assistant would tell the waiter in a comical three-way display of pomposity. What did Giunta learn about his character? "That he was demanding and could not function well without a lot of hand-holding from his support system," she said.

Stephen Pritchard Independent On Sunday: The market for business services management software will be worth $1.1bn (£630m) by next year, according to Forrester Research. If that prediction comes true, sales will have more than doubled in just four years. Such growth would be good in any area of technology at a time when, for most large businesses, spending on IT is either flat or growing only in the low single digits. It is all the more remarkable because business services management (BSM) is largely concerned with persuading IT departments to spend more on running costs. BSM is designed to make IT more efficient, by managing departments as a set of services rather than a collection of hardware, software and people. BSM, in its own jargon, is "about aligning IT with the business".

Helen Beckett, Computer Weekly: Computer Weekly attended an IT Outsourcing roundtable hosted by Managed Objects in October 2005. This subsequent feature article recaps the roundtable’s discussion about the impact of cultural differences on the success of off-shoring IT. It includes quotes from event panelists from Hitachi, The Infrassistance Company and Managed Objects.