As you might expect, there are a number of different definitions for Business Service Management (BSM) floating around today - from IT software vendors and industry analysts. Major industry analysts. like Gartner, Forrester, and EMA, agree that BSM is software that essentially forms a dynamic link between business-oriented IT services and the IT infrastructure components that support those services. Analysts will gone to tell you BSM monitors IT infrastructure performance and availability in real-time to not only determine business impact, but also to help isolate root-cause and thereby quickly remediate IT outages.

And while this still may sound complex, when you talk to the over 300 Managed Objects customers that have implemented our BSM solutions, they will tell you that BSM can best be characterized as a suite of integrated solutions working together to provide four essential capabilities:

• Maps technology... to applications... to the business
• Creates a trusted source for IT and the business
• Turns data into powerful intelligence
• Makes visualization relevant to a diverse community

In short, BSM lets IT organizations more effectively monitor and manage the applications and services they deliver to the business.

Today, BSM has become an imperative for a growing number of Global 2000 companies. This is largely because companies have learned that BSM not only facilitates and accelerates important best-practice initiatives like ITSM, ITIL and Service Level Management (SLM), BSM has proven time and time-again to be effective in addressing the critical challenges that consistently rank among IT's top priorities, year after year, these include:

• Control Change: Minimize the risks caused by infrastructure changes
• Communicate Value: Show how IT meets and exceeds the needs of the business
• Manage Impact: Mitigate the business impact of outages and other IT problems when they occur

The bottom line is that when applications fail and outages or slowdowns occur, the business top-line suffers - often dramatically. In one recent example, an appliance manufacturer recently attributed $64M in lost revenues to a 3-day outage of its in-store Inventory Reorder Kiosk.

And what about all those other critical IT initiatives you hear about, such as ITIL, CMDB, Service Level Management, Application, Business Process or Project Monitoring; Availability and Performance Dashboards - how does BSM fit in with these? Actually, all these initiatives are part of BSM. You see, BSM consists of a suite of applications that can work separately or all together - and are all part of a single common "BSM fabric". In this way, companies adopt BSM in a modular fashion - implementing only those capabilities that address their immediate needs, while leaving room for growth and adoption of other BSM applications as the company grows and needs change.

Learn more about BSM