ITIL's influence extends beyond IT operations to enhance SOA, portfolio management and change management

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Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) advances have helped IT departments recast themselves as mature and process-oriented. But the role and influence of ITIL, especially version 3, is extending well beyond IT organization and operations improvements to impact such essential endeavors as as service oriented architecture (SOA), portfolio management and low-risk change management.

ITIL, in effect, is fostering cultural and behavioral change inside of IT departments, which also has a direct bearing on general business transformation and the ability of enterprises to innovate and compete writ large.

To help better understand the role and impact of ITIL on actual IT departments in a variety of use-case scenarios, I interviewed two ITIL practitioners, Sean McClean, principal at KatalystNow, and Hwee Ming Ng, solutions architect in HP's Consulting and Integration group. The discussion was recorded June 18 at HP's Software Universe event in Las Vegas.

This ITIL impact podcast comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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Interview: HP SOA Center director Tim Hall on new business drivers and efficiency benefits from SOA

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Service oriented architecture (SOA) is at a crossroads, moving from pilot to enterprise status for many companies. As the trends and economics landscapes shift, SOA's benefits and pay-offs are accelerating.

Green and energy-conscious companies are seeing SOA through the context of data center and applications modernization. Toss in a surge of interest in virtualization, ongoing methodological on-ramps to SOA and a budding fascination in cloud computing methods, and we’re looking at the means to accommodate (at lower TCO) all the old and new of IT systems, platforms, framework, applications and delivery services.

That takes data center transformation, and not just adding more servers. We also need is the means to manage the complexity, fragility, scale and cost. HP seems to see this clearly. The goal of data center transformation that goes hand in hand with SOA efficiency is clear, but how to get there is another matter.

To probe deeper into SOA's impact on enterprise IT and business transformation, we sat down with Tim Hall, director of HP's SOA Center products for a discussion moderated by me, recorded June 18 at HP's Software Universe event in Las Vegas.

Listen to this SOA impact podcast, part of a series of discussions with HP executives from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Will ebizQ post my comment on proper blog link etiquette?

I wonder if this comment (below) that I left on Joe McKendrick's SOA blog on ebizQ will show up. I'll let you all know.

[UPDATE: They did, they did publish my comment, and did the requested customary link to my blog ... all's well with the web world. No harm done.]

"Thanks for the blog on my storage and SOA observations, Joe. And thanks for the link back to my SearchSOA Q&A.

However, it is customary in blogs to link back to an individual's blog when you reference them by name, though I notice that ebizQ is often stingy on this point. I've had to ask them several times now to do baseline linking.

So for ebizQ's edification, here are the links to use when referencing my name and analysis for the benefit of their readers:

--http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/
--http://briefingsdirectblog.blogspot.com/
--http://www.briefingsdirect.com/
--http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/
--http://www.findtechblogs.com/soa/
--http://www.interarbor-solutions.com/home.html

Thanks!"

Interview: HP information management maven Rod Walker describes how BI empowers business leaders to innovate

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Business intelligence (BI) has been a top investment for corporations in the past several years, but the ability for BI to generate value and strategic direction guidance is merely in adolescence.

In health care, customer retention, energy and oil management, and for global risk reduction and compliance, BI is offering some of the best payoffs from IT and datacenter investments, says Rod Walker, vice president for information management at HP's Consulting and Integration group.

In this podcast discussion, Walker joins me to explore how BI will continue to be one of the most effective ways for business leaders to leverage IT over he next decade. Proper information management -- including all content in all forms, and not just structured data -- provides powerful market analytics and customer and user behavior inferences to enable real-time decisions about core services, product offerings and go to market campaigns.

Listen to this BI business opportunity overview podcast recorded at HP's Software Universe event June 18, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas. The Walker interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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Interview: Dan Rueckert of HP consulting digs into ITIL's role in accelerating SOA, IT service management

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More enterprise IT departments are working toward Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) principles and reference models for running their organizations. Yet ITIL can provide more benefits than initially meets the eye, including accelerating service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption, faster mean time to recovery in IT operations, and more effective change management.

Dan Rueckert, worldwide practice director for both the service management and security practices in HP's Consulting and Integration group, explains in an interview the direct and significant ancillary payoffs from ITIL adoption -- from establishing an IT service lifecycle to defining an overall IT service strategy.

Listen to this ITIL overview podcast recorded at HP's Software Universe event June 18, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas. The Rueckert interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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Interview: HP Software's David Gee on next generation data center trends and opportunities

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Enterprise CIOs face mounting challenges that are hard and getting even harder. HP says it has a lifeline for these IT departments and leaders over the next five years by helping them to dramatically cut the size of IT budgets relative to the enterprises' total revenue. This allows a shift on IT spending from operations to innovation via next generation data centers.

David Gee, vice president of marketing for HP Software, in a podcast interview from HP's Software Universe event this week, discusses the large global opportunity for enterprises and service providers to cut the relative size of IT budgets by investing in modern data centers that save energy, consolidate applications, leverage virtualization, and rely more on automation than manual upkeep processes.

Listen to this interview podcast, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas, for more on HP's plans for next generation data centers that focus IT on the businesses' interests.

The Gee interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives I'll be doing this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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Interview: HP's BTO chief Ben Horowitz on how application lifecycles and data center operations can find common ground

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There may be no greater "silos" in all of IT than the gulf between application development and data center operations. For the sake of enhancing both, however, common ground is needed -- and HP is putting together a path of greater collaboration, visibility, management and automation to engender "application lifecycle optimization" to better bind design time with runtime.

Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager of HP’s BTO software unit, and former CEO of HP's 2007 acquisition, Opsware, explains in a podcast interview from HP's Software Universe event this week how these hither to fore distinct orbits of IT can finally coalesce.

Through managed requirements collaboration and the use of "contracts" between the designers, testers, business leaders and IT operators, application lifecycle optimization has arrived, says Horowitz. Bringing more input and visibility into applications design, test and refinement, in a managed fashion, allows applications to better meet business goals, while also providing the data center operators better means to host those applications efficiently with high availability, he says.

Listen to this interview podcast, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas, for more on HP's plans for and philosophy on how BTO and next generation data centers come together.

The Horowitz interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives I'll be doing this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

HP burnishes vision on how products support both applications and data center lifecycles

HP opened the second day of its Software Universe event in Las Vegas with "product day," but the presentations seemed more about process -- the processes that usher application definitions and development into real world use.

I've heard of applications lifecycle, sure, but the last few days I've heard more about data center lifecycle. So how do they come together? HP's vision is about finally allowing the operations and development stages of a full application lifecycle to more than co-exist -- to actually reinforce and refine each other.

Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager of HP's BTO software unit, pointed out on stage at the Sands Expo Center that HP is number one in the global market for applications testing and requirements management for software development. And, of course, HP is strong in operations and systems management.

The desired synergies between these strengths need to begin very early, he said, in the requirements gathering and triage phases. Horowitz, the former CEO of HP's 2007 Opsware acquisition, also explained the fuller roles that business, security, operations and QA people will play in the design time into runtime progression. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

I guess we need to call this the lifecycle of IT because HP is increasingly allowing applications requirements and efficient and automated data center requirements to actually relate to each other. You can't build the best data center without knowing what the applications need and how they will behave. And you can't create the best applications that will perform and be adaptable over time without knowing a lot about the data centers that will support them. Yet that's just what IT is and has been doing.

Next on stage, Jonathan Rende, vice president of products for SOA, application security and quality management at HP, painted the picture of how HP's products and acquisitions over the past few years come together to support the IT lifecycle.

Application owners, project managers, business analysts, QA team, performance team, and security teams -- all need to have input into applications requirements, design, test and deployment, said Rende. The HP products have been integrated and aligned to allow these teams to, in effect, do multi-level and simultaneous change management.

Remember the 3D chess on the original Star Trek? That's sort of what such multi-dimensional requirements input and visibility reminds me of. Social networking tools like wikis and micro blogging also come to mind.

Rende then described how change management and process standardization in the requirements, design, develop, test and refinement processes -- in waterfall or agile methods settings -- broadens applications lifecycle management into the business and operations domains.

By allowing lots of changes to occur from many parties and interests in the requirements phase, the IT lifecycle begins in the requirements, but extends into ongoing refinements for concerns about, for example, security and performance testing. Also, the business people can come in and request (and get!) changes and refinements later and perhaps (someday) right on through the IT lifecycle.

I really like this vision, it extends what we used to think of simultaneous design, code and test -- while building advanced test beds -- but extends the concurrency benefits broadly to include more teams, more impacts, more governance and risk reduction. Without the automation from the products, the complexity of managing all these inputs early and often would break down.

HP's products and processes are allowing more business inputs from more business interests into more of the IT lifecycle. The operations folks also get to take a look and offer input on best approaches on how the applications/services will behave in runtime, and throughout the real IT lifecycle.

Because there's also portfolio management benefits applied early in the process, the decision on when to launch an application boils down to a "contract" between those parities affected by the applications in production, said Rende. This allows an acceptance of risk and responsibility, and pushes teams to look on development and deployment as integrated, and not sequential.

Horowitz further explained how HP's announcements this week around advanced change management and a tighter alignment with such virtualization environments as VMWare will allow better and deeper feedback, refinement and efficiency across the IT lifecycle.

This "IT lifecycle" story is not yet complete, but it's come a long way quite quickly. HP is definitely raising the bar and defining the right vision for how IT in toto needs to mature and advance, to allow the enterprises to do more better for less.