The emergence of private and public cloud computing technologies is causing organizations to revisit their IT performance management strategies and evaluate if the solutions that they currently have in place can be as effective in these new environments.

Many of them are already finding that the tools in which they had in place for many years do not have all of the necessary capabilities to support cloud deployments, and are looking for new features, delivery methods and pricing models to meet their new objectives. On the other hand, vendors from different areas of IT performance management are focusing a major part of their product development efforts on making their solutions more “cloud friendly”. When it comes to Business Service Management, some vendors might find that some capabilities that have been developed in the past might come in handy when managing private cloud environments.

To continue reading, click here

- One CFO's Problem is Another CFO's Solution -

One of the top reasons organizations are becoming more interested in public cloud computing services is the flexibility of aligning the cost of IT computing resources with changes in business demand. Back in January, I published an article that discussed how organizations would be very interested in having a somewhat similar model for deploying IT management tools, but not many technology vendors are willing to offer this type of capability for delivering their products.

End-user organizations are looking to take more of a service-centric approach when managing IT performance, and management vendors, for the most part, have done a good job of adjusting to this trend. Recently, I had the chance to see a number of demos of IT performance monitoring products that are based on different underlining technologies for collecting performance data, are being sold to different job roles within the organization, and even competing in different markets, but they all had something in common. The first screen of their performance dashboards looks almost identical. And products that are based on network monitoring technologies, data center management or application monitoring all of a sudden have the same look and feel:

To continue reading, click here

As server virtualization is becoming one of the fastest growing IT initiatives in the enterprise, organizations are looking to extend the benefits from these projects to new areas. As a result, they are looking to virtualize not only their servers and storage, but also to achieve similar benefits from virtualizing their desktops. For end-users, this means that their operation systems and software that used to be installed on their desktops are now being hosted in the datacenter and accessed across the network.

To continue reading, click here