Delta

2010 – the year of truth for IT Operations

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1200

I’ll start with this truth: the truth about software vendors and the push to enhance. I’ve been saying for some time, “Vendors think buyers want more features, when really they don't.” Things are already complex (see more by Greg Ness, on twitter as Archimedius). A recent story, another writer: here.

"Executives overwhelmingly believe that the strongest differentiator is when vendors understand the buyer's business and prescribe tailored solutions," Santucci writes in his article.

This shows there’s something myopic about the IT industry. Vendors – backed by leading analysts such as Forrester, Gartner - keep striving to create a technical edge, generally leaving it to the customer to work out how to deploy it in an integrated way with existing tools and processes. A current theme of mine is how analysts keep writing reports about how great the new infrastructure technology is and we should all be diving into dynamic IT and cloud computing.

Impact of next-gen IT

A recent familiar-themed report, from Forrester, titled “Increase Resiliency And Flexibility With Virtualization” published March 2010, has many positive comments on the value of increasing virtualisation, but hardly mentions the importance of IT automation to improve processes.

The article does note the emerging need for a couple of key process improvements:

* policy-based automation – but doesn’t say which policies or how they can be automated

And then

* develop operational efficiencies – again without any advice on which or how

This is just one of a slew of articles telling us to virtualise for resiliency & scalability with barely a nod to the CRITICAL importance of operational processes. We have clients starting to stress about how their IT ops processes – barely able now to cope with BAU and keep a process maturity cycle active – will handle the looming business demand for a switch from legacy IT to ITaaS, private cloud, dynamic infrastructures, etc. Everyone, other than IT Ops, seems to assume the legacy is easy to replace.

Put it this way – IT operations are the nervous system of IT delivery. If we ramp up the demand, the "consciousness" of business services, without upgrading the nervous system there will be a breakdown, just as in organisms that are stressed beyond their usual operating capacity. I’ll borrow more of this analogy from another writer – put the mind of an evolved human being into the brain of say a chimpanzee, what will you get? A smart chimp? No, an instant nervous breakdown.

Some other key findings in this and echoed in other reports - the top virtualisation drivers:

1. Create a more efficient shared IT infrastructure
2. Disaster recovery & business continuity
3. Improve IT infrastructure manageability & flexibility

However another very common finding is the virtualisation threshold that prevents these drivers from being fully executed. We deal with this issue all the time. Why is it hard to virtualise past the typical 30-40% of servers barrier? That’s simple.

The IT Operations challenge – crossing the threshold

At this level the challenge is to bring over the mission-critical apps and services, around which there is many years of built up legacy infrastructure. Virtualising them means reworking all the legacy processes, which means all of IT operations has to learn new skills, new management tools, and collaborate in ways that are new and appear risky.

Our clients tell us, as noted above, that the barrier to re-working infrastructure processes is BAU. The often-repeated cry is “my people are flat out keeping up with the current change activity and running operations; we have no time to re-work critical processes for new infrastructure.” The prospect of replacing legacy infrastructure, with all it’s built-up complexity, with something simpler , dynamic and more resilient is clearly appealing, but also daunting for IT operations.

For most IT organizations there is a lot of inter-dependency in current IT Service Operations for critical IT services. Between systems, and staff & vendors. All the low apples that can be virtualized easily have been done, which gets us to the 35-40% virtualization threshold commonly reported.

However, there’s much more risk in not changing. As businesses demand the benefits of a virtual dynamic infrastructure, for faster scalability and greater resiliency at less cost, IT operations will have to seriously raise the game. What has worked for fixed legacy network systems for 20 years must eventually be replaced.

Why do we care?

How can we help, what’s our angle? Well we happen to know a lot about improving processes – it’s been our core business for over 10 years. We know a lot about the need for increased integration. This shows up typically as a need for integrated configuration management tools and data, or as a need to radically improve release deployment processes. Or sometimes as a need to get on top of the “event storms” that generate from early attempts at automating problem diagnosis & analysis.

These are early symptoms of an IT nervous system that’s pushed to a limit, things start to break. Even operational change management for many relies on immature and outage-risky processes. Not because they’re difficult – usually they’re very simple – it’s just the volume & variety of changes, in a risk-averse operational culture with a complex infrastructure, has prevented effective automation. What we’ve developed is an architecture approach as a roadmap to building the automation needed for a dynamic and highly virtualised infrastructure. This ensures that the constraints of existing infrastructure, with the benefits, are absorbed, while tools and data are re-used wherever possible.

The goal is simple – to enable more resilient and scalable processes requires a re-work of IT Service Operations, represented by various problem symptoms that recur. Process maturity enables the scalability and efficiency gains from increasing virtualization, which now needs to fully embrace mission-critical and legacy-dependent applications.

If the benefits are so good, what are the barriers?

This is easy to summarise, from talking to many clients involved in meeting business demands. Several key points are already noted:

• Licensing, still a largely inflexible last-century model from most vendors
• Legacy infrastructure runs mission-critical systems, which will be sticky for many years yet
• Enterprise software upgrades and releases are inter-twined with myriad internal projects
• IT operations have legacy-based processes evolved over decades, they’re also sticky
• The CIO might be aware of the need for change but operations management, wedded to a “keep-the-lights-on” culture, tends to resist, which is completely rational

So there’s a mix of technology, process, education and culture issues that need to be addressed and planned, allowing the changes to be understood and built into an outcomes-focused maturity cycle. From our perspective this is Process 101 and the only thing new is some of the technology.

What next?

To make this higher ground?

The eco-system is already in place. Where marketing hype is processed as technology promise, this creates the ideal opportunity for smart business-process specialists, like us, to ensure the promise actually works, that the infrastructure investment provides an ROI, and that the IT operations processes can scale to support the growing business demands from IT services. Everything about the technology is focused on the right business issues – flexibility, scalability and resilience for a new utility-based computing services paradigm. It’s just that getting there will need a major and complete re-think of IT operational processes. Really that should be BAU.

Vendors - keep on vending, improvers - keep on improving. World, keep on changing, ‘cause it won’t be too long (TY Stevie) … for the truth to be shown, in all it’s shrunken glory.

David Gandar
MD Delta Software

ITvirtual

Source: 2010 – the year of truth for IT Operations

Real-world processes for a virtual age

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +1200

We all know that virtualization is a fast-growing trend. Various studies and analyst reports (Yankee Group, Forrester, Gartner) show there is a clear set of operational benefits from virtualising physical servers, and the vast majority of organizations intend to continue or accelerate this trend.

No problem – we can keep deploying tools such as VMware to increase the number of virtual machines, keep consolidating the server infrastructure, keep whittling down the environmental & facility costs, and scale up the IT operational support. Right?

Wrong. Most reports give an average ratio of virtual-to-physical as around 30-40%, and that to move past this level requires considerably more effort and management. Forrester’s understanding is deep enough to define a 4-stage maturity cycle, with stage 3 being process improvement. (ref. “Virtualization Management and Trends” Jan 28th 2010).

What is this management effort and why is it needed?

I’ll answer the why part first. What the studies show is that for continued virtualisation growth, IT capability has to scale up and this requires processes to be improved. The 30-40% threshold appears to be where the existing and largely manual operations processes start to limit the ability of IT service operations. (A good study on this topic is from Forrester’s Glenn O’Donnell, published in July 2009. Forrester’s Jan ’10 paper noted above on virtualization trends is also very good.)

So this observation exposes an assumption in my earlier statement “scale up the IT operational support”. That simply doesn’t work. Managing an increasingly virtualised infrastructure means change and that means building a process capability. The typical early stages of virtualising rely on subject-matter experts learning the technology and the best ways to optimize usage, crafted around their organisation’s needs and priorities.

Building operational capability also means going through an organizational change so people can work effectively with new processes and tools. This is well-understood and has been for many years. Whatever discipline is adopted – ITIL/ITSM, LeanIT, SixSigma among several – the path to improved operational efficiency requires, and always has, standards and disciplines to be developed then absorbed into BAU.

Now for the what part – what is the extra effort required? What processes and tools can be applied? If we think in terms of outcomes, a few that shape the trend: 1) standardize on IT capabilities like resource scheduling & policy compliance ; 2) self-service with provisioning; 3) service delivery orchestration; 4) moving to centralize servers and network components.

To re-cap: To continue with virtualisation benefits requires a scale-up of operational capability. To achieve that needs process automation, a well-understood discipline.

You might think automation means less people doing more work, or less-skilled people replacing skilled technicians and systems administrators. Automation is a dumb-down.

No, quite the opposite. One of the drivers for automation, as reported in various analyst studies, is that increased virtual deployment can create a skill shortage. We need automation to enable skilled administrators to get more done, deploy and configure more virtual systems, and manage a larger-scale virtual infrastructure. There is no appetite in the corporate IT spend to increase headcount for these efficiencies, and even if there was, the processes that work for managing 35% of servers virtualized will not scale to manage 80%, 70% or for most organizations, even 50%.

A sample of the kinds of tasks that need automation for scalability:

• standardized policy-based configuration and detection
• provisioning, resourcing and de-comissioning
• capacity and usage management

While aspects of the “what” are specific to managing a virtual environment, the underlying “why” isn’t. Lack of process automation leads to increased manual effort, extra admin time handling operational problems, and becomes a barrier to scaling up the benefits.

The automation job is clear: optimise processes; standardise configurations; unify your technical silos; centralise services; and deploy tools that help enforce new processes. Simply relying on tools does not enable process efficiency.

Never mind the subject matter, this is Process Automation 101.

David Gandar
Managing Director

Source: Real-world processes for a virtual age

IT Operations Problems Need Automated Solutions

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +1300

Anxious about technical impact assessments? Application migrations giving you a migraine? Licence true ups getting you down? OK enough of the alliteration however the message is clear, if these IT operations problems are worrying you then you need to do something about it.

Before we go too far I will nip the CMDB in the bud right now because a CMDB for CMDB’s sake will only breed cynicism. Any configuration management solution needs to be just that - a solution, to a problem – otherwise it will add no value whatsoever.

So what is it that you can do to prevent all those downers, anxiety attacks and migraines? The single most important thing is to automate. Software license management and infrastructure and application dependencies are a technology problem so let’s use (the right) technology to solve the problems.

Asset and configuration management that relies on any manual process to discover assets and map dependencies will never be a reliable source of the truth. Virtualisation on it's own is equal parts solution and problem to maintaining a single source of the truth (I feel a headache coming on…). A data source that is unreliable makes people skeptical about configuration management, and we all know there are enough skeptics in the world!

Software licence true ups need not get you down if you are automatically discovering assets and software and have a service request process in place to handle installs and uninstalls. The most important things are: how many licences you have and how many are installed. Knowing that will make you feel better but to really pick you up, we suggest adding software usage will enable you to determine how many of those installs are actually being used so licenses can be reused on-demand.

Asset Management and Discovery Checklist

For automating software discovery, here's our minimum checklist:
- Automated discovery
- Automated auditing
- Can reconcile number of licences purchased and number installed
- Optionally provide for software usage / metering

Technical impact assessments for projects rely on correct data. This is why most are done manually as and when required, often going over the same ground many times over for different projects. Automated AND continuous infrastructure and application discovery is crucial to enable accurate impact assessments in a timely manner.

Infrastructure and application discovery is not much affected by complex applications and network topologies as the fundamental protocols used are well understood. The two main protocols are the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). These protocols have the advantage of being non-proprietary, supported by all leading manufactures and most importantly are low priority traffic that can be dropped with no impact to the network or discovery process.

Infrastructure considerations

Care and attention however is required with virtualized infrastructure as this is designed to increase the utilization of the physical infrastructure. Therefore any discovery MUST be unobtrusive and have as little impact on the network as possible. This is where agent-less discovery using the fundamental networking protocols are the best option, to avoid creating host and network processing overhead.

Single application to entire data center migrations are risky projects at the best of times and I have heard many a project manager say they are running blind on such projects. Application mapping provides a view into application communication and can visualize the infrastructure that applications depend on.
Providing accurate application mapping is crucial to removing the risk of migrations, including unforeseen capacity issues, security and authentication issues and unavailability of dependant systems.

Infrastructure and Application Discovery Checklist

- Automated discovery is agent-less
- Automated discovery uses ICMP and SNMP
- Can discover physical and virtual connectivity
- Can visualize the network
- Can provide or simulate impact assessments

One more thing. Once you have automated discovery in place then you can add future value by using the data for service management, particularly linking to the service catalogue and service level agreements. Typically this is done using the federation method to connect discovered data sources to a service management system.

Note however, federation itself can be risky especially if data exists that has been manually entered and/or updated. This can cause duplicates to be created and data being stored in the wrong location. Use the following checklist to ensure successful data federation:

- Can reconcile discovered items to prevent duplication of existing configuration items
- Can reconcile existing data to prevent data storage errors (provides easy data mapping between discovered and existing data)
- Can de-duplicate discovered items to prevent duplicate configuration items, this is especially important if two or more discovery tools discover the same item
- Can synchronise data, either automatically or regulated to identify unauthorised change via data discrepancies
- Can provide mapping and visualisation services

Source: IT Operations Problems Need Automated Solutions

VMware to acquire IT management products from EMC

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +1300

We note this quote “VMware will continue to work closely with key management partners, including EMC, to provide integrated solutions and interoperability between the entire VMware vCenter product family and management partner solutions in support of heterogeneous environments.”

This announcement looks very interesting for what it signals about the need to bring compliance & standards to the virtualised data centre. As an organisation focused on IT automation for operations efficiency, we’re positive about the move and what it represents for continued collaboration with both EMC and VMware.

Full story here.

Source: VMware to acquire IT management products from EMC

Announcing EMC Ionix Service Manager 9.0 - service delivery for the virtual age

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +1300

EMC announces Ionix Service Manager 9.0, the latest release of EMC’s IT service management software. Ionix Service Manager helps enterprise and commercial organizations simplify and automate IT service management by providing unparalleled visibility, flexibility, and efficiency, and lowering the function’s total cost of ownership.

Ionix Service Manager 9.0 forms an integral part of EMC’s Ionix portfolio of IT management solutions designed to help organizations improve the efficiency of their IT function while maximizing visibility and control over both physical and virtual environments.

Overview

Ionix Service Manager provides out-of-the-box functionality for all major ITIL processes, including Incident, Request Fulfillment, Problem, Service Level, Knowledge, Change, Release and Deployment, Service Configuration and Asset, Service Catalog and Availability Management.

Leveraging integrated end-to-end automation, flexible easy-to-use workflows, and powerful discovery and dependency mapping, Ionix Service Manager provides customers with enterprise-class depth of functionality without compromising the ease of deployment of their IT service management solution.

Ionix Service Manager offers four key areas of functionality addressing key customer pain points:

· Integrated alerts to Service Desk—Ionix Service Manager enables incidents to be created automatically in response to operational alerts. Relevant knowledge is pushed to Service Desk staff and problems are automatically initiated by analyzing the history of past incidents and identifying trends.

· Automated Change Management—Ionix Service Manager enables users to efficiently manage change by:

- Providing complete visibility of their environment through automated discovery and dependency mapping

- Supporting the planning of changes using Impact Analysis, Change Calendars, and a Forward Schedule of Change

- Enforcing their change and release processes, including approvals, notifications, automated deployments, and automated CMDB maintenance

· Next-generation Asset Management—Ionix Service Manager allows organizations to take control of their software and hardware assets by:

- Automating inventory maintenance, requests, and deployments to drive efficiencies

- Comparing license assignments to discovered deployments in order to reduce overspending and the risk of supplier audits

- Identifying underutilized licenses that can potentially be reharvested

- Accurately associating asset usage with appropriate cost centers

· Streamlined Service Request Management—Ionix Service Manager enables users to browse or search the catalog of services offered by IT, and to make requests using a familiar “shopping cart” concept. Each request drives an automated workflow process that helps minimize response times, enforce best practices, and minimize costs, while at the same time providing a complete audit trail.

Product Integration

Ionix for Service Manager 9.0 ships with out-of-the-box connectors to these Ionix technologies:

· Discovery of resources from IT Operations Intelligence, Application Discovery Manager, and Network Configuration Manager

· Automatic generation (and closing) of incidents and problems from IT Operations Intelligence

· Provisioning of network changes through Network Configuration Manager

A Server Configuration Manager connector is a high priority, and EMC is targeting its availability during 2010. In the meantime, EMC Professional Services can provide a custom Server Configuration Manager connector if needed.

Customers do not need to purchase the Ionix Service Manager integration platform to integrate with an LDAP-based user directory, such as Active Directory, or to integrate with other Ionix products.

Source: Announcing EMC Ionix Service Manager 9.0 - service delivery for the virtual age

Forrester on IT automation to cut operational costs, increase service

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +1300

Of the various IT automation stories circulating, I think Forrester nail the IT operations challenges best. I take the liberty of quoting them, and links to the source articles appear below. First a story by Forrester VP Rob Whiteley, printed in CIO.com called “ Three Ways to Reprioritize Your IT Infrastructure Investments in 2010”

Check the link.

Quote: “If you do nothing else in 2010, focus on IT automation to build a more efficient I&O foundation.”

Some statistics quoted in these two articles:

• Infrastructure spend to grow 9.2% in 2010 (Forrester) • Change & configuration mgt software to grow 5.6% (IDC) • Problem mgt s/w (includes service desk) to grow 5.9% (IDC)

These are high numbers – why this forecast? Because the only way to meet the multiple demands on IT operations is to automate processes. The smart people in the industry have already started doing that.

Check the 2nd Forrester story here.

A quote: Evelyn Hubbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said IT organizations "are being asked to do the impossible - be more efficient and effective with less money and add additional technologies (such as virtualization) to reduce cost even more," said Hubbert. Hubbert said IT organizations "need to establish some order." At this point, that order has become ITIL, which provides agreed upon, common sense processes that can manage incidents, problems and changes "in such a way to take the guess work out and to become a functioning group," she said.

It has to be one of the simplest automation messages I’ve seen. If your IT operations are coping with new & changing infrastructure, increasing complexity, growing demand from the business for both services and service reliability, plus the business appetite for change (= efficiency for reduced costs) then there’s only one way to scale up.

Automate processes. It works and it’s proven. Throwing technology and tools in without process re-design & teamwork change does not deliver ongoing benefits – it just adds to the complexity. Note I’ve avoided the v-word. That’s a technology that by itself demands a huge change in IT operations.

At Delta Software we‘re monitoring a big trend in enterprise IT virtualisation (oops, v-word) – the need for standards & processes. Why? Because we see the importance of IT processes to enable continued deployment. The most recent story is a new CIO.com article on how some companies have used process automation to build their skills in virtualising – we have this available as a white paper for anyone interested in contacting us directly.

Source: Forrester on IT automation to cut operational costs, increase service

Forrester at CeBit, "Service Management a challenge in the cloud"

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +1300

Most people are still concerned about security in the cloud. But those that articulate this concern loudly are not the same people that are using cloud! I have not found anybody on CeBit or elsewhere in the last 2 months, who was really disappointed by the security levels of any major cloud computing provider that they use. Beyond the technical integration of cloud and non-cloud services, the unified management of services is a major cloud-challenge which was already addressed from some vendors on the CeBit. Innovative software vendors like helpline realized early that an extended service management can go far beyond ITIL services and could be applied for example to facility management or to healthcare helpdesks. We fully agree. As has been said elsewhere, cloud computing is a service not a technology. The full CeBit article http://bit.ly/d8CsmO.

Source: Forrester at CeBit, "Service Management a challenge in the cloud"

Announcing 3 New infraEnterprise Training Courses

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

The training team at infra Sydney have been extremely busy rewriting 3 of the courses in the training curriculum and we are pleased to offer these to our New Zealand clients.

Request & Task Manager

The 1 day Workflow Manager training class has been rewritten and retitled "Request & Task Manager". This course is now to the workflow side of infra what Service Desk Operator is to IPK. The course covers Understanding process workflow basics, How to navigate the interface, How to create a new Request from a Template, The main components of the Request Explorer, How to action and authorize a Request, How to manage outstanding Tasks and Requests, Using the Task and Approval windows, How to amend an existing Request workflow, Attaching information to a Request, Linking Change Windows to a Request, Creating Outages from a Request, Scheduling Requests to be created automatically, Linking Requests to Calls, How to record time and expenses against a Timesheet, Creating reports using the Reports tool, Using the Bulletin Board to send updates.

Workflow Template Designer

The Advanced Workflow course is now a 1 day course entitled "Workflow Template Designer" and is intended for those who will be responsible for the creation and maintenance of workflow templates. This is now the only course in the curriculum which covers this area. Topics include Understanding change managers and templates, How to create, modify, clone and delete a template, How to create a workflow process in a template, Adding tasks and approvals to templates, Documenting templates, Using the full workflow palette, Using conditional branching to direct workflow, Using shared task fields, How to create and apply component workflows.

Configuration Manager

Configuration Management is the updated CMDB Design and Implementation course and is 1 day. If you want to learn how to implement an ITIL aligned CMDB with infraEnterprise this is the course which will give you that expertise. Topics include An overall understanding of Configuration Management, How to activate availability for an entity, How to build the CMDB, An understanding of the different CMDB entities, How to create relationships between CMDB entities, How to track and control changes in the CMDB, How to configure global settings and keywords for your CMDB

Outlines for these and all of the courses offered by Delta Software can be found on our course outlines page

Source: Announcing 3 New infraEnterprise Training Courses

EMC's infraEnterprise Wins "Service Management Product of the Year" at Network Computing Awards 2008

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced its recently acquired Infra Corporation's infraEnterprise, has won 'Service Management Product of the year' in the Network Computing Magazine Awards 2008.

The Awards recognize the outstanding technologies and solutions at the forefront of today's rapidly evolving industry. Over 15,000 votes were cast as readers supported their favourite companies and products with infraEnterprise – a 100 percent Web-based solution for automating IT Service Management processes – scooping top spot in its category for the second year running.

Receiving the Award at a high-profile ceremony in London on 13th March 2008, EMEA Manager of Service and Delivery for EMC's infraEnterprise products, David Percy, commented, "The infraEnterprise team is delighted to be awarded the prestigious accolade of 'Service Management Product of the year' 2008 by users and readers of Network Computing Magazine. We are committed to delivering 'real world' ITSM solutions that take customers where they want to go faster and more effectively, and greatly appreciate the industry support and recognition that has seen us retain this coveted Award."

Independently verified to the highest level for ITIL compatibility across all processes (Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Release, Service Level and Availability Management), EMC Corporation's infraEnterprise provides a fully integrated Service Management solution in one scalable application. The infraEnterprise service desk, with its ability to manage the full lifecycle of IT services, complements EMC's automated discovery, rich analytics, native dependency mapping and model-based approach – better enabling customers to manage service delivery end-to-end

About InfraEnterprise

infraEnterprise is a 100 percent Web solution that automates IT Service Management processes. infraEnterprise supports industry best practice methodology such as ITIL and KCS (Knowledge-Centered Support) and delivers the best upfront and ongoing value for comparative depth of functionality. Infra has recently been acquired by world leader in information infrastructure solutions, EMC Corporation.

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

LONDON, UK. – March 24, 2008

Source: EMC's infraEnterprise Wins "Service Management Product of the Year" at Network Computing Awards 2008

Infra Corporation to become part of EMC Corporation

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Infra Corporation is pleased to announce that the company is to become part of EMC Corporation, the market leader in information infrastructure solutions.

This is an extremely positive event for Infra’s global network of Partners. Infra has achieved an outstanding market position through internally-resourced growth and partners. Operating as an entity within EMC’s Resource Management Software Group (RMSG) will enable Infra to achieve its full global potential.

For Delta Software’s clients it is very much business as usual. The announcement is about Infra’s next step in becoming a global provider, and Delta’s operations are unaffected. We will continue to partner with NZ clients to deliver operational efficiency.

We are confident that during this transition Infra and ourselves will maintain our high standard of service. The partnership provides a strengthened opportunity to leverage Delta’s successful Service Advantage programme. This includes widening the infrastructure integrations and delivering on the promise of enhanced IT operations for improved performance.

Delta Software will continue to focus on meeting customer needs as we move into this exciting new phase of transforming service management.

Further information regarding this announcement can be found on these web sites at

www.infra.com.au
www.delta.co.nz

David Gandar
Managing Director
Delta Software Ltd

Source: Infra Corporation to become part of EMC Corporation

Infra announces new EMC Smarts connector for infraEnterprise

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

New EMC Smarts connector plugs into growing customer demand for easy CMDB integration with best-of-breed technologies.

Sydney, Australia November 2007 - Australian owned IT Service Management software developer, Infra Corporation has announced the latest plug-in network connector for its web–based ITIL application – infraEnterprise. Infra connectors, implemented globally, deliver out-of-the-box integration with best-of-breed network tools providing control and visibility of Configuration Item data right across the IT infrastructure. The new EMC Smarts connector has been designed to cost-effectively simplify the process of delivering end-to-end Service Management for users.

The infraEnterprise EMC Smarts Federated CMDB Connector (EMCSC) enables infraEnterprise customers to leverage their EMC Smarts product investment by integrating EMC Smarts' discovery and topology mapping, monitoring and root-cause analysis functionality into the infraEnterprise ITIL-certified Configuration, Change, Incident and Problem Management modules. EMC Smarts is designed to automatically discover links between configuration items on the network. These links are imported into infraEnterprise by the EMCSC to maintain an accurate CMDB, and facilitate problem management and root cause analysis.

The InfraEnterprise Federated CMDB intelligently maps and stores data required for Configuration Management, and is able to continuously reference the balance of EMC Smarts data as required. The development of the new connector extends the powerful functionality of the infraEnterprise Federated CMDB to users of EMC Smarts.

According to Infra Managing Director, Andy Wade "Infra is committed to the development of 100 percent web-based software. Our open architecture provides organisations with the flexibility they require to manage today's increasingly complex IT infrastructures. Infra's approach means that customers can continue to store data in multiple repositories and use best-of-breed asset discovery tools while having the end-to-end visibility they require to manage business critical services."

Mr. Wade continued "Our customers are telling us that this is what they need and want, and Infra will continue to enhance its comprehensive range of connectors to anticipate and satisfy the growing demand for fast, easy integration."

"The new EMC Smarts connector plugs into growing customer demand for easy CMDB integration with best-of-breed technologies and EMC is delighted to be working with Infra to ensure we meet the needs of our customers," said Gary Staley, Global Vice President of EMC's Resource Management Software Group.

The EMC Smarts connector joins the growing list of connectors already available for many popular technologies, such as Microsoft SMS, HP Node Manager, LANDesk Manager, ZenWorks, Cendura Cohesion and Altiris.

Infra also provides directory integration connectors that enable the Infra CMDB to plug into multiple LDAP Directory services on different platforms simultaneously, for example: Microsoft Active Directory; Novell eDirectory; and Sun Java System Directory. This enables the IT department to auto-populate the CMDB with officer and customer information, and simplifies, for example, the process of providing detailed audit trails for financial data protection and compliance.

Source: Infra announces new EMC Smarts connector for infraEnterprise

Infra Corporation Positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk, 2007

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Evaluation Based upon Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

Sydney 25 September 2007 – IT Service Management software developer Infra Corporation has announced its inclusion in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk, 2007.¹

The Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk evaluates service desk vendors that support large scale enterprise environments of more than 5,000 employees.

The Magic Quadrant report states that the IT service desk market has grown by 14% per year for the past two years.

Infra Managing Director, Andy Wade comments, “Infra is delighted to be positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk, 2007.”

Mr Wade continued to comment, “Infra has established its credentials as an enterprise-class vendor with more than 350 customer and reported revenue growth of 58% for the year ending July 2007. This growth reflects our on-going commitment to providing a best of breed integration platform and innovating in the areas that matter to our customers such as rapid deployment, ITIL process automation, ease of configuration and customisation - and of course, having customer-oriented licensing policies.”

Independently verified to the highest level of ITIL service support, infraEnterprise Version 8 is a sophisticated web-based application that provides ITIL processes within one application. Underpinned by a Federated CMDB, the product is fully scalable with rich out-of-the-box IT service management functionality that includes advanced online workflow management, web self-service and knowledge management.

^{1. Gartner, Inc., "Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk,
2007" by David M. Coyle, Aug. 23, 2007}

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted August 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant.

The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose

Source: Infra Corporation Positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Desk, 2007

Leading law firm Herbert Smith rules in favor of Infra's global service desk

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Top-ten UK law firm Herbert Smith LLP is an international legal practice, comprising more than 1,100 lawyers and a network of offices throughout Europe and Asia. The full-service commercial firm has a formal alliance with leading European firms Gleiss Lutz and Stibbe, and provides advice across all major practice areas including capital markets, dispute resolution, employment and European Union law, intellectual property, finance, tax and real estate.

Herbert Smith attaches great importance to providing outstanding levels of customer service to its many clients and requires excellent IT systems to effectively support the success of its business. The ability to swiftly resolve support issues affecting the firm's IT and telecommunications infrastructure is therefore a top priority for the IT department.

It was becoming evident that Herbert Smith's existing call management system was insufficient for the firm's increasing IT Service Management needs. The call logging process was unwieldy, calls were taking too long to complete and the system did not support proactive Problem Management. As a result, Herbert Smith decided to commission consultancy firm Plan-Net to develop a service improvement process based on ITIL best practice.

Implementing ITIL processes with Infra

A "key criteria" checklist was developed for the selection of a new service desk solution with tenders invited from a number of leading providers, including Infra Corporation whose proposal was successful.

Catherine Cheetham, Service Management Team Leader within the Information Services Department (ISD) at Herbert Smith comments, "The decision to choose infraEnterprise software was based on our immediate business requirement for an easy-to configure, web-based service desk that would allow proactive Incident/ Problem/Known Error lifecycle management.

"Significantly, infraEnterprise also offered advanced features such as time-zoning, which actively supported our goal to implement a global service desk for business critical issues."

infraEnterprise global service desk

Within Herbert Smith, ISD, based in London, provides a 24-hour weekday service desk for users as well as weekend cover. A team of fourteen frontline and seven second level analysts is responsible for managing mission-critical service calls received daily from lawyers and other employees. Analysts are also located in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris and Moscow. Over 6,000 Incidents/Problems are logged each month using infraEnterprise with typical problems ranging from requests to reset passwords or difficulties with Word documents through to issues with printers or email.

Since implementing the Infra system, calls initially logged in Europe or Asia can be seamlessly escalated to the second line in London, with each Incident/Problem being tracked through to closure. All calls logged are in the local time and time-zoning within Infra makes it possible to provide 24x7 support for issues categorized as business critical.

Efficient Problem Management

Using Infra, ISD can also accurately monitor information such as the exact nature of each call and the point at which calls tend to be escalated to the second level. Analysts have the ability to link calls to a Known Problem, enabling management to track the volume of calls relating to specific issues.

According to Catherine Cheetham, "With Infra, we can use tools such as Trend Analysis to enable us to identify issues sooner and when a Problem hits, processes are in place to allow us to manage it more effectively.

"As a result, there has been a marked improvement in efficiency with 75 per cent of all calls now resolved by the initial contact."

Sharing skills and knowledge is also much easier now that all international support teams are using the same system. Herbert Smith has implemented the infraEnterprise Knowledge Bank, building up a repository of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to assist with troubleshooting for common problems. ISD in London also publishes information about Known Errors to the business via the Bulletin Board.

Business support with Infra

The successful implementation of the global service desk has led to a number of other support groups within the firm adopting infraEnterprise. ISD now manages frontline calls for the contact management system and the accounts system, ensuring that consistent processes are followed and routing calls to the relevant department for application-specific support. Acting as a single point of contact for frontline calls ensures that best practice processes are adhered to and enables the consistent management of all calls through to closure.

Several departments have also begun to use Infra software as a business system, replacing existing databases with limited functionality. For example, around 50 users in the Document Centre now log over 800 jobs per month within infraEnterprise. Similarly the Reprographics department, responsible for providing a fast turnaround photocopying service, is using infraEnterprise to manage 1,200 job requests monthly. infraEnterprise offers an easy-to-use yet comprehensive tracking system for job requests with partitioning within the system ensuring that users view only data relevant to each particular operation.

Integrated Change Management and Customer Portal

Looking to the future, Herbert Smith is planning to implement Change Management using infraEnterprise to replace a number of other systems. The firm anticipates that integrating Change and Problem Management processes will increase efficiency and speed up the authorization and implementation of Changes.

The introduction of Infra has certainly had a positive impact on customer satisfaction - 85 per cent of calls are now answered within just 30 seconds and the service desk is seen within the wider business as an efficient and effective way to resolve problems and action requests. Herbert Smith is also planning to provide user self-service in the future via the Infra Customer Portal, allowing calls to be logged to both ISD and to the busy Reprographics Centre.

Catherine Cheetham believes that the IT Department has found the ideal service management solution for Herbert Smith's international set-up.

"From the initial tendering process we got the strong sense that Infra was a company we could do business with. Infra software is smart and sophisticated, but not difficult to use or overly costly. In fact, Infra software does exactly what it says on the box, and where customization has been required, it has been simple. Infra's consulting and technical staff were - and continue to be - brilliant throughout."

"Infra has enabled us build the flexible global service desk solution that is right for our international support operation today and can be continually enhanced to meet our future needs."

Source: Leading law firm Herbert Smith rules in favor of Infra's global service desk

Infra Wins Major Network Computing Award

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Infra Corporation’s IT Service Management (ITSM) application, infraEnterprise Version 8, has won the ‘Helpdesk of the Year’ Award 2007 - voted for by the readers of Network Computing Magazine.

The Network Computing Awards recognize individuals and organizations at the forefront of the industry and give industry wide recognition to the technology, tools, solutions and products in this rapidly evolving market.

Infra Corporation’s John Murnane commented, “Receiving the Network Computing Award for ‘Helpdesk of the Year’ means a great deal to everyone at Infra. Winning this accolade is a direct result of votes cast by readers and customers – people with hands-on experience of the IT Service Management marketplace - and we would like to thank everyone for the fantastic support and recognition they have given us”.

New Zealand vendor for infraEnterprise Version 8, Delta Software is also excited about the award. "We have known for some time that this application was equipping customers with the optimal tool for Service Management." says David Gander Managing Director, Delta Software. "This award confirms that with infraEnterprise Version 8 we are offering the best solution available globally to our New Zealand customers."

infraEnterprise Version 8 provides a complete ITSM solution within a single 100% web-based application. Independently verified to the highest level for ITIL compatibility across all processes (Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Release, Service Level and Availability Management), infraEnterprise offers advanced ITIL capabilities and ease-of-integration with popular third party repositories and LDAP Directory Services.

Voting for this year’s Awards was hosted on the Network Computer Magazine website. The Award for ‘Helpdesk of the Year’ was presented to Infra at a high-profile awards ceremony at The Russell Hotel on 21 March 2007 in London.

Source: Infra Wins Major Network Computing Award

Elders Implements ManageSoft-Driven ITAM Solution

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Elders Survives Three Software Audits Unscathed

Elders is an icon in rural Australia, with a rich history of providing services to the nation's primary producers since 1839. Today, the company operates in three major areas: branch network, supply management, and production.

Branch networks are the core of Elders' business, with more than 420 branches and agencies spread across every state in Australia. The domestic network provides Australia's rural producers with inputs, services, products, and support in Elders' core areas of wool, livestock, rural finance, insurance, merchandise, and real estate. Its supply management division, Elders International, connects 100,000 Australian rural producers with the world's agricultural markets.

The Challenge

The vast majority of Elders' 420 branch offices are located in rural and remote areas — many of them hundreds of kilometres from the nearest capital city and thousands of kilometres from Elders' Adelaide head office. The geographical spread of the business adds complexity to managing Elders' wide area network (WAN) of 3750 computers. The majority of branches operate without a server. The network provides 4000 users with online access to internal business systems and applications hosted out of Adelaide, as well as email and Internet access. Asset tracking, software updates, and security were identified as problem areas that required attention.

Elders’ branch offices had manual processes in place to check hardware assets visually and post reports to the head office. Software asset reporting was another matter. Manual tracking of authorised and unauthorised software installations across their enterprise wasn't feasible. Rolling out software updates required IT staff to travel vast distances or send costly CDs through the mail. Addressing security threats, such as viruses, was also an additional growing time sink. Elders needed a closed-loop solution to manage and monitor branch IT assets and software licensing, deploy software applications, and protect its systems from security threats.

The ManageSoft Solution

Elders has implemented a ManageSoft IT asset management (ITAM) solution, including asset recognition, configuration management, and reporting. This enables Elders to easily deploy and update business-critical applications for its fleet of computers and provide compliance reports for internal and third party audits. "Introducing an automated ITAM solution has enabled Elders to automatically track the systems and software it has deployed and manage its licenses and compliance requirements effectively for the first time," explained André Laubscher, IT Facilities Manager at Elders. " had an inventory management system, but it was based on a manual effort. For staff to do a visual check of equipment takes long enough without then checking what software is on it. It was impossible to do software license management properly. Moving from manual checks to using ManageSoft meant we were able to discover what software we had deployed where, and ensure our licensing requirements were met. Since we deployed ManageSoft, we have been audited three times — twice by Adobe® and once by IBM®. Each time we were able to extract the information we needed from ManageSoft. Both organisations, when they learned we use ManageSoft for licensing, were a lot more engaged because they knew we were taking licensing seriously. If we didn't have ManageSoft, I don't know how we would have done it."

Elders now uses ManageSoft for large-scale application deployment, including a recent mass rollout of Adobe Acrobat Reader® to the entire network. Mr. Laubscher added, "Without ManageSoft it would have taken years. We wouldn't have even attempted it. Now we can roll out a new application that is potentially a critical business application to the whole organisation in a short time frame and realise benefits to the business pretty quickly." The ManageSoft software deployment solution has delivered Elders tangible time and cost saving benefits, according to Mr. Laubscher, "In the past, we had to send out CDs or have people travel. Now it's done in a more timely fashion. There's more consistency and quality over the whole process. We don't incur the cost of burning CDs or running the risk of software getting lost in transit or taking a year to roll out.

"The ManageSoft configuration management solution has also given Elders an effective insurance policy against security threats," Mr. Laubscher added. "It's a simple fact of life when running Microsoft applications you need to patch. ManageSoft provided us with an enterprise-wide patch deployment solution for all our applications. Prior to ManageSoft, we didn't run organised patch management. You don't realise how difficult it is to cover the Australian continent, until support people are required to travel from Brisbane to north-west Queensland. Typically we got there once every one or two years. Now we can service our remote offices far more effectively and provide a level of service and software that was only available in our head office previously.
ManageSoft is virtually making the impossible, possible."

For more information on ManageSoft Compliance Manager please contact us.

Source: Elders Implements ManageSoft-Driven ITAM Solution