Delta: News

Delta Software joins forces with VMware partner ViFX

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +1300

Delta Software joins forces with VMware partner ViFX.

31 January 2012

ViFX Limited acquires ITSM specialists Delta Software Limited
Move strengthens ViFX ability to deliver end-to-end cloud computing solution offering
David Gandar heads new ITSM division as General Manager, Service Management
Acquisition strengthens the VMware deployment capability of new organisation

Delta Software has teamed with fast-growing VMware partner, ViFX Limited, one of only five Premier VMware partners in New Zealand. Based in Auckland, New Zealand with offices in Sydney, Australia and Singapore, ViFX is considered a leader in IT consultancy specialising in advanced virtualisation, cloud and storage solutions.

David Gandar, former Managing Director of Delta Software, will take responsibility for the new ITSM division of the business. As General Manager, Service Management, David will work closely with the ViFX Management Team and Managing Director, Geoff Olliff, to provide strategic direction to the newly created service business unit, ensure a smooth transition of staff and oversee the operational delivery of managed services to a growing ViFX customer base.

“I see this as a timely opportunity to speed the adoption of an IT-as-a-service business model. To fully realise the journey to the private cloud, businesses need to move through basic virtualisation to a state of process maturity. Only then will companies realise the real benefits of a virtualised infrastructure” he said. “The move will enable ViFX to deliver a comprehensive virtualisation and ITSM deployment service to enterprise level business across the Asia Pacific region. And it feels good to be teaming up with an established VMware partner recognised as a high growth company;”

Under the terms of the merger agreement, Delta Software will continue to operate as an ITSM deployment business. The transition will see all services currently offered by Delta Software continue as normal. “For our customers it will be largely business-as-usual. Consulting and delivery staff will move into similar roles within the new structure and the Delta support team will move across to become a part of the ViFX support team.”

Geoff Olliff says the merger with Delta Software is the next step in its strategy to become the pre-eminent VMware services company in the Asia Pacific region. “We are delighted to welcome David and his team into the ViFX business. Through our combined service management and operational expertise ViFX will continue to build out the vision of an integrated managed service and cloud operation.”

“This is a strategic step to enhance our service offerings for customer value. ITSM is about the quality, efficiency and consistency of end-to-end services delivered via an IT supply chain. When it comes to cloud computing, the supply chain is re-engineered but the end service remains the same. We see considerable need for an improved approach to build readiness for the greater IT value that cloud computing offers”.

Source: Delta Software joins forces with VMware partner ViFX

All Work and No Play on Mobiles

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1300

28 October 2011.

Waikato District Health Board (DHB) has recently launched a new integrated system, based on VMWare Service Manager, at Waikato Hospital using mobile phone technology to manage services and allocate jobs to attendants to reduce wasted time.

In the past attendants returned to base to get their jobs through a paper-based system, which was extremely inefficient. The new system incorporates mobile phones to allocate the jobs and notify them while they are out in the hospital. The Waiora Waikato Hospital campus is the largest in Australasia, so the opportunity to allocate jobs in this way will result in major productivity gains.

This new system was chosen after an extensive search was undertaken by Attendants service manager Steve Coles and team leader Marie Dicks to find a system to support the attendants to make them more efficient, so they spend their time looking after patients, not finding out who needs to be looked after.

The new system is an extension of the existing IS help desk system, Infra service desk software (now VMware Service Manager), which has been in use at Waikato DHB since 2002.

“We wanted a system that would reduce wasted time in walking back and forth to the main attendant room to get jobs and gave us more equitable and smart job allocation and better reporting,” said Mr Coles.

“We looked at the various systems across Australia and New Zealand and the best option for us was to extend our existing service desk software with the help of Delta Software who had set up our existing system. This gave us a customisable solution which we were able to adapt to specifically meet our needs.”

The project has also developed, with big picture efficiencies in mind, to provide advances for other departments, streamlining their processes and switching them from paper forms to computer-based processes.

“The integration of mobile phones into the system was rolled out on Monday 3rd October and is still in the training/teething phase,” he said.

“Once the new system is fully up and running, we will continue the service improvements in radiology, ED and theatre. All these improvements are being carried out with only one purpose: to ensure we give the best possible care for our patients.

“The whole project is a big step forward in automating how things are done at the Waikato DHB and there has been a real commitment from everyone involved,” says David Gandar, managing director of Delta Software.

“Delta Software is delighted to have been a part of this process.”

Waikato District Health Board

Waikato DHB is responsible for planning, funding and providing quality health and disability support services for the 365,300 people living in the Waikato DHB region. It has an annual turnover of $1.2 billion and employs more than 6000 people.

Mary Anne Gill

Communications Director

Phone: +64 7 834 3684

Email: MaryAnne.Gill@waikatodhb.health.nz

Delta Software

Delta Software specialises in Service Management solutions. Delta covers all the ITIL service processes and can deploy ready-to-go tools tailored to meet business needs. Delta Software represents market-share leaders in the IT Service Management & Operations sector, focusing on IT service management, configuration management, and ITSM best practice tools from VMware, AuditWizard and Polestar.

David Gandar

Managing Director

Phone: +64 9 309 9400

Email: dg@delta.co.nz

Source: All Work and No Play on Mobiles

Delta’s Three Blind Mice generate $70k for Women's Refuge

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +1300

The Tongariro crossing was held on November 25-26 by the 3 challengers and about 50 IT supporters and completed in 29 hours.

Delta Software is delighted to announce that the event raised a total of $70,000! The money has been raised to help The New Beginnings Fund, The Angel Trust and to provide Christmas Vouchers for ten deserving families that have been through refuge this year.

The Three Blind Mice and the Board of the Kia Timata Ano Trust are just overwhelmed by this achievement.

Congratulations to everyone but especially to Delta’s Three Blind Mice – Glenda Godfrey, Pat O’Connell and Jonathan Iles, who not only completed the challenge, but also organized it, and managed to encourage over 50 mouseketeers in joining them and fundraising for such a noble cause.

Photos of the challenge and media coverage can be found in Delta’s Three Blind Mice website: www.threeblindmice.co.nz

To read more about the stories that have been generated, follow the links below:

CIO - Extreme obstacle course for CIOs

Stuff – A walk in the park and

Infonews – Delta's Three Blind Mice generate over $66K for Women's Refuge

From Delta Software – CONGRATULATIONS EVERYONE, as a sponsor of this event, we couldn’t be any happier with the result. What a way to close the year!

Source: Delta’s Three Blind Mice generate $70k for Women's Refuge

Three Blind Mice set off on endurance challenge

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +1300

Senior IT executives will be crossing the Tongariro Alpine Crossing four times in 30 hours next week to raise $80,000 for Kia Timata Ano (KTA) Trust – an independent women’s refuge in the Rodney District.

The Delta’s Mad Mouse Challenge is led by the “Three Blind Mice” Glenda Godfrey, Account Manager for the Tango Group, Pat O’Connell, CIO for Rank Group and Jonathan Iles, CIO for Carter Holt Harvey.

Godfrey who is also a trustee of the KTA Trust is passionate about supporting women who have been affected by domestic violence and putting an end to the issue in New Zealand.

“We’re a mad bunch of people and hope that doing something as crazy as the Mad Mouse Challenge will help to raise some awareness around the incidence of domestic violence in New Zealand and helps raise funds for the Trust,” says Godfrey.

The challenge will take place on Thursday 25th and Friday 26th of November to coincide with White Ribbon Day – the international day where men wear a white ribbon to condemn violence towards women.

The fundraiser follows on from the successful 2009 Four Peaks Challenge which saw the team conquer the four peaks in the North Island in under 36 hours, raising over $22K in the process for Women’s Refuge.

This year’s endurance journey will see the team completing one of the world’s most renowned treks, covering 77.6kms of volcanic terrain and climbing 4,000m up and 4,000m down.

The IT industry has thrown its support behind the campaign with Delta Software, Oxygen, Gen-I, Brother and Equico coming on board as sponsors while over 50 ICT industry colleagues , dubbed “Mouseketeers”, from notable companies such as Air New Zealand and Datacom will also be participating by completing one crossing.

You can follow the team’s progress and find out how to donate at the official challenge website – www.threeblindmice.co.nz

About The Kia Timata Ano Trust

The Kia Timata Ano Trust (Rodney District Women’s Refuge) provides 24 hour support, advocacy and accommodation for women and their children experiencing family and domestic violence. All money raised will be used to establish a fund that will help families rehabilitate their lives.

For more information, please contact:

Glenda Godfrey
Tango Group
P: 09 377 6033
E: glendag@tangogroup.co.nz

Source: Three Blind Mice set off on endurance challenge

Newsletter October 2010 / Issue # 3

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +1300

Your Newsletter

Service Advantage Module upgrades Here is a summary of the current status of the Service Advantage modules that are being upgraded to version 9. SA Reports: SQLServer version - Complete Oracle version - final testing SA AuditWizard Connector: Rewritten to support the new connector framework - in final stages of testing. SA Change Schedule: SQLServer version - final testing Oracle version - under development.		In this issue: • Latest news • Main article • Events • Training update
VMware Service Manager Project Progress – the new infraEnterprise in use We now have our second site live on VMware Service Manager version 9 – the new infraEnterprise. Wellington City Council followed the Reserve Bank in boarding the VSM express train. We currently have 4 more sites in Wellington and one in each of New Plymouth, Christchurch and Hamilton actively underway with V9 upgrades. All of these sites are really excited about the opportunities that V9 brings for helping improve their Service Delivery. The new feature is generating the most interest is the built-in designer. This allows you to have complete control and real time access to your screens and portal forms, providing drag and drop access to customizations that historically took us hours. From a project perspective, the upgrade projects are shaping up how we expected. This is a major upgrade and there can be a reasonable amount of reconfiguration required, particularly around the user directory integrations (AD and LDAP). However, this does provide a much simpler and more functional integration when completed. The formal training is also adding a lot of value as we often find sites neglect training for IT’s internal system while telling their business users that it is important. THE MAD MOUSE TONGARIRO CHALLENGE: 25-26 November STOP PRESS – We now have 51 mousketeers! There are many worthy community causes out there, and we’re often asked to contribute, and do. This one moves us to a completely new level. The Kia Timata Ano Trust funds a women’s refuge centre in Rodney, which does fantastic work. Without community support and donations, these women have very little help – what’s available from govt. agencies isn’t enough. Read the stories: Last year, three IT colleagues scaled North Island’s highest peaks, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe, Ruapehu and Taranaki in a mere 35 grueling hours. This year’s challenge is to walk the 19.4 kilometre Tongariro crossing four times within a 24-hour period – and raise at least $55,000. The fund is already up to $21,530 with 65 days to go. “For me to do this, despite the fact that we burn the candle at both ends at work, is really enjoyable,” says Carter Holt Harvey CIO Jonathan Iles. “It gives you a different dimension rather than focusing on business all the time.“ Other founding members of the Mad Mouse Challenge are Pat O’Connell, CIO of Rank Group and Glenda Godfrey, AM at Tango Group but this year they’ll be joined by volunteers known as Mouseketeers who can walk one or more of the four tracks they will traverse. Each Mouseketeer is committed to raise at least $1000. Delta Software is the lead sponsor with several other IT companies for the Mad Mouse challenge to raise money for the KTA Trust in support of the women’s refuge. Other sponsors are Oxygen, Brother, gen-I and just announced, Equico. Along with CHH there are teams from Datacom, Air NZ, iStart and The Warehouse. We’re delighted to be involved for both the IT industry and as a personal challenge to help raise awareness for the charity. You can help by making a donation here or by becoming a Mouseketeer yourself. Details are at the Three Blind Mice website. For those interested in the challenge, registering will get you on the news list – kindly run by iStart who are a fantastic supporter – for details of the challenge, training tips, what gear and where to get it for good prices.		Alliance Partners and Conference With the recent changes in the Infra Service Management software becoming part of a bigger VMware software portfolio, the Infra partners have taken the opportunity to create a forum for sharing ideas. We had a partner conference in the Waitakere countryside recently and identified a number of ways we can work together, informally, to continue a strong ITSM focus for the projects business for VMware. One of the initiatives to come out of the Alliance partners discussion – a commitment to set up a 24x7 service desk for VMware Service Manager users. We all have clients who operate global operations, and recognise a need to. We’ll continue to inform you of initiatives from the Alliance partner forum as they evolve. Any comments or suggestions from you are most welcome. TRAINING UPDATE We’re pleased to announce we have signed an authorised training agreement with VMware (a VATC), to continue the VMware Service Manager version 9 training as we have been delivering for many years over prior releases. While this is a business-as-usual announcement, it is significant to note that many of the former Infra partners do not have this level of training certification. It is a recognition of the quality of our training delivery and our track record. The agreement mandates our ability to deliver authorised VMware training material, to use the authorised VMware logo, and we will work to maintain the high standard we have set. To all our consulting staff, and to our training guru Barry Humphreys, very well done and thank you.
Copyright © Delta Software
If you wish to subscribe to our newsletter click here

Source: Newsletter October 2010 / Issue # 3

Delta Software sponsors a new fund-raising challenge

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +1200

There are many worthy community causes out there, and we’re often asked to contribute, and do. This one moves us to a completely new level. The Kia Timata Ano Trust funds a women’s refuge centre in Rodney, does fantastic work. Without community support and donations, these women have very little help – what’t available from govt. agencies isn’t enough. Read the stories:

Stories from The Refuge

We're up on the sponsors page as Platinum:

Why did we make this level of commitment?

Firstly, we believe in the 3 Blind Mice cause; we’re humbled by their spirit, the 2009 event was a real hit.

Secondly, we’re delighted to be involved for both the company and as a personal challenge - we’ll be recrutiing as many team members as we can get. Please read through the site material, if you’re interested in joining as a Tongariro hiker, go for it. Of course there’ll be a Delta team with collaborators.

We’d love to see you there as a Mouseketeer.

click here for the Mad Mouse Challenge website, and click here to read Delta Software’s tweets.

Source: Delta Software sponsors a new fund-raising challenge

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

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

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

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