The concept of Business Service Management and why it is good for IT (and the business) is reasonably understood by most people.   The reality is that people tend to buy BSM solutions for the features it provides not just on the definition of BSM.   For some organizations, a BSM product is purchased within some type of internal project like ITIL or a Dashboard project.  When it comes down to it, those projects have requirements and they tie to specific features needed in the end solution such as;

• Console consolidation
• Root cause analysis
• Impact analysis
• Service Level Management
• Dashboards
• End to End visualization of Services

The list tends to go on and on.   When it comes down to it, BSM is something that you do within the solution (Managing to the Service, not the technologies), the features and functionality tend to be part of the BSM solution and where the purchasing focus should be.   One of the core features required for BSM is the ability to integrate to many sources.   There are many upon many tools within a large enterprise and many opportunities to pull in specific silo’s of data in order to provide a more complete view to the end users.  Large enterprises need the luxury of swapping out underlying tools/application in the future due to over priced maintenance renewals, bad support, acquisitions, poor software and numerous other reasons.  If the BSM solution is limited or not highly flexible in the ways in which it integrates to third party products, you may be stuck with some of those underlying technologies.

When evaluating BSM solutions, ensure that the solution has a robust integration feature.   Some BSM solutions are only good with integrating with their own companies products, this is a bit limiting.   Ensure that the are a few different options, ie: more than an SNMP trap or CSV import.

Tobin