Business Service Management Hub

Companies looking for an edge, might want to begin to explore supply chain analytics, a growing space that gives your company insight into activities within supply chain, valuable information that could give you a leg up in the market.

Wall Street wants to monitor social media streams to find trends they think will help predict the market. I’m skeptical about such an approach, but I do believe it can help marketers find information about their companies from a much smaller sub-set of data.

When the likes of the US government and Microsoft are committing fully to the Cloud, it has to make you stand up and take notice, and while you can’t make your decisions based on what others are doing, you have to at least be thinking about it.

No discussion of analytics is complete without discussing Google Analytics, the free analytics tool from Google. It can provide your company with a wealth of valuable data about your web site’s visitors. You simply add some code to your web site, and Google begins analyzing the traffic for you.

There’s an awful lot of statistics and predictions floating around about how long it will take for companies to adopt the cloud, but in my experience, change happens very slowly in the Enterprise and it could be years before many adopt private clouds.

In an interesting move, VWware is launching CloudFoundry.com, an open platform as a service (PaaS) offering. It should be interesting to see if it’s open enough to support BSM monitoring.

When Amazon EC2 service went down the other day, it didn’t necessarily show the weakness of the Cloud model, but instead showed just how vulnerable everyone is regardless of the location of your infrastructure. If it could happen to Amazon with all its fail-safes, it could happen to you too and you have to be ready.

You can use Business Transaction Management (BTM) to build a better understanding of certain types of data inside your enterprise and you can link this data to your Business Service Management (BSM) system to have a one-stop shop for valuable business data.

Enterprise software has grown so complex that it consumes much of the time and energy of IT just to maintain it. By moving some software to the cloud, IT can return to its role of mapping technology to business and monitoring the entire system, rather than babysitting software.

Mobile apps are convenient for users, but they also provide a valuable source of data you can use to better understand your customers.

As companies realize the advantages of engaging in online social media channels, they are looking for ways to measure the success of that engagement and IBM has introduced new products to help.

Recent purchases by Adobe of Web Content Management vendor, Day Software and analytics vendor Ominture, have resulted in a tool set that could give you more insight and understanding of your customers and what they’re saying about you online.

Another kind of monitoring you might not think about very often is analyzing your customers and how they interact with your properties using analytics.

At first blush, a consumer service like the Amazon Cloud Drive might seem completely irrelevant to IT, but what it does is bring cloud services to the masses on a large scale, and that could have an impact on you before you know it.

A recent survey found that businesses biggest fear about moving to a hybrid cloud environment, but there are tools to help maintain some semblance of control over the entire computing infrastructure, even when part of it is outside the firewall.

When Microsoft starts paying attention to a space like private clouds, it’s time IT pros took notice too.

While we strive for the ultimate protection with service level agreements (SLAs), the fact is that there are legal, technical and social limitations that make that impossible — for now.

While there’s plenty of room to debate the energy efficience of one type of computing over another, when you include it as part of your overall measurement process, it leaves less room for argument.

With its purchase of software vendor newScale today, Cisco bought the ability to give customers a self-service portal environment that’s easy to deploy.

Microsoft released a Beta of System Center Configuration Manager 2012 with a twist. It not only monitors Windows devices, as you would expect, it also lets you monitor iOS, Symbian and Android devices, which represents a big (and welcome) departure for Microsoft.