Business Service Management - Is Nastel Technologies Providing Value?    by Denise Rutledge

in Business / Management    (submitted 2010-12-21)

Nastel Technologies is a recognized provider of business transaction management solutions for a broad spectrum of industries--retail, wholesale, manufacturing, insurance, healthcare. Does Nastel provide value for users requiring business service management?

Its recent rating with Gartner in the APM Magic Quadrant report and in Forrester Research’s Competitive Analysis: Application Performance Management and Business Transaction Monitoring suggest that this visionary company is already demonstrating its competence at providing a scalable and flexible business service management solution. It should be expected of a company that is already recognized for providing a 360° situational awareness of applications, middleware and transactions and they impact their state has on the business.

What are the key components of business service management? These are the areas that a business service management (BSM) solution must provide value in.

Business Service Management – ITIL Best Practice

BSM technology focuses on design from a service perspective instead of from a separate component perspective. Rather than operating IT as a configuration of individual silos, BSM enables integration between diverse IT infrastructures. BSM brings together many disparate processes and tools so the entire IT infrastructure functions in a way that fosters business’ dependability and success and optimizes IT’s ability to support the business.

This is exactly what Nastel’s AutoPilot has been doing for years. Nastel has been a leader in bringing new technologies to market such as—Complex Event Processing, SOA, virtualization, cloud computing, etc.—Nastel has kept up with these advances, providing the tools needed to integrate the old with the new. This embrace rather than replace capability allows businesses to make changes seamlessly as need dictates.

Business Service Management – Moving Beyond IT Service Management

In order to provide value to users requiring a BSM solution, Nastel’s AutoPilot solution should adhere to ITIL v3’s vision of helping in the effort to integrate IT with the business -- much more powerful than the prior ITIL directives. BSM is now an ITIL best practice. ITIL V3 defines it as “the ongoing practice of governing, monitoring, and reporting on IT and the business service it impacts.” It’s an approach that leverages processes and technology to make the goals of IT and the goals of the business one and the same. It must provide businesses with the ability to understand the services that depend on the IT infrastructure.

AutoPilot accomplishes this goal by providing visibility into the relationship of technology to services and business processes and delivers the insight users need to make decisions and take action based on business impact.

Business Service Management – Integrating IT with the Business

BSM focuses on integrating IT with the business. Whether that end-user is a teller at the bank who is processing a deposit, an insurance claims handler settling a claim, or a trader explaining where an order went, BSM focuses the energies of IT teams on delivery of dependable service and moving to the next level of service management maturity. This is important because so many organizations are attempting to integrate business applications to automate end-to-end business processes and deliver business services. Deriving operational objectives from business services and managing the services accordingly, however, is a difficult challenge. Examples of this type of objective include reducing problem detection and resolution time through automation and processing transactions faster.

Because BSM includes a focus on service level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs), a BSM solution must enable improvement in how these services are delivered. Real-time monitoring and reporting should be automatic.

A BSM solution should also:

Reduce IT outages and downtime. AutoPilot delivers end-to-end visibility across the entire IT enterprise. Because the core complex event processing engine correlates data with applications and events, emergent problems are nipped before they cascade into user-impacting problems. Problems can be prevented resulting in the elimination of most IT outages.

Minimize the risk that changes to the IT infrastructure will interrupt business critical functions. AutoPilot’s automated discovery of applications and transactions and their performance can feed a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) in order to speed up the process of managing the impact of change in a business and improve its accuracy.

Provide transparency into the availability and performance levels of each service. AutoPilot’s deep-dive capabilities provide real-time availability and performance reports for each application and determines the impact this has on the business service. The information generated makes it easy to pinpoint exactly where problems are, where they are developing and what their impact will be.

Monitor and report. AutoPilot not only monitors the entire IT enterprise, it generates automated reports. Whether you are monitoring for SLA compliance or for slow transactions, AutoPilot’s reporting is automatic.

Provide a single point of reference. All the information gathered should be available in one view. AutoPilot has role-based dashboards which IT operations staff and business managers may use to extract more in-depth information about business services and their underlying infrastructure. This ability to access information on a dashboard suitable to their role enhances functionality.

AutoPilot’s built-in, grid-based complex event processing (CEP) engine is both fast and highly scalable. Its ability to deliver predictive alerting and problem prevention are essential in order to reduce the impact IT problems have on the business. This is an important benefit in that it reduces the cost to bring new services to the market and also to reduce the cost of maintaining them over their lifetime. This is another critical factor making AutoPilot a strong competitor in the BSM marketplace.

The real strength displayed by AutoPilot is its ability to complement other applications. Nastel has designed its program to work with other applications. It is certified with IBM: Ready for Tivoli and Ready for SOA, is integrated with CA, BMC and HP. Using open application programming interfaces (APIs), AutoPilot can be teamed up with legacy monitoring solutions to provide its customers with best-of-breed business service management options with turnkey integration. In fact, it can raise the IQ of a customer’s existing investments in monitoring solutions.

Is Nastel Technologies providing value in the business service management sector? All the evidence says it is. It continues to provide thought leadership to the market and continuously expand AutoPilot’s capabilities to meet the demands of the increasingly complex IT environment common in business today. It is an Application Performance Management and Business Transaction Monitoring solution worth serious consideration.

About the Author

Denise Rutledge enjoys researching and writing about many topics including financial and business topics. Denise also works with clients to develop website content, with a focus on writing materials that develop brand and trust through valuable, easy to read information. Learn more by visiting her website at http://writingasaghost.com.