Is delivering IT operations management as “software as a service (SaaS)” a viable option?
I think it’s a question worth contemplating for anyone involved in IT Ops. Yes cloud hysteria is everywhere, and yes a lot of what’s going on is vendors rephrasing the same products with the latest buzzwords. Nonetheless, there are also signs of a major shift, that can potentially have a major impact on IT Operations Management.
There is no doubt that IT Ops will be drastically different going forward when organizations start using more and more “cloud” services but this is not the focus of this post. What I wanted to hash out is whether SaaS is a viable model for delivering IT management itself. And even going further, whether it will become the dominant model in not so distant future.
Let’s start with a look at the current state of IT Operations Management first. Is there actually a problem that needsa solution? I’m pretty sure we all agree that there is indeed a problem.
Most organizations are stuck in the muck
Currently implementing just the base solutions take so much time and effort that only few organizations have the means and the will to proceed any further. There has been little innovation in the field and even the ideas and technologies that have been around for many years don’t get applied.
For example, let’s think of what it takes to implement and maintain an event management solution in a large network.IBM’s Netcool suite is widely accepted as the defacto standard product for event management and has a very large user base. Yet the solution has many moving parts:
- Probes
- Tiered Object Servers for aggregation, presentation, etc.
- Bi-directional gateways for replication,
- Webtop, TIP, etc. to provide web based UI
- Reporter and Oracle for reporting
- …
At least a dozen application processes. Just installing the right versions of the included software, avoiding compatibility issue and integrating the components is a major undertaking, let alone mastering how to develop solutions using them. This is just to consolidate events in a single repository, nothing advanced at all.
As a result of this complexity, highly skilled resources get bogged down implementing & maintaining the base solution, struggling to find the bandwidth to implement features/techniques that would truly add value: enrichment, automation, correlation, visualization, service management etc.
It is also very costly and difficult to build sophisticated solutions on top of such complicated and hard to maintain foundation. Hence organizations find it hard to show ROI, and justify any further investment. Solutions at best stagnate where they are, performing the bare minimum, and at worst they degrade in time to become eventually unusable.
So how may SaaS help ?
SaaS is not a magic bullet. If someone took the same product suites and attempted to provide as a service they would have little to no chance to succeed. The dominant products from Big 4+ vendors are quite old and not designed for the “cloud”. But a solution that is designed from ground up with new constraints and opportunities of introduced by cloud and other modern technologies may have a significant impact.
What if event management was available as a SaaS offering? An event management solution that has high availability, no scalability limitations, modern web based UI with impressive visualization capabilities, correlation using complex event processing techniques, workflow, integrated reporting etc. ? Even more, what if they also offered a development platform for others to build solutions as well, similar to SalesForces’s Force.com? Would it not change the entire landscape?
Such an offering can potentially solve majority of the problems, Ops organizations currently struggle with (the muck), freeing up their resources to move up the chain and tackle more value add projects. It would also potentially provide substanstial savings, making it quite attractive to business.
SaaS as a model has moved to mainstream. It is no longer necessary to explain to people what it is, why and how it provides value. Although it may not have been embraced by everyone in the enterprise world, there are signs that it may even becoming the preferred approach for many organizations.
And SaaS offerings have come to IT management as well. Service-now.com ITSM service is a stellar example of the power and potential of SaaS in IT management. It has already changed the ITSM landscape, forcing established players to scramble to offer their own solutions as SaaS.There are also already number of SaaS offerings in the market typically targeting SMBs. Can an event management solution for the large enterprises be far behind?
No doubt there are obstacles, both technical and organizational, that may hinder adoption of SaaS in IT Operations. Most obvious ones seem to be security concerns and integration, but are these show stoppers or just issues that need to be worked out? These concerns are valid for any application and although they are source of concern, they do not seem to hinder adoption of SaaS in other areas. Is there something that makes IT Operations Management so unique that it can be immune to the SaaS tidal wave?
One thing is for certain that if SaaS gains traction in IT Ops, our lives will never be the same! I think it is time to assess what the implications of SaaS may be and figure out what we need to do to surf the wave rather than getting swept by it.
What do you think? I would love to hear what your thoughts and compare notes…
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