IT Management 2.0: New Answers to New Questions (http://bit.ly/9Y0kj6)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) March 12, 2010 -- Today, most IT leaders have a relatively clear idea about what they must grow up to become—highly responsive, agile and lean service providers. Of course, they’ve known this for some time—only now, the transformation seems more imminent than ever.

It’s the combination of necessity and invention that has made this so: necessity, in the form of changing economics and market realities; and invention, in the form of new tools.

For most, the necessity part is clear as day—painfully so. But the tools? The tools remain cloudy—in many cases, literally.

In part, we have ourselves to blame for this rampant “cloud washing” that has swept across the vendor landscape over the last year or two. (Although, I’m quite proud of rPath’s discipline on this front. Certainly, cloud is an amplifier to our value, but we’ve consciously avoided being labeled “a cloud company” in the service of clarity and focus.)

As a vendor contributing to this ecosystem and the emerging generation of system management solutions, this confusion has been burdensome. We’re often relegated to an amorphous catchall category associated with virtualization, cloud or some such thing.

But that seems to be changing. Category definitions are evolving to reflect the new generation of management tools—new answers to new questions.

Forrester recently published a report that bid farewell to yesterday’s IT management taxonomies in favor of a new model for describing the IT management tool chain—what they’re calling IT Management 2.0. It’s a welcomed, and I think necessary, refresh in the context for the IT management conversation. I hope it will spur others to do the same.

At the same time, DevOps has emerged as a movement more inclined to look forward than back. The focus is on the automation requirements for lean, high-velocity IT.

Some of the large management vendors continue to fan these winds of change, signaling strong agreement through aggressive acquisition and realignment (think CA and VMware). Others are standing by more idly (examples withheld for propriety’s sake; that’s just how I was raised. But you know who they are).

The reality is that yesterday’s approaches to IT management are fast becoming anachronistic relics, yesterday’s answers to today’s very different questions.

Today, IT is under extraordinary pressure to transform because of:

• Massive scale – driven, in part, by the emergence of virtualization and cloud, through which the volume of deployed systems may compound by 5-20X or more.
• Accelerated change – amplified by Agile development and the growth in complexity of systems comprising many different custom and commercial software sources.
• The need for speed – a persistent pressure for IT, but made worse by the just-swipe-a-credit-card promises of Amazon EC2 and other public cloud options.

• Lean IT – as budgets contract under the weight of do-more-with-less mandates, last year’s lean-by-necessity becomes this year’s “new normal.”

In The

cloud     data center automatio     release automation     release automation platform     rPath     virtualization