Service delivery.

Service management is the new philosophy of IT delivery. As IT managers have come under pressure to assure the high quality of IT services, governed by internal service level agreements and by the requirement to deliver application responsiveness to web users coming in from outside of the firewall, vendors of systems, network and applications management software have responded with new and reworked toolsets that go beyond specific device or application management to support and prove service levels and IT value.

No longer is it acceptable for IT to manage discrete tasks such as server uptime, network bandwidth, or application availability. Rather, the need is for service delivery in a holistic way.

"IT's responsibilities have shifted from managing individual technologies to managing end-to-end services," says Hurwitz Group analyst Jasmine Noel. "As a result, managing the computing infrastructure is now about ensuring continuity of business services. This builds a service-level context into everything IT does."

The technologies that are imbued in that new approach are just emerging. Companies such as Mercury Interactive, Hewlett-Packard, Compuware and BMC Software have re-oriented their thinking to put service at the head of the agenda.

That is certainly where many organisations want to get to, but few feel they are close yet. In a recent straw poll by Compuware, the bulk of managers (37%) still felt their IT infrastructure management was governed by "reactive" behaviour. Only 16% believed they were in a position to deliver service level management.

Vendors addressing this have pulled together their product offerings in network, application, database, storage and platform management and added an extra layer that provides the central reporting mechanism essential to the SLA culture. Such moves, says Mike Lucas, business consultant at Compuware, "allow organisations to start reporting the metrics as proof points to the business."

That points back to the fact that service management is a process that spans multiple, and previously discrete, disciplines. To make it a reality, organisations will have to mix and match their suppliers wisely.

Market snapshot: Service management software

Market metrics At this stage, no analyst group provides figures on the service management software market. Instead, Gartner's Dataquest unit sizes its two main component areas, network and systems management and storage management. The worldwide network and system management software market reached around $10 billion in 2000, up 19% over 1999 revenue levels, and may grow to $2.1 billion by 2004. Gartner highlights how some sub-segments are strong. The network and service management products saw 45% growth in 2000, with desktop management coming in second at 33%. Computer Associates IBM/Tivoli, BMC and Hewlett-Packard led the market share table. The related area of storage management software was worth $5.3 billion in 2000, growing to $16.7 billion in 2005, says Gartner.

Key suppliers

BMC Software

Computer Associates

Compuware

HP

IBM 

Mercury Interactive

Microsoft

Mercury Interactive

Veritas

Product segmentation The service management software market is defined in different ways by different vendors and analysis. "The ability to establish and meet ebusiness-based , service-level objectives while rapidly adapting to changes in your business,"is how BMC Software puts it. But the majority regard it as the superset of management products that are required to deliver the kind of end-to-end IT that is demanded by service-level agreements - irrespective of the source of the problem or issue. In order to satisfy that, service management suites include systems/platform management, network management, applications management, performance management, storage management, data management , middleware management, security management and capacity management, as well as specific coverage for the managing service level agreements.

Sector buzzwords 

Service delivery

SLAs

application visualisation

end-to-end management

application performance management

enterprise consoles

service assurance