IT Systems Management

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Facing the challenges presented by the changing economic situation is no easy matter for the IT sector.

With many indigenous companies struggling to keep their heads above water, and some multinationals laying off large numbers of workers, the pressure is on to reduce overheads and squeeze every cent out of existing technology. At the same time, the ratio of people to machines and applications is moving in favour of the former, and IT staffs are being asked to do more with less. To this end, a key message coming from the systems management community is that IT professionals need to keep the business goals of the company in mind when they think about their ongoing roles.

IT talk and IT walk
“Every CIO or IT director I know is being tasked by their business with understanding the bigger picture,” said Paul Turley, regional sales manager for HP software and solutions. “They’re being told ‘stop talking IT, and start aligning everything you do with the business objectives of the organisation.’ On top of this, they’re also being told to report to the board on their performance in business terms.”

“Systems management is critical but infrastructure monitoring on its own is old hat – it doesn’t provide what the organisation needs. The world has moved on and we need to monitor both the systems and the actual business services that people are using,” he said.

Turley believes that in the current economic climate, IT directors have to be able to see that technology is only valuable in its capacity to further business goals.

“In order for a business service, such as an e-mail system or a website for example, to be available to people to use, the underlying systems need to be available and working. However, the end user doesn’t necessarily care if a server goes down, or a network box goes down, or a piece of storage is unavailable. They only care if the service is available or not,” he said.

Faux pas
According to Turley, a classic mistake made in systems management is to place too much importance on diagnostic tools and not enough on the quality of the user experience.

“Quite often an end user will ring the helpdesk to say that a particular application is not performing or is slow. The helpdesk then typically consults its diagnostic systems and replies ‘we’re looking at all our monitoring tools, and all the lights are green.’ That drives end users nuts, and it demonstrates a lack of alignment between IT and the business,” he said.

Instead of using the term systems management, Turley says HP prefers to focus on the idea of business services management as a means of bringing technology more closely into line with the role it plays in the organisation.

“We do systems management – with all the tools and capabilities required to allow a company to monitor their network, servers and applications at an IT level – but we also have tools that allow you to synthetically monitor the end user experience. It’s marrying the two together,” he said.

This re-ordering of priorities is part of a broader effort within the systems management sector to help Irish companies gain competitive advantage by squeezing more out of the investment they have already made in their IT systems.

“In the good times, perhaps even as recently as a year or two ago, companies could afford to throw cash at problems when they encountered them,” said Jeremy Young, director of managed solutions sales with CA. “The result was that often the quality of their infrastructure was far in excess of what they actually needed at the time.”

Young argues that because of this, many companies actually have more capacity and resilience built into their system than they need, and that this spare capacity has the potential to become real asset now that budgets are tighter.

“Basically, an analogy for this might be that they bought a Rolls Royce when a simple Fiat would have done the job,” he said. “A challenge we now have with many customers in this position is how to reduce the capacity of their infrastructure so that it meets the quality of service level that they now require.”

“Having convinced them of that principle, then we need to find out what parts of the infrastructure are over-engineered, and what the relationship is between the assets and the service levels, and the capacity required. Many organisations are grappling with these questions because they haven’t had to consider them all that carefully in the past.”

Squeezing more
According to Joe Baguley, chief technology officer with Quest Software, it is “an absolute fact” that people are gearing up to get more out of their IT infrastructure. “Systems management is an important part of that,” he said.

Quest specialises in systems optimisation, and Baguley said the company has grown by 16% in the last year and is still growing, despite the state of the economy.

“This tells you something about the role that systems management can play in this climate. If you walked into a company 18 months or two years ago, you had to show return on investment on your systems management and optimisation solution over a three to five year period,” he said.

“Today, you have to be able to show that you’re going to save a company money in this fiscal period, in other words within a year. The simple analogy is that two years ago, many people were probably planning on buying a new car in 2009. Now, they’re saying that instead of undertaking that expense, they’re going to put more money into maintaining and keeping that existing car for another couple of years. That’s also what people are doing with their computer systems,” he said.

“I wouldn’t like to be an ERP or CRM salesperson in 2009, because there isn’t going to be a lot of people willing to spend huge sums on new systems. Instead, their priorities are going to be about minimising capital expenditure and optimising operating expenditure by tweaking what they have already got.”

The pressure to do more with less is one that most systems management professionals will be familiar with, but with many companies being forced to downsize their IT departments there is also increasing pressure to automate as many processes as possible.

“The three main areas we’re seeing as consistent issues in the market are cost management, virtualisation and automation,” said Young. “Over the years, IT organisations have invested in various environments such as J2EE or Linux applications, and then have invested in point solutions to manage those environments. Over time they have more and more point solutions which are not integrated, while at the same time, the people in their organisation are moving on from their jobs, either because they’re being let go, or for other reasons.”

“The result is fewer people, lots of deployed technology and a difficult situation in which many companies don’t completely understand all those management tools. They’re almost paralysed by an excess of environments, complexity and management tools,” he said.

Automation nation
Young said that CA is seeing growing interest in automation in the marketplace, as companies look for ways of maintaining workloads at the same time as lowering costs. However, this presents something of a challenge when current and legacy technology have to work together.

“Typically, companies have to deal with both legacy and new systems working side by side, with lots of sophistication and lots of cost. These two lines on the graph are heading in completely opposite directions. Automating the company’s processes and procedures to allow less people to manage the system is a real challenge,” he said.

The ideal solution is to throw everything out and start from scratch, but of course that is out of the question both from a cost perspective, and also from a business continuity perspective.

“Shifting from systems management to systems automation – that’s where businesses see they have to go to squeeze cost out of their IT budget. But of course you can’t get there without a clear understanding of what you have, the capacity of what you have and whether it meets the requirements of your business,” said Young

“We’re finding that virtualisation is also a big driver to reduce costs. Anything that reduces costs is a good thing in the eyes of senior management.”

Systems agility
Patrick Irwin, product manager with Citrix agreed. “Companies know that they need to keep spending to keep moving their business forward, and do things differently to adapt to the changing markets. Virtualisation is one of those areas where it can be clearly seen that there are benefits in terms of making the business more agile,” he said.

“You have to look to the end of this malaise – a few years into future to when the end of this downturn comes – and organisations want to put themselves in the best position to weather this storm and come out the other side in one piece ready to move on.”

Irwin suggests that there is a current trend towards centralisation and consolidation, with companies seeking to bring as much of their IT as possible back to the data centre to drive costs down and achieve greater efficiencies.

“A lot of people we speak to have distributed computing models, with networks and systems that have been built up over the years. These have all been built for very good reasons, but often IT teams today are finding themselves weighed down under the complexity of what they have to manage,” he said.

“Their systems are costly and inflexible, and it’s hard to work with that to accommodate change in the business. IT finds it hard to work with the business’s changing goals and with potential opportunities, or companies miss opportunities altogether because the systems and the business just won’t change in time to make the most of them.”

In the search for methods of achieving cost savings without compromising on manoeuvrability, companies are looking for ways of quantifying the size of the problem. It’s hard to find ways to cut costs if you can’t first measure accurately your outgoings.

Cost control

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