Business Service Management (BSM) for Virtualized Infrastructures

Had a very interesting discussion this week with a leading industry analyst who covers the Application Performance Management (APM) space. It had been more than two years since we had briefed her. Getting into the briefing she was a sceptic. She had been introduced to eG as an APM vendor several years ago, and wanted to know what was new in our APM solution. She heard from our PR manager that we were into virtualization management now and was even confused as to whether she should speak to us or one of her colleagues who covers virtualization should (even the analysts seem to work in silos!!!). Anyway, she decided to make the briefing and the first thing she wanted to know was why we’d given up on APM and moved to virtualization management.

As we went through eG’s positioning against competing management vendors and showed how we focus on competitor’s weak spots rather than go head-to-head against them, she was intrigued. Then we discussed how our play in the virtualization space was not to be yet another monitoring tool that just took vCenter data and put into another dashboard with pretty graphs. As we went through an example that illustrated how eG Enterprise took a business service performance problem and helped the service desk pin-point with a single click where the root-cause of the problem was (i.e., network? database? application? VM? physical server?), she could immediately see what we were doing and that eG Enterprise is the only solution today that correlates business service performance with that of the underlying infrastructure (physical and virtual) and helps pin-point where the real bottlenecks lie. She concluded by saying “So you are doing BSM for virtual infrastructures! Cool!“

While BSM seems to be quite popular in the physical world, very few in the industry seem to have recognized its importance in the virtualized world as well. This article – http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/server-virtualization/egs-software-a-hit/ – highlights why you should care about your business services in a virtualized infrastructure as well.