HP Today

"Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands but now it's being dismembered and destroyed. It's tragic", Steve Jobs, 2011

Right information to the right level

There is a big misunderstanding when providing dashboards and reports to Sr. IT management and this practice makes it difficult for an organization to understand the value of these solutions. Starting from alerts in the monitoring systems, false alarms go to technical administrators and they ignore them. Technical detail information goes to a Sr. Director or a CIO and they do not have much use for it. What will a CIO do with a report of that says a disk filesystem was full last Thursday or that the CPU was 100% at some point on Friday. The Sr. management of an IT organization deals with the business and at the end of the day the data they need is the current status of the IT service and a report as to how it performed in the past 7 or 30 days or so. Just like a CFO the first thing he needs is money produced and money spend, similarly the CIO needs to know if the service is available and the performance of the service is decent. The historical report should also incorporate the business requirements for these IT services. What is the point of stating to a Telco CIO that a POS at a store was unavailable outside the business hours? Planned downtimes need to be mentioned in the report and finally if available the business expectations for the service should be reflected in the report. If there was an agreement, more of an SLA or an OLA that a service will have 99.9% availability for example then there must have been an investment for high availability of this service that the ROI of the business related to this investment is providing this availability. High availability does not happen by magic or wishful thinking of the business unit, therefore these business requirements should be formalized and if needed spend money to be able to provide this level of service. The report of the CIO for the IT services should reflect that. When an IT service is failing, then this is the point when the detailed technical information from the events along with incident information from Service Manager need to come into the picture to figure out why the service is failing the expectations. Just like if a company is loosing money, the CFO and CIO will dig into the detail financials of the expenses to find out what went wrong and make adjustments to improve the results, but imagine if they tried to fix a problem without the data in there hands... it's a he said she said situation and the best or sometimes dirtiest politician wins. When the executive IT reporting is left to the hands of the technical administrators without clear guidelines as to what the upper IT management is looking for, then the technical admins are looking for ways to 'impress' and a meaningless report with beautiful colours comes out and it will not do the job. If you want to impress get fireworks, this is a business report that should have the right info for the CIO level.

Etisalat Service Level Management solution in the news

The Etisalat SLM solution that will provide the ability to offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to the corporate data network customers is about to go live in July 2011. The solution, implemented by Parallon, as appeared in the UAE press due to the HP EMEA award to Etisalat as BTO champion:

http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidZAWYA20110621121625/HP_announces_Etisalat_as_Business_Optimization_Champion

Parallon Presenting at HP Software Universe in Barcelona

Lefty Kreouzis and George Petrides from Parallon will be presenting at the HP Software Universe in Barcelona "Service Level Management for Telcos with HP BTO Software". The HP Software Universe is an annual conference for HP Software.

Click here for the event website.


Nov 30, 18:00 - 18:45
Room: P1-128

Present an integrated Service Level Management platform for Telecom Service Level Agreements (SLAs) using HP Operations Manager for UNIX, Service Manager, Network Node Manager, Performance Insight and Parallon SLABus. The solution consolidates and correlates network alarms from Element Management Systems and presents a service view of the end-customers networks for operational purposes. The alarms are passed on to Service Manager while measurements for the SLAs arrive from OVPI and EMS systems. The Network SLAs are built on the Parallon SLABus, a middleware for the HP BTO platform to offer complex Telecom SLAs that are a must for MSPs.

Parallon Telco Service Level Management (SLA) Solution

Parallon is one of the few consulting firms in the world that have a solid Service Level Management solution incorporating HP BTO Software. Our proven solution enables Telecom Managed Services Provider to offer complex corporate customers network SLAs and at the same time improve the efficiency of service support and increase the quality and availability. The following block diagram presents the Parallon SLM solution that utilizes the Parallon SLA Bus and Paralert software.

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Parallon March 2010 Newsletter

You can download our latest newsletter from link
http://www.parallon.com/news/parallon2010newsletter.pdf

Dilbert on CMMI

eTOM and ITIL

It's interesting how two worlds co-existed in the large Telco environments but did not have much interaction... I am talking about IT and Telecom, even from the consulting point of view, we would only deal with IT but never touch the telecom management areas and each side had something tha the other side needed. Lately we see more interaction between the two areas and it is interesting how more advanced IT was in the service support areas with ITIL. Service Desk software are badly needed in the telecom side of the large companies and now ITIL is officially part of eTOM v8, addressing the service support areas. eTOM addresses the entire Telecom enterprise, however, it is remains higher level than ITIL in terms of detail. On the other hand, it gives a good of the Telecom company structure. In smaller telecom companies (and also younger companies) we have done for example provisioning control through service desk in the past and the telecom guys were able to keep the provisioning side organized and simplified processes and their life in general... however, looking at large telecoms, some of them struggle to keep track of the situation with little homegrown applications left and right but given the increase of demand for data networks and managed services now the situation gets more serious and is a critical revenue channel that needs to be optimized.
Shown below are the areas that ITIL v3 addresses (click on the image to enlarge):

Having said that though, people have to realize that they need to share information, centralize the information and manage the processes end-to-end in the Telecom company, and that is where the CTO and CIO roles are very critical in getting this through, especially in ex state owned telecoms where there was a big gap between upper and middle management.
HP is ahead of the competition and has developed ISM, a framework that combines eTOM and ITIL and uses the BTO software in combination with the traditional HP Telecom Management software (e.g. Temip) to address that space, as shown below:


The core of the solution is Service Manager along with the uCMDB for service support and the Parallon SLA Bus has evolved as an enterprise Telecom SLM solution and goes hand-in-hand with the HP BTO products in the complete SLM solution.








The Parallon SLA Bus is integrated with HP Operations Manager, Service Manager and uCMDB to manage complex Telecom SLAs. A couple of screen shots below of the SLA Bus v3.0 coming out in February:

Further reading for eTOM and ITIL:

Paper “TR-143 Building Bridges: ITIL and eTOM by TMForum”, the ITIL incident management processes are part of eTOM framework and the adaptation of these processes is NGOSS compliant.

Also, another reference paper that also includes the configuration management part is

“GB921V: Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), The Business Process Framework, Release 6.0”

Both papers above are available through TMFORUM.

Burj Dubai Tower

Burj Dubai was inaugurated today, that is the tallest building in the world at 828 meter with 168 floors. Some Parallon consultants have witnessed the rising of Burj Dubai since 2006 when we started the upgrade of Etisalat's NMS systems and today we have witnessed it's completion as we are delivering one of the largest ITSM projects in the MEMA region, the Etisalat SLM solution.
It was sad to see how the news about Dubai were misrepresented in the world media during the last month. A company asking to freeze it's debt payments for six months was interpreted that Dubai is going down and it's the end of it... Dubai went through the hard times exactly a year ago and now it is on it's way to recover. Yes, it will take a while before it comes back to the high growth it had two years ago but the important thing is that it is on it's way up. Burj Dubai was renamed Burj Khalifa in honor of the UAE President and ruler of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Khalifa.

Youli Bogdanou joined Parallon

Youli Bogdanou has joined the Parallon team as a software developer working on the development and support of Parallon SLA Logic Bus and the Paralert products.

Dubai coming back!!! Abu Dhabi taking off...

A year ago Dubai was highly affected by the economic crisis and some journalists jumped to the opportunity of exaggerating the situation. However, I am glad to say that Dubai economy is coming back. People start pouring in (and traffic is bad again..) but this is a good sign. Roads and malls are packed and Dubai is growing again at fast pace and feels great being in this vibrant city. Our business is growing fast in the UAE given the needs of companies that are growing and all the effort we have put in the past years to break into the Middle East market are now paying off.


Abu Dhabi has been developing like crazy the past few years. It feels like Dubai around 2003 and it feels like it has been taxiing in the past years and just took off. The Formula 1 race few weeks ago was the lift off sign from Abu Dhabi. The Ferrari theme park is almost ready and I personally enjoy driving the new highway through Yas Island that takes you through beautiful scenery of Sadiyat Island and gets you straight to the Corniche of Abu Dhabi. The UAE is truly the center of the Middle East region and the place that bridges East and West.

Speech by HP's CEO Mark Hurd

A speech by HP's CEO Mark Hurd at Berkeley's Haas Business School. We are grateful to Mark for turning around HP and bringing it's partner closer to HP.

IT Management Solutions and Maturity of IT departments

Having worked with numerous IT organizations around the world, it is quite interesting to see the difference in maturity and organization witnessed over the years at some of these. One side is the technical infrastructure, where shops grew fast without any standards and an enterprise level infrastructure is managed without naming standards, DNS and OS, network and applications standards. To my opinion these are the responsibility of the IT manager or technical leads of the administration and support teams. These are usually addressed with documents that the tech teams need to put together and eventually enforce these standards. Moving one layer higher, the IT director should get his people to put processes together for the various teams under him or her to work more organized and efficient. These areas should address infrastructure monitoring, incident management, release management and IT operational processes. Moving one more layer up to the CIO level, this level should address how all teams should interact between them and how to serve the business. The initiative for change management, asset management, service level management and incident management should come from the CIO who should force all directors and managers to enforce these inter-departmental functions. In quite a number of shops, the IT manager expects from the administrators to get together and come up with standards, the IT director expects from the technical administrators and their leads to come up with infrastructure management initiatives and solutions and the CIO expects from one director to enforce processes across areas that are not under his/hers responsibility with no backing from higher up. The result is an enterprise level IT organization that runs like a small IT group. Problems left and right, firefighting, finger pointing and eventually an IT organization that the business sees as necessary to the business as electricity. The failure of the IT department to run like a business is a major issue that prevents IT from showing it's value to the business and be regarded as a function critical to the business. The lack of consulting firms who can guide the customers to the right direction or the inability of the consulting firm to talk to the right level in the IT organization is also a major issue.
We have seen IT organizations with low maturity that addressed infrastructure management solutions as a tool to be used by the administrators to monitor servers, networks, etc. The management expects from the administrators who's job is to maintain the servers, networks, etc. to also monitor the infrastructure. This is the job of the IT Operations team and very rarely an administrator will proactively monitor the infrastructure. The managers fail to see the business gain from these solutions that is really the ability to find where the problem is right away and route it to the appropriate support team to fix it. I have heard IT managers going to the CIO or IT director with a request for few hundred thousand dollars and when their management asks "What is it going to do for us?" the answer is that it will tell us if a hard drive is about to fill up or if our backup failed... this would be similar to someone asking their parents for college money and when asked what they'll do with that money, the answer would be "I'll live in dorms, attend classes and get a paper". Any CIO would be out of his mind if he or she approved a requisition for few hundred thousand on the basis that it would tell his techies that a hard drive is full...
Moving on to Service Support, this is a more difficult area in the sense that it usually involves multiple departments in the design and implementation of such solution. We have seen IT managers who do not understand ITIL processes and how things should work, who inquire about a service desk solution and in their mind they are looking for a help desk software. When they hear the prices they freak out and they are right, since they are looking to buy a moped and they see the price for a large truck. However, their approach is wrong to begin with. You do not manage the finance department of a large company the same way you run bookeeping for a small company and these are the signs of an immature IT organization. We have witnessed maturity growth in Telecom organizations and particularly GSM providers and our business is growing fast in that sector. However, the banking IT organizations still have way to go before they address IT Management solutions that will be used appropriately and see high return on investment. We as Parallon typically have a high cost of sales development since it involves educating the customer during a long sales cycle but the results are encouraging when the customer reaches a level of maturity and we see initiatives coming from inside the company seeking to improve IT efficiencies and the quality of services.

Our 2008 Ad

Telecom Service Level Management

We have witnessed an increase in demand for Telecom SLA solutions in South Europe and the Middle East given the trend of large organizations to outsource their wide area networks to Telecom providers. Our expertise in such SLA solutions has grown over the years and we have even developed a business logic bus integrated with the HP BTO software to satisfy specific needs for Telco SLAs where practical problems in incorporating complex business rules, long term data retention, exceptions and integration to BSS/OSS systems are not easy to address with a standard products. Parallon’s deep knowledge of Telecom business and HP software management platform along with our implementation and IT management experience has brought us into the spotlight nowadays. Our loyalty to HP as a technology and business partner, the hard work and dedication of our team, the attention to detail and quality results, and following a strategy of focused core competencies offered across multiple geographical markets, have placed us way ahead of the competition and positioned our company for high growth.

Sukru Arslan joined the Parallon Team

Sukru Arslan has joined Parallon as a Senior Solutions Architect. Sukru ranked number 2 in the world in the HP Management Software forums at itrc.hp.com and has worked for a number of IT companies in Turkey, including IBTECH, the IT group of Finas Bank, a subsidiary of the National Bank of Greece. Sukru is a member of our Middle East Infrastructure Management team.

Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft

One step at a time...

Running an enterprise IT department without an ITSM infrastructure is similar to running a finance department with spreadsheets. Ironically, IT departments support the 'computerization' of their company's business units that are running advanced solutions in the meantime, IT barely has any solution for it's own use. Now, when a customer has no ITSM platform and they ask us for reporting, I try to explain the steps needed to get there, that is infrastructure monitoring, service monitoring and then service reporting. Similar to setting up a financial system first and then expect to get your financial reports. If a customer has it's availability report then there is no beyond that as to the status and performance of the IT services. If I get a service report with 80% say availability, then I do know I have a problem but don't know why I have a problem and therefore I can't do much about it to improve it. Well, at that point I don't really need the report since the business units will be complaining about the IT service provided to them.
Therefore, the first step to implement an ITSM platform is the ITIL infrastructure optimization layer. Monitor every infrastructure component of IT and relate that component to the IT services provided. Focus on each IT service (on-line banking, pre-paid billing systems, ERP, etc. etc.) and then drill down to the infrastructure that supports the service rather than focus on servers and disks. Monitor every layer of the IT service, NSP, network, application, database, cluster, Operating System and hardware. Monitoring of only one layer, e.g. network with Network Node Manager, is only a part of the picture and will not bring significant value to IT and the business. Give the monitoring function to IT Operations since that is where it belongs, don't expect the adminstrators to monitor the infrastructure since that is not their job to begin with. This practice will increase availability since the time spend to find where the problem is (is it on the server, hardware or Operating System, is it the database, is it the network?) and reduce the finger pointing between the technical departments. You heard many times the phrase "it's not an application problem... it must be the database..." Well, eventually the problem is low swap on the server but you just wasted precious time of the application support administrator, the database administrator and the systems administrator to figure out something that a good ITSM implementation would have shown within 5 minutes. In the meantime, while the technical support personnel was searching and pointing to each other for 3 hours, your IT service was down!
Cars nowadays have advanced monitoring and diagnostic systems that let you know right away you have a problem, with the correct severity (red light for running out of oil, orange for check engine, cyan for running out of windshield fluid, etc. etc.) but your multimillion Euro IT infrastructure is running with no monitoring system.

IT Service Monitoring (end-to-end) is the next step. Try to monitor the IT service the same way the end-user 'sees' it. Emulate a user transaction and check that every few minutes in order to know right away you have a problem and record that data.
You are now ready to start working on Service Reporting.
Now, plug-in the bussiness requirements for the service (business hours, required availability, planned maintenance) and you got your report you need to do the job while Infrastructure monitoring will provide the data you need to take actions.

After you get to this point, then you can start looking into Business Technology Optimization, where you start monitoring flows of data, queues etc. etc. and translate that into business terms. In Infrastructure management, I have an alarm that the CRAPPQ queue is high and I let my application support people know about it to figure out where the problem is. When I get to business service management I translate this to 'credit application queue' and I link this to the rest of the business process supported by IT in order to receive and approve credit applications by customers.

Business Technology Optimization. Not everyone ready for it...

HP Software's direction is BTO (a term evolved from 'bussiness services management') that became a hot topic these days with the acquisition of Mercury. Starting from Infrastructure management and then off to service management the next logical step is business service management but I firmly believe that unless you have graduated the infrastructure and service management school, then you are not ready for business service management. A number of our customers are monitoring the IT infrastructure and services from the business point of view (meaning linking the infrastructure to the service and then managing the end service with monitoring, reporting and support). These kind of customers get into the business processs by monitoring the parts of the process. E.g. for banking payment systems there is a flow of the business process to accept for example utility payments either through on-line banking, ATM and other payment machines, process the payment and inform core banking, and other external systems and/or agencies of the payment status. Mercury has great tools to help us map application interaction and monitor the flow between them, which will help with the manual process we currently use to get people in a room and try to map the application flows on a whiteboard. How fast then can an organization move to BTO? That varies significantly, depending on a number of factors but unless these projects (infrastructure, service management) are backed by the top IT management then the expect a very slow pace graduating the ITIL arena with little projects that will win concensus and then move on to BTO.
George