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Enterprise Management Associates™ (EMA™) research has uncovered several trends and best practices in the industry around asset management and asset intelligence. These best practices are focused on solving some of the most difficult challenges facing enterprises today. Business growth that outpaces increases in IT headcount coupled with escalating complexity in managing the infrastructure are two factors threatening to overwhelm companies with inefficient IT organizations. In order to increase IT efficiency, one of the fundamental building blocks is good asset management practices, a standardized environment that is automatically discovered and holistically visualized. Tools that address issues such as intelligence about assets in the environment, deviations and drift in hardware and software, visualization of dominant configurations, and integration with other IT domains (i.e., portfolio management, incident and problem management, etc.) are becoming absolute requirements for companies interested in advancing their asset management to the next generation and improve IT efficiency.
This white paper addresses asset management and asset intelligence in the larger context of overall IT objectives by providing insight into the industry and future trends. A case study for Erie Insurance illustrates the principles advanced in the paper. Finally, a review of the current offerings from CA, specifically focused on Unicenter Asset Intelligence r11.2, is presented as a viable real-world solution for IT operations that must focus on standardization. A viewpoint on the Unicenter Asset Intelligence r11.2 product provides a brief review of the technology from EMA’s perspective.
The Rise of Analysis and Intelligence Engines
EMA research has uncovered several consistent trends in the growth patterns of enterprise IT operations. These trends, following general economic indicators, allow for periods of rapid growth similar to those seen at the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s. During that period, many companies built out infrastructures through massive investments in new technology that were expected to last ten years or more. Management of the IT infrastructure, however, was a secondary or tertiary concern for most companies, overshadowed by new capabilities and rapid development of new technologies. Standardization was difficult at best with many organizations allowing application developers to determine hardware, operating system and configuration parameters on an ad hoc basis. Even when standards were applied, most large organizations found it difficult to enforce standards without implementing Draconian measures.
In the last five years, with cautious growth in IT spending, the focus of many initiatives has shifted to catching up with managing the infrastructure. This focus includes both assets within the datacenter and those outside including laptops, remote desktops, and mobile devices. With limited budgets, IT management in the US has finally begun to adopt best practice standards such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Standardization of hardware and software with a keen interest in integrating toolsets is now a priority. Tool acquisitions have moved from plugging holes in monitoring capabilities and discovering basic configuration data to implementing full-fledged configuration management database systems (CMDB). The CMDB, as an enabling technology that allows a holistic view of the entire enterprise, provides the foundation for the implementation of next-generation analytic tools and processes. EMA predicts that as the bulk of large enterprises jump the CMDB hurdle, a new focus on intelligence engines, predictive analysis tools and true management dashboards will emerge as top-of-mind issues for IT executives.
EMA uses a variety of consulting models to determine the current state of an IT organization’s maturity and predict various scenarios for future states. For example, the EMA Asset Management Maturity Model is aimed at providing a comprehensive evaluation of an IT organization’s current ability to monitor, standardize, manage and predict the assets in the infrastructure. As shown in the diagram below, there are five states of asset management maturity. EMA research has definitively shown that most enterprise-level IT organizations are located in the late Active stage of this model with a significant trend towards putting in the foundational elements (i.e., CMDB, etc.) to move to the Proactive stage where a focus will be on analytics and optimization of assets. EMA expects that this transition from Active to Proactive management will occur by 2010 for the majority of the Fortune 500.
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