IT Service Management:
BMC Software for IT Service Management recently announced two products, and an ongoing strategy, to address the problems associated with managing complex business transactions. The products that are available immediately have some unique advantages, especially the ability to monitor and manage mainframe-originating transactions, and will help customers overcome specific issues from day one. The longer-term strategy is aggressive, and will result in a wide-ranging and highly functional solution that will be extremely competitive.
BMC Software Announces 'BMC Transaction Management' On February 14, 2006, BMC Software entered the Business Transaction Management market with the announcement of BMC Transaction Management. This announcement signals the availability of two new products, BMC IT Service management, Transaction Management Application Response Time, and MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer. It also signals a new integrated product and marketing strategy for business transaction management that aims to address customer needs more completely over time.
The Complexity of IT Service management Managing Business Transactions:
Business processes are becoming increasingly complex. In simpler times, one business process, such as a loan application or a sales inquiry, might have been equated to a single IT transaction. There was a direct connection, as an application or database processed a user request, and then returned a result directly back to the user. In modern enterprises, business processing spans multiple IT components, traversing web servers, application servers, and databases across several different operating systems and environments.
This makes it much harder to track complex business transactions, manage their performance, isolate and correct problems, and assure service levels. Such complexity leads to significant business issues, most notably slow response to lost' transactions and poor performance. Often multiple IT Service Management departments and skill sets are required to address a problem that spans multiple environments, which exacerbates the problems, and extends the problem's impact. End users can experience excessive downtime or an ongoing slowdown in response, with the resulting loss of business and revenue, lower customer satisfaction, and potential compliance problems.
Traditional IT Services Management and performance management solutions generally offer only a fragmented view of business transactions. For example, a monitor may be able to detect and resolve issues within a contained database environment, or within a single application server, but complex transactions may suffer from compound effects; or the administrators may not be able to determine who owns the responsibility for a poorly performing transaction. A fragmented view also raises costs, as enterprises over-provision their environment to compensate for potential performance issues, instead of addressing real problems.
Several vendors address this issue with solutions for business transaction management. These solutions aim to monitor and manage IT transactions from a business process perspective, from the end-user though all the IT components that make up a complex business transaction. The goal is to provide a single, integrated view of the transactional data, the end user experience, and the IT infrastructure, to allow enterprises to manage, monitor, detect, isolate, and resolve problems that affect the business process as a whole.
BMC Software's Response to Complex Business Transactions
BMC Software has entered this market with the announcement of two products that form the foundation for end-to-end transaction path analysis to pinpoint components that are causing transaction slow-down or failure. The products are:
- BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time which uses synthetic transactions to measure end-user experience, record user transaction steps, and detect component problems
- MAINVIEW Transaction Analyzer which tracks real transactions through the mainframe to correlate and record transaction information across multiple subsystems
These products are available immediately. While both products are available as standalone offerings, they will make use of an open platform that can accept metrics from other infrastructure components. BMC is leveraging this by integrating these products with their configuration IT Service Management database, linking transactions to business services, and building on their IT Business Service Management (BSM) capabilities.
BMC Software's longer-term strategy is to deliver "actionable information through all technology layers," with a horizontal insight across mainframe, distributed and n-tier architectures for synthetic and real transactions. This long-term strategy will eventually allow customers to approach problem isolation and resolution proactively, regardless of the complexity and maturity of their enterprise.
