Pulse 2010: Building a Dynamic Infrastructure through Integrated Service Management

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Getting great information is central to making headway in the face of complex challenges.

Today, the challenges faced by business leaders lead to difficult questions such as: How can we position our organization to succeed in the new economy? How can we create a unified response to changing conditions when our infrastructure is divided into and managed on the basis of separate silos? How can we optimally respond to unpredictable spikes in workloads, or roll out new services more efficiently? How can we obtain holistic management of all our assets, and proactively secure and enhance our services? And where can we turn to get proven, expert information on all these topics?

One compelling way to get answers to these questions is to attend Pulse 2010, the premier service management event of the year, to be hosted by IBM in Las Vegas Nevada from February 21st to February 24th at the MGM Grand Hotel. Front and center at Pulse will be a key IBM strategy—Dynamic Infrastructure—which is designed to help organizations improve service management by integrating and enhancing the infrastructure used to deliver and support services.

A Dynamic Infrastructure is an integrated solution to many business challenges

IBM's vision of the Dynamic Infrastructure, to be explored in depth at Pulse, represents a fairly deep conceptual shift for many organizations. Rather than the infrastructure being divided into largely independent technology silos, each with its own assets, each managed separately and each tuned well for its own purposes, it should be integrated. The infrastructure should also be managed in an integrated way, as determined by business priorities, to create more business value for the entire organization.

As you’ll find at Pulse, IBM’s integrated service management solutions, applicable across all industries, can render the infrastructure more dynamic in just this sense. Operational costs fall, often because the infrastructure becomes more consolidated and virtualized; this means precious revenues can be redirected to strategic innovation (new applications and services).

Meanwhile, thanks to holistic asset management, intelligent automation and end-to-end proactive tracking, IT operations become much more efficient in detecting and eliminating threats to service health—sometimes, before those threats can even create a measurable business impact. And business risks of all kinds, from service downtime to unpredictable costs to reduced customer satisfaction, are effectively mitigated as a result.

Whether your role in managing a dynamic infrastructure is executive leadership, security, operations, storage, production, delivery, facilities or communications service, the most valuable opportunity to learn what you need to know about service management is Pulse 2010. Because Pulse streams (and the tracks that comprise them) will discuss proven best practices, leading solutions and many new offerings and strategies, and because they're supported by case studies and implementation expertise from around the world, they represent a virtual smorgasbord of compelling information.

Pulse attendees can simply select from the streams and tracks the information that most closely corresponds with their organization's needs in the pursuit of a dynamic infrastructure, and in less than a week return to the organization tremendously better informed.

Stream: Service Management for Information Technology

Change is the only constant in business today. For the infrastructure to become more dynamic, therefore, it must be able to respond more dynamically in the face of change.

From an IT standpoint, that can imply many different subtopics; different organizations will leverage IT assets and services in different ways. The included tracks are:

Service Delivery and Process Automation: Automation can render services far more efficient and cost-effective, while also helping the organization scale or modify them more easily to suit changing workloads.
Service Availability and Performance Management: Get the highest customer satisfaction, and best return on investment, by maximizing service levels and service availability.
Security, Risk Management and Compliance: Organizations must strive to restrict service access to only the right people, with the right access privileges, to address both internal security policies and external regulations.
Storage and Information Infrastructure: Getting the highest business value from both information and the storage it depends on will mean considering many complexities—and new possibilities.
Energy and Efficiency: Green design and implementation translate into lower costs, more availability and a more sustainable world for all of us.
Cloud Computing: Cloud architectures imply exciting possibilities to create, manage and optimize IT services in a fraction of the expected time and with little or no effort required from the IT team.

Stream: Enterprise Asset Management

This stream is sure to be of considerable value to almost any organization with a complex array of assets, all of which must be continually monitored and managed to ensure they deliver the appropriate service levels and thus empower superior service management.

While asset management has, like IT, often occurred on the basis of segregated domains, a better outcome will stem from unified, holistic management that acknowledges all assets, at every stage in their lifecycles.

Some of the issues to be addressed: maximizing asset life-span; deferring asset investment as a result, and instead allocating funds to development or other strategic priorities; improving safety for workers; achieving simplified regulation compliance, despite an ever-increasing number of regulations to consider; how asset management applies differently in different industries; and many others.

Tracks include:

Asset Management Best Practices: Techniques, processes, incentives deemed exceptionally effective and efficient in creating and improving an asset management/maintenance strategy.
Implementation/Upgrades: The experiences real-world users have had in upgrading to IBM Maximo versions six and seven, particularly with respect to planning, tools, tasks, subsequent review and quantified improvements.
Maximo Functional Sessions: Interactive panels featuring a Maximo expert and a group of users to create a double perspective on real-world implementations in areas such as mobile, linear, spatial, navigator, asset configuration and others.
Maximo Technical Sessions: Interactive panels featuring a Maximo expert and a group of users to create a double perspective on real-world implementations in areas such as workflow, reporting, migration, monitoring, archiving and integration.
MUWG: The Maximo Utilities Working Group, now in its twelfth year, will offer presentations addressing the subindustries of electric, gas, water and wastewater, particularly with respect to change coming from deregulation, globalization, new regulatory requirements and emerging competitive challenges.
Smarter Asset Management for Your Industry: Contributors will speak on asset management complexities in different industries, with a focus on energy, manufacturing, transportation, chemicals and petroleum, mining, life sciences, telecom, finance and the public sector.

Stream: Service Assurance for Service Providers

Few industries are as hyper-competitive as telecommunications. Communications service providers are under continual pressure to distinguish themselves through superior service levels, both for existing services (where customer tolerance for downtime or reduced quality is extraordinarily low) and new services to stand out from the competition.

Assuring service levels continue to hit or exceed targets is therefore the focus of this stream, which explores how IBM can help service providers realize substantial optimizations through accelerated isolation of fault events, prioritization of (and a prioritized response to) different kinds of problems to diminish the overall business impact, and improved visibility of even their most complex wired and wireless infrastructures, from the largest bird's eye view to the finest level of detail.

Stream: Service Management for Business Leaders

Ultimately, IT should serve as a means of achieving business goals, and this is a key aspect of IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure initiative, which helps organizations evolve IT in a manner suggested by those goals. The focus of this stream lies in the different business complexities involved in its three tracks:

Service Management for Your Industry: The specific complexities of service management as it applies differently, in different industries.
Hot Topics in Service Management: How service management is developing as a field—and how businesses can address those developments by making the infrastructure more dynamic.
Service Management for Mid-sized Businesses: The specific needs and concerns of mid-market, growing organizations will be addressed to show how they can increase service levels, yet also decrease the required costs.

Stream: Service Delivery Lifecycle Management

Currently, most organizations dedicate only a third of the total IT budget to Development. However, as the Operations side becomes more cost-efficient as a result of the optimizations that come via a dynamic infrastructure, this ratio can be reversed; substantially more revenues can be redirected to Development.

That might mean development for internal purposes—new services and applications for end users—but it also might mean new revenue-generating services or applications for customers and business partners. Both help lead to an improved business outcome for the organization as a whole.

Software development is a complex process that requires careful shepherding, however. This stream's three tracks address the implied complexities:

Smarter Products Delivery and Management: How to orchestrate superior delivery and management of services/applications.
Quality Management for Applications and Services: Verifying at every point that development projects meet expectations—that is, that they are feature-complete, within spec, on time and under budget.
Change Management for Applications and Services: Rolling out new software involves many logistics that must be balanced and implemented carefully to obtain the desired result with the smallest business impact.

Register for Pulse and join us for a webcast on Dynamic Infrastructure

To experience the rich educational environment of Pulse and receive a $500 Early Bird discount on the attendance fee, be sure to register before November 15. And to promote your organization better, contribute to the dissemination of best practices in the service management ecosystem and obtain free admission to the show, you should also consider delivering a presentation at Pulse.

What’s more, a great new webcast, Responding to today’s demands with dynamic infrastructure, will explore these many topics in detail. In this webcast, to be shown on October 20, both IBM executives and IBM clients will discuss, in forty-five minutes, the different ways organizations can respond well to a difficult business climate, and emerging new demands, by evolving their infrastructures to become more dynamic.

And toward that end, exciting new IBM offerings only recently unveiled will also be put under the spotlight. Designed to help organizations manage information, spur service levels, reduce costs, and optimize workloads, they can play a key role in achieving a dynamic infrastructure. Register today!