Pulse 2010: Drive Business Value via Cross-Domain Integration

Generate impressive business wins by integrating IT operations and IT development

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Pulse 2010, the premiere service management event of the year, is right around the corner. And for service management professionals looking to obtain key information they can use to drive service levels up, costs down and mitigate many forms of business risk, no better learning opportunity is available.

To be held from February 21st to February 24th at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Pulse 2010 will deliver an unparalleled educational experience: service management challenges, technological solutions, innovative business processes, real-world experiences of peers, sneak peeks and roadmaps of forthcoming offerings, technical demos, interactive sessions and far more. Among other compelling attractions: former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, the world’s most influential voice on climate change, will be on hand as guest speaker to discuss energy management complexities and opportunities.

Show attendees can cherry-pick the content that most closely parallels their organizations' needs, coming away from the event exceptionally well-positioned to address those needs through new insights or solutions—or perhaps by integrating domains that are currently not as tightly linked as they might be.

Two such domains, for instance, are IT development and IT operations. Historically, for most organizations, these have been separated by a logical wall; IT development was responsible for software creation, whereas the IT operations department was responsible for software deployment and management. But in today's world, organizations might consider the business value that they can create by empowering a closer working relationship between both.

Fortunately, Pulse 2010 boasts an entire stream—Software Delivery Lifecycle Management—in which these possibilities will be explored in depth in three tracks: Smarter Products Delivery and Management, Quality Management for Applications and Services and Change Management for Applications and Services.

Optimize software delivery lifecycles for today's challenges and tomorrow's opportunities

Each track will spotlight, albeit in three different ways, the new paradigm of improving service management, over the full service lifecycle, by improving the ways IT development and IT operations interact via shared information and linked processes.

By shifting the focus from technical domains per se, and toward domain-spanning logical services and the user experience, organizations can create and deploy software at lower cost, more quickly, and yet also improve service levels through improved uptime and performance.

Clearly, IT development cannot achieve these laudable goals on its own; it will need a better understanding of how software is put into production, what the production environment consists of and many other operational complexities. In some cases, too, IT operations will benefit from greater awareness of the development perspective, and links to development tools and information.

The argument for cross-domain links

What's driving the need for cross-domain integration?

Composite applications represent one answer to that question. This comes as a result of the way they leverage a wealth of different resources, from Java code to core systems to mission-critical business databases, as required to support services.

Such a blend of resource types—drawn from both IT development and IT operations—has the effect of blurring the once-tidy distinction between these domains. Correctly modeling the real-world performance of new code in advance is exceptionally difficult; in many cases, problems will not manifest, and therefore can't be addressed, until new software is under the purview of IT operations, in production. Obtaining best business value from composite applications, therefore, is a task that will commonly require information, assets and business processes spanning both IT development and operations.

A second aspect to consider is the generally shortened software development cycle. Thanks to new development tools and methodologies, IT development teams can deliver software more quickly to operations than ever. Unfortunately, code shortcomings in that software can translate into operational shortfalls and, very quickly, an unwanted impact on business performance. Problem reports must then flow back to IT development, which must respond with new code, which repeats the deployment cycle. Toward minimizing the number of cycles for any given software, and creating software that best fulfills business goals without introducing new operational problems, better integrations between development and operations would clearly be enormously helpful.

These two complexities introduce a third, which is the fact that new technology itself is driving change. When development cycles are shortened in the manner described, one implication is that there is less time to evaluate new technologies. Specifically, there is less time available to determine the various negative effects new technologies might create in a complex production environment, and proactively implement a fix.

And because composite applications are comprised of, and leverage, such an extraordinarily rich blend of resource types, the rate at which new technologies are introduced into an IT infrastructure has accelerated. This added complexity makes it harder than ever to orchestrate IT development and IT operations in unison for best business results, but it also makes it more important than ever.

IBM offers cross-domain integrations to generate a greatly improved service lifecycle

At Pulse 2010, these issues will be explored in greater depth and detail—and IBM offerings now available to resolve them will similarly be explored.

Thanks to IBM Rational software development portfolio and IBM Tivoli systems management portfolio—both best-in-class—IBM is exceptionally well positioned to implement the cross-domain links and integrations organizations today need to connect their IT development and operations teams in the right ways, at the right levels of abstraction, to empower both groups with smarter information and tools.

Accelerate deployment via automated test lab management

As suggested earlier, a key challenge involved in creating software feature-complete, high-performance and bug-free lies in correctly modeling the production environment prior to deployment. The more quickly, and closely, a test lab can mirror the production environment and operating conditions, the better.

Manually provisioning the test systems with the complete software stack needed to create such a model, however, is relatively slow. Worse, it can introduce unwanted inconsistencies that can invalidate testing. A superior outcome will stem from rapid, automated provisioning, based on a library of disk images, of the type operations teams have been using with in-production systems for years now—essentially giving IT development a dose of IT operations know-how.

Fortunately, new links between IBM Rational and IBM Tivoli empower exactly such automated provisioning. IBM Rational Test Lab Manager can now leverage IBM Tivoli Application Dependency and Discovery Manager to inventory test systems and determine what software they will need before testing new code. And that information translates into swift action as well, because Rational Test Lab Manager also integrates with IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, which can in turn provision that software where required. The results: faster provisioning, more accurate testing based on a more accurate model of the production environment, higher-quality software, shorter production cycles and fewer business problems created by problematic code.

Improve delivery agility by synchronizing asset libraries and service requests

A second powerful link between IT development and operations teams is the different data stores that maintain their assets. While each domain has its own catalogs of information, cross-domain integration between them is rare.

This lack of integration, in turn, often translates into a diminished business outcome because information needed by one domain is only easily available to the other. For example, in the process of developing a new Java application, IT development will certainly need to know which systems that application will be running on, and verify that the Java environment installed is appropriate for the build. That information, however, is typically maintained by IT operations and only accessible from within operations tools.

Here, too, cross-domain links between the Rational and Tivoli portfolios empower an enhanced outcome. Specifically, IBM Rational Asset Manager, which is used by development teams to manage software assets, is now integrated with its counterpart tool on the operations side, IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, which contains comprehensive technical information and change histories of IT assets. By giving team members in each domain direct access to information normally only available in the other, overall software build quality rises—and production problems, once that software is deployed, fall.

Furthermore, essentially the same argument applies to reporting and tracking systems; each domain typically uses a different tool, and a different methodology, to report problems and track their resolutions, but cross-domain links can yield a superior result.

Such links now connect IBM Rational ClearQuest, which handles software issue tracking, and IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager, which handles service desk functions on the operations side. By sharing and leveraging key information across these domains, the process of isolating and resolving technical problems is rendered faster, simpler and less expensive.

Eliminate composite application bottlenecks and drive higher service levels

Finally, composite applications represent a third opportunity for IT development and operations to integrate effectively. As composite applications have become more common and more deeply embedded in IT infrastructures, rapidly and accurately resolving problems that may occur within their chains of resources has become more important in proportion.

One powerful tool available to detect and resolve performance bottlenecks on the operations side is IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager, which monitors composite application performance, and uses automated alerts and detailed visualization features to decrease time-to-resolution in the event of an issue with even the most complex applications.

Now, thanks to the new Rational/Tivoli integrations, root-cause information obtained via this tool is directly available to development teams as well. IBM Rational Performance Tester can import this data, empowering developers to make appropriate code changes to resolve the problem, which are carried out via IBM Rational Application Developer—closing the modification loop in an accelerated, consistent and accurate manner that creates more business value through higher service levels.

Register now to attend Pulse 2010 and learn about these and many more topics! Those who register before February 18th can avoid late fees and obtain a discount for groups of five or more attendees.

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