Making an Impact on Business Service Management

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Perfect timing. EMA’s new report, The BSM Service Impact Radar, was published right when our second issue was coming out. To keep my commitment to you to provide valuable information on the technology in the Business Service Management market, a focus on this report in this issue seemed like it was meant to be.

Why did I focus almost the entire issue on this report? Because I believe in it. I read the report and spent time talking to the author, Dennis Drogseth from EMA, and I believe this Radar has value for our readers. It can help build a solid foundation from which an organization can begin to construct a new Business Service Management initiative. Obviously it takes a lot more than a report, but this is a starting point.

Furthermore, I believe it is good for the industry, because it vocalizes what the best vendors are aspiring to, and what they should be aspiring to, and points the market in the right direction. It is honest – it gets past the marketing hype that many vendors begin to believe themselves. I also think it reminds the Business Service Management customer base what they should be demanding from their vendors. Bottom line: I think over time this report will make a positive impact on the industry, and that is why I featured it in our June issue.

I know that some vendors opted out of the time-consuming and painstaking process required to be in the report. In my view, with IBM, CA Technologies, HP, Compuware, Novell and some of the hottest smaller players like OPNET and Netuitive on the guest list, this seems like one party you want to be at. And my prediction is that many of them will show up for the next BSM Service Impact Radar.

In other BSMdigest news, our efforts to build out the bsmdigest.com site are ahead of schedule – we just added a new Industry News section. So, a message to the vendors out there – let me know when you have good news to report.

I am also happy to announce that BSMdigest welcomes two new sponsors, Zenoss and BSM Review. You can learn more about them on our BSMdigest Sponsors page.

Once again, to ensure you keep receiving BSMdigest every month via email, please take the time to subscribe, if you have not already. If you have any ideas on topics you would like to see covered in BSMdigest, let me know. Like the BSM Service Impact Radar, BSMdigest also aims to make a positive impact on the Business Service Management industry.

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Making an Impact on Business Service Management

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Perfect timing. EMA’s new report, The BSM Service Impact Radar, was published right when our second issue was coming out. To keep my commitment to you to provide valuable information on the technology in the Business Service Management market, a focus on this report in this issue seemed like it was meant to be.

Why did I focus almost the entire issue on this report? Because I believe in it. I read the report and spent time talking to the author, Dennis Drogseth from EMA, and I believe this Radar has value for our readers. It can help build a solid foundation from which an organization can begin to construct a new Business Service Management initiative. Obviously it takes a lot more than a report, but this is a starting point.

Furthermore, I believe it is good for the industry, because it vocalizes what the best vendors are aspiring to, and what they should be aspiring to, and points the market in the right direction. It is honest – it gets past the marketing hype that many vendors begin to believe themselves. I also think it reminds the Business Service Management customer base what they should be demanding from their vendors. Bottom line: I think over time this report will make a positive impact on the industry, and that is why I featured it in our June issue.

I know that some vendors opted out of the time-consuming and painstaking process required to be in the report. In my view, with IBM, CA Technologies, HP, Compuware, Novell and some of the hottest smaller players like OPNET and Netuitive on the guest list, this seems like one party you want to be at. And my prediction is that many of them will show up for the next BSM Service Impact Radar.

In other BSMdigest news, our efforts to build out the bsmdigest.com site are ahead of schedule – we just added a new Industry News section. So, a message to the vendors out there – let me know when you have good news to report.

I am also happy to announce that BSMdigest welcomes two new sponsors, Zenoss and BSM Review. You can learn more about them on our BSMdigest Sponsors page.

Once again, to ensure you keep receiving BSMdigest every month via email, please take the time to subscribe, if you have not already. If you have any ideas on topics you would like to see covered in BSMdigest, let me know. Like the BSM Service Impact Radar, BSMdigest also aims to make a positive impact on the Business Service Management industry.

The Latest

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...