SaaS and Business Service Management
November 17, 2010

Michael Procopio
Micro Focus

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I was reading BSM versus Cloud – which is the larger idea?, a post by Dennis Drogseth, and it caused me to think of the relationship between the what’s behind BSM and how it relates to what SaaS offers. I know Dennis from my Network Management Center and Business Availability Center days as product manager and a product marketer – he’s a sharp guy.

BSM is about managing IT from the perspective of an end user or business service (ex: purchase order lookup). In the graphic below you see each of the IT silo can say “hey we had very little downtime”. The end-user, however, sees a much different picture. Companies get to BSM along their evolution of IT maturity from chaotic management in silos (one of the big analysts did a nice paper on IT evolution) to proactive management.

The question is can you go to SaaS without having evolved to BSM. If your IT shop focuses on networks and servers, are they ready for the move to SaaS where by definition you are getting a service and have little or no access to the underlying infrastructure.

For a brand new company that only uses SaaS, its easy – they have never had anything else. For companies that are managing their own infrastructure at the silo level - not so easy. They’ll need a new set of tools.

I agree with Dennis that BSM is the larger idea – you can have BSM with or without SaaS (or as Dennis used Cloud). You can’t have SaaS without BSM unless you are not going to bother monitoring.

Related Links:

SaaS for IT Management

Application Performance Management blog (was originally called Making BSM a reality) lots of BSM articles

BSM Evolution: The Role of IT in the Business blog series

Business Service Management resource page at HP Software

HP Business Service Management Community

Michael Procopio is Senior Product Marketing Manager at Micro Focus
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