Blade Watch

I was having a chat with a start up, they have been working on a management interface to further enable management of virtual and physical servers independently of the server vendor.

Anyway, they were asking if there was anything to think about in this space, how could they get investment and interest for their product. My replies might be a bit generic, but there is a reason for this. As the IT landscape changes, we find more business units taking an interest or even wanting to run or buy in their own infrastructure, we need to be changing what we as IT offer from a generic IT service to a business centric way of doing business. Knowing that server SATS02022 is Fixed Income is meaningless to an end user unless we relate the application, the underlying place in the landscape so that if that server fails or we changed that bit, what would happen to our business, our application, our user experience:

1. Get out of  the IT space – there is no money in cross business line activities and if there is it needs to be business relevant for real investment, not one of those interested, we have it but we don’t really use it or spend any money on it
   1. IT might love the concept but do they understand the business and operational priorities or are they shopping for nice to haves?
   2. IT will be thinking of reporting, management and delivery, business users might just want their view, their bit that concerns them
2. Make it business relevant to the organization and the business sponsors
   1. Make it an IT tool for the business
   2. Consider how it could be linked to the application or business line viewpoint,  so I can manage my business line specific servers or applications.
   3. Could we have a hardware monitoring tool or systems management tool on a per business line basis?
   4. Could http://fixedincome.bankname.com show me all the fixed income servers, applications and their health or status - rather than a generic IT tool saying all is well, but please query from this list of 1200 alerts to see if your one is ok.

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