We recently stumbled across an interesting blog post (http://trianzblog.com/wordpress/?p=203) by Subhankar Das of Trianz that summarized fairly comprehensively the ongoing debate about data integration: do you Extract, Transform and Load data from one data repository to another, or do you Extract, Load and then Transform.

The question is of obvious interest to us because core to the back end of SMI Suite is an ETL utility that takes the data from the Service Manager database, then does a lot of translation to make the nasty array fields, BLOBs and CLOBs readabale, then loads that data into the relational SMI database.

The difference really boils down to where the translation takes place. Under an ELT model, the translation happens once the data has already been loaded into the target repository. And, as Subhankar points out, new technology is making this an increasingly viable option, and is gaining traction in the marketplace.

Check out Subhankar’s full piece for an excellent breakdown of the pros and cons of each approach.

For Westbury it’s an ongoing discussion that will, no doubt, shape our future development initiatives and give us some serious food for thought.

Tom

Now that the holiday hangover has passed, it’s time to start putting some new year’s resolutions into place.

Alongside the usual personal goals – do more of the things that are good for you, do less of the things that are bad for you – you should also be thinking about business goals for the year ahead.

Everywhere, it seems, including this week’s Time magazine, people are agreeing that 2010 was a dreadful year, but 2011 is going to make up for it. Predictions abound regarding the continuing economic recovery – great news for the unemployed and for business owners, and also great news for ITSM.

During the worst times of the recession, “discretionary” spending – things like process improvement initiatives – were put on the backburner. Now there’s a little more budget available, the best way to spend that budget is in improving the way business is conducted.

If you do, next time the bust part of the boom/bust cycle rolls around, and budgets are cut, you’ll be better prepared. If you can demonstrate that your IT department is already running super-efficiently, then there will be less fat to trim. And if your processes are more streamlined, you’ll be better able to cope with staff changes, layoffs and other side-effects of economic instability.

Process improvement can be a little like going to the gym. I don’t really need to convince you that it’s beneficial, but it still requires some willpower to do. Now’s the time, while you’re still full of good intentions! Good luck!

Tom

We were intending to follow up our show opening video with a recap at the end of our time in Barcelona, but our booth ended up being so inundated on the final day that there simply wasn’t chance.

However, that our booth was inundated gives you somewhat of an idea of how the week went compared to our hopes and expectations. We were simply blown away.

We’d never before seen such enthusiasm and interest  – across the board, from customers to partners to HP folk. And the people we spoke to were all confirming the things that we’ve been saying all along – that reporting from HP Service Manager is difficult without a dedicated end-to-end solution.

David vH and I seemed to be on an endless rotation of demos for interested parties and almost everyone I spoke with got it straight away – they understood the value proposition of SMI Suite and seemed genuinely excited about what the solution could do for them, and how it could impact their organization.

If there was any negative from the event, it was getting home. While my flight back to Boston actually landed 40 minutes early, Floris got stuck in Dublin overnight when his first delayed flight meant he missed his connection. He assures me the Guinness helped.

Tom

Not to be outdone by Michael Collins, Jason Kennedy of the University of British Columbia and Vivit stepped in front of our camera at the HP Software Universe show to share his thoughts about Vivit and why it’s so important to have an independent HP user group.

For more information about Vivit and what the organization does, visit (or should that be vivit) their website at www.vivit-worldwide.org. Here’s Jason:

We’ve been working with Vivit for a while now – we set up the Service Management special interest groups, and from time to time you’ll even see Floris in a soccer jersey on the Vivit booth at events like HP Software Universe.

As we’re here at HPSWU in Barcelona – and since our booth is directly opposite the Vivit booth, we decided to sit Michael Collins of xMatters and Vivit down so he could share with you some more information about what Vivit is and what it does.

Earlier this month Gartner released the latest iteration of their Magic Quadrant report looking at the IT Service Desk. The report pits the major players in the sector against one another based on a variety of criteria.

The report is interesting for us every year as it helps to show how well HP Service Manager is performing compared to its competitors, which has knock-on effects on the size of our potential market.

The news for HP was mixed, but actually one specific line in the report caught our attention more than the rankings:

“Fundamentally, IT organizations need to invest more analysis effort on metrics, processes, service-level expectations and support costs out of the box. Your vendor of choice should provide and implement meaningful measurements and reportable content from day one of production. The ability to quickly and correctly measure key IT service and support metrics, such as mean time to repair (MTTR), first contact resolution (FCR) rate, end-user satisfaction, cost per calls and so forth, should be the most important criteria when choosing a new tool, and having access to that data is essential for the IT service and support organizations to justify further improvements.”

The good news here is that when a customer buys HP Service Manager and also SMI Suite, this is precisely what they get – advanced measurements and reportable content out of the box. The question remains how differently Service Manager might have fared in the Gartner rankings if the optional addition of SMI Suite had been taken into account as a feature.

It’s also heartening that Gartner sees the issue of reporting as so central to the overall success of any ITSM platform – something we’ve believed for a long time. The logic is fairly simple: if you’re only using the ITSM tool as a repository – i.e. you’re recording lots and lots of data about incidents, interactions, changes, problems and SLAs, and you’re using that data operationally – but not doing much with the data beyond that, then you’re missing half the point of having the tooling in the first place.

Tom

Here at Westbury we’re pretty addicted to Ted.com.

Last year we breathlessly shared with you the video of Hans Rosling making data sexy, and to follow that up, here’s David McCandless talking about the beauty of data visualization.

If you click through to the video on the actual Ted.com site you’ll notice some disparaging comments about the quality of the data that McCandless uses in some of his visualizations. For me, that kind of misses the point. His first visualization is all about numbers reported by news media and how to make sense of them when you see them just as numbers on a page or screen. His point, if I’ve got it right, is that numbers like 250bn or 500bn are both so mindblowingly enormous that it’s hard to appreciate that one is literally twice the size of the other – until, that is, you *see* that represented as two boxes, one of which is twice the size of the other.

The implications for ITSM are, hopefully, fairly clear. We – quite rightly – pride ourselves on the fact that we’ve solved the issue of getting data out of Service Manager, but we also recognize how pointless that might be if there were not also an easy to use way to convert that raw data into something visual to aid true comprehension of what the numbers mean.

Interesting stuff! Here’s Mr. McCandless:

We have a slew of upcoming events in Europe and Russia that we’ll be attending, so we thought it was worth posting up the details in case you’re thinking of attending one of the events and news that we’ll be there will sway you. Hopefully it will sway you towards attending and not the other way around, but you never know…

1. HP Software Forum, Russia
Radisson Hotel, Moscow, 16th September

Our very own Bens van Altena will be presenting and we are hoping to meet with distributors and prospects.

2. Rubik Synergy
Kasteel van Brasschaat, Brasschaat, Belgium, 16th September

Marc Kuijpers and David van Heusden will be presenting and meeting with customers and prospects. The presentation will about SMI Suite and will include an ITSM roundtable discussion.

3. Netherlands Customer Day
Location TBD, 1st week of November

In conjunction with Rubik, we’ll be hosting a customer event in the Netherlands. Details will follow soon.

4. HP Software Universe
Barcelona, 30th November to 2nd December

We’ll be exhibiting at HPSU in Barcelona. You can learn more about the event here: http://h41112.www4.hp.com/events/software-universe-2010/index.php

Tom

As you may be aware, Westbury is very closely involved with Vivit, the HP user group, and in particular with the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group. Here’s a round-up of new from the SIG:


Latest news from the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group.


HP Service Manager 9.2

For those who attended the recent VIVIT sponsored webinar entitled “What’s New with HP Service Manager 9.2“, we hope you found it useful. Thank you to those who answered the follow up survey. For those who may have missed this event, the session was recorded for your viewing. Please click here to access.


HP Service Manager Survey

As the Vivit SIG for HP Service Management, we’re very interested in your opinion on various topics around HP Service Manager. We’ve created a very short survey, the responses to which will determine our focus for future webinars, and shape the agenda for Local Interest Group events. We’d appreciate a few moments of your time to take a look and complete the survey, which you can find here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/STR9TVK


Upcoming events of interest

There are several local events coming up that are fully focused on HP Service Management. We definitely recommend attending one of these sessions if you’re in the area. Please also let us have feedback about the value of these events.

1. User Group Minnesota – August HP ITSM User Group Meeting

August 20th

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/761103481


2. New York / New Jersey LIG event – What’s new with HP Service Manager 9.2

August 26th

https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=111&chaptereventid=574


3. Chicago LIG event – ITSM User Group

September 8th

https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=4&chaptereventid=576


Mark your calendars! HP Software Universe 2010 Barcelona

http://h41112.www4.hp.com/events/software-universe-2010/index.php


Tom

While we were at the HP Software Universe conference last week, we took a moment to talk to some of our partners.

In particular we wanted to know what challenges they were seeing among their customers when it came to ITSM reporting, and their answers were pretty illuminating, especially when you bear in mind that we didn’t even buy them a beer by way of thank-you for waxing lyrical on camera.

Many thanks to the participants:

Steven Kiss of Achievo

Emily McMullin of Techport Thirteen

Ken Herold of Melillo Consulting

Tom