Efficient Solutions

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/onarchitecture

Is anyone able to find it?

http://www3.opengroup.org/events/our-webinars

Very interesting link:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:4mM_K5Kt-tUJ:www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/pdfs/eedatacenterbestpractices.pdf+top+energy+efficient+servers&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShPlfLpJG9n3PucDkRH0_qobNWD0slI37SnKxaQjsDUdG6b6KdskMLxHAnBgXa35lzjSH_NvC68T_GY6zDlLtdNydlESOiaFHKERdCrjME44yjBnpKbVUdk1ncDy-PnY-dm1VnC&sig=AHIEtbRSAZ_D3mE8dvsiosw7pdlnLDbUQg

TBSM is one of industry’s most looked upon product when it comes to service visualization, service level management, SQM and lastly BSM solution. I have worked on TBSM since early RAD 3.0 days when only a handful of folks really worked on it, and a ton of features never worked (for example the mapbuilder.sh in RAD 3.0).  Times evolved and so has the product, built on features like service templates, service instances, auto-population rules, ESDA and some decent visualization templates. So much about the history, where are we heading! What is the future, what will be the place of TBSM in future, what does TBSM need to do to ‘lead’ not just exist, these are some of the questions, I will be putting my 2 cents into.

Lets bring some context here, the concept of ‘service’ gives most executives a kick and selling TBSM is not really rocket science, when you can view the business scorecard from technology, operations and financial context in a solution, the solution has to sell. But that is just the very first phase, it is the post sales, execution that is the key. We need to put some goals that define the finish line, so what are they – Is it to be able to leverage the solution to it fullest or is it systematic step by step setup of its BSM context and visualization of services, financials and efficiencies? This is the area which is the burning question and all said and done still an area that needs to be addressed together by many stakeholders. So how to make this all happen – is it even possible to have a common TBSM deployment framework which would be generic enough to fit any bill and yet not broad enough to overcommit and under deliver – my belief 100% YES!

To summarize, my experience with TBSM has always been that it requires a ton of specializations and generalizations, understanding the contexts, abstraction layers, encapsulation of information, but still all environments have a common theme. Unfortunately noone has really built a common deployment process framework (1,2,3 step-by-step deploying TBSM). Unless, the users  and TBSM services professionals come together and build this framework, the quality of delivery will never be consistent and we will keep bumping into dissatisfied clients. Shout out  for TBSM deployment framework, not from the PDU teams but from the services professionals, users and process analysts who deal with reality on a day to day basis.

Strategy. Cost. Analysis.

Three words that individually carry immense value and when put together makes huge sense. So what the heck does strategic cost analysis really mean?

Costing IMO, fundamentally is a science (there goes the accounting guy) to manage value incurred to the value gained. Now, one may ask – what does that mean? It means everything that you do everyday is being measured for a return on investment, and how the return is calculated might be the decision making point between weather what  you/your team is doing is worth the value or not.

Remember: All cost allocation is arbitrary.

Costing is developed to encourage behavior that is tagged profitable and discourage behavior that is not tagged a good practice. Now the art really is to define the taxable and subsidized  practices. Good practice is subsidized and practice that causes value degradation/erosion is taxed.

So, lets look at an example:

Engineering Operations accountant  gives  you a call and says that your project budget is going really overboard and you need to cut cost, believe me this happens everyday with a lot of us.

Don’t surrender, and say here are the things I’ll do. First understand the allocation structure, understand the breakdown and then make a call on which areas you would want to allocate differently. For example, if you run an operations in the US or UK the cost of the employee overhead is so significant that it almost adds up to 40% of employee wages at times. In that case, approach the facilities management (don’t try this at work, unless you really know what you are doing ); and tell them about the wonderful things you are doing. Brief them about how your project will reduce carbon footprint by X% in coming years and having the project stay where it is critical, if the management finds value in your work and just makes an accounting exception to allocate facilities cost elsewhere, you are off-the-hook.  So, there, not easy as described above, but I have seen in past cost allocations being differed and changed to accommodate behavior that would help organization.

Don’t believe me, take up any balance sheet and look at the goodwill as an asset (mostly technology firms) and you would feel compelled to ask, how the fu** do you quantify goodwill in a dollar amount? There- I told you so!!

So let’s bring this to the OSS/NMS/Engineering world,

• can you add R&D as an asset? – YES
• can you qualify SLA penalties, goodwill loss if Mean-Time-To-Resolve decreases? – YES

Think about if folks, this gives you power like never before. If you know how to get your way across accounting standards for your industry, you will know much more…..

Much more, later!! Good luck…

Of late, I have been looking at Datacenter automations and impact of DCA on costing for the datacenter.

Various solutions exist, to name a few Emerson Aperture, NLyte and Rackwise – All of which bring important things to the table. But what are the big 4 doing in this space? Do they have any solid solutions out there? Or they are just living with the situation?

Lack of investments in RFID, rack monitoring software has really taken the cost of manually managing datacenter’s higher. The bottom line is datacenter is a piece you cannot just outsource because it is the fundamental part of unique value chain for every company.

The only proposed solutions are:

1. Virtulization mgmt
2. Workflow management – Cable mgmt, Physical and logical asset management
3. Spare management
4. Space, Power, Cooling mgmt
5. On-boarding, offloading management
6. For cloud – customer centric solution management

Unfortunately the quest for finding the right solution continues, but I am not giving up.