Industry experts give their predictions for how Business Service Management will change and how it will impact business in 2011.

1. Cloud Will Accelerate the Need for BSM

Cloud will accelerate requirements for core BSM technologies, including automation, dashboards, and the move to a federated CMS. It will also impact architectural priorities in these areas to support more real-time requirements and more versatile, less monolithic, approaches to implementation.

Dennis Drogseth
Vice President
EMA

2. No BSM = Disadvantage in the Cloud

With the growing move toward cloud computing, BSM will become significantly more important. Cloud is an inherently service based architecture and those who have not implemented BSM will be at a disadvantage in how fast they can move to take advantage of cloud's benefits.

Michael Procopio
Social Media Strategist
HP Software

3. The End of Traditional BSM

BSM as traditionally implemented by the "Big Four" will be made irrelevant by virtualization and cloud computing - and will be re-implemented by VMware and startups in the virtualization and cloud ecosystems focused upon delivering guaranteed service levels through automated adjustment of elastic infrastructures.

Virtualization and the Cloud has already made traditional BSM irrelevant. VMware bought Integrien to start making this happen, and several other vendors are focused on it as well. So the old is well on its way out, the new will probably get 25% to 33% of the way done next year.

Bernd Harzog
Analyst - Virtualization Performance and Capacity Management
The Virtualization Practice

4. The Rise of Managed Services

In 2011, we could see a significant increase in capabilities for managing IT performance that are being deployed as a managed service. This would come as a result of increased complexity of managing IT performance as well as providers of public cloud services and other service providers starting to offer more advanced capabilities for managing the performance of IT services and applications. Additionally, large telecom carriers are broadening their service offerings and starting to provide public cloud services that could accelerate this trend even further.

Bojan Simic
Founder and Principal Analyst
TRAC Research

5. Predictive Analytics Goes Mainstream

Virtualization and cloud computing are fueling a new breed of performance management solutions. The conventional tools that rely on rules-based approaches are no longer viable in such dynamic environments. In 2011, look for automated predictive analytics solutions to go mainstream. These products use mathematical correlation, rather than human guesswork to understand and anticipate performance. This software will also provide the self-learning intelligence that delivers on the promise of autonomics.

Nicola Sanna
President & CEO
Netuitive

6. Virtual Stall Poses Major Challenge

"Virtual Stall" will continue to be a major challenge for the majority of organizations. Virtual stall - aka VM Stall (i.e. the tendency for virtualization deployments to slow or stop as they get larger and more complex) has been a very real issue in 2010. The pace of virtualization deployments will pick up in 2011, and the average level of virtualization will expand beyond the 30% most organizations are at today. However, while better virtualization management - of capacity, automation, performance, security, and configuration - will help well-run IT shops get over the hump, it will be a surprise if more than 50% of workloads, on average, are running in virtual servers by the end of 2011.

Andi Mann
Vice President of Virtualization Product Marketing
CA Technologies

7. Convergence of BSM and APM

Compuware expects growth in business service management based on a focus around how core applications support business needs. Expensive CMDB-based BSM projects that were the trend before the financial crisis are giving way to more nimble application oriented initiatives that tie business metrics back to end-user experience.

We see a continued convergence of the BSM and APM spaces - as IT departments mature, instead of focusing more on how infrastructure supports business outcomes, they will gravitate more to how their applications do, and how to measure those applications and support application-oriented Service Level Agreements vs. infrastructure-oriented Service Level Agreements.

Bryce Dunn
Director of Strategy & Product Line Management
Compuware Corporation

8. More Transaction Management

The increased use of transaction management in the enterprises will be driven by three items: the need to link business and IT goals, effective capacity planning and management, and virtualization.

Byrne Chapman
Technology Consultant
Correlsense

9. Private cloud will be the #1 ‘management by magazine' topic

Senior execs will see so much positive hype about cloud - mostly from vendors, but also from business press - that they will demand IT pull the trigger on private cloud projects in 2011, whether they are ready or not. A lack of good management solutions - especially integrated service automation, process compliance, and service management - will be just one of many significant showstoppers.

Andi Mann
Vice President of Virtualization Product Marketing
CA Technologies

10. Monitoring Abstracted to a Higher Level

We believe that in 2011, BSM will move towards a world where configuration and provisioning is automated, and the monitoring gets abstracted to a higher level. So rather than worrying about individual network devices or servers, the administrator is focused on monitoring the level of service.

Al Sargent
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
VMware

11. Rethinking IT Management in Terms of BSM

Business Services, as an entity and discipline, become more prevalent as businesses continue to seek out efficiencies as they recover from the recession. Business service management will be recognized as an avenue to gain an end-to-end perspective of how the business creates and delivers value efficiently and effectively to the customer. This line of sight drives increasing focus on how businesses organize and manage themselves.

Jack Probst
Principal Consultant
Pink Elephant

Rising complexity of applications and business services are forcing IT to think and manage differently. We have moved from a few applications via browser based applications through N-tier composite applications to applications which are highly integrated across multiple tiers (Data center, clouds, all kinds). In a world of integrated business services we need to manage from the top down.

IT is still struggling with the concept of BSM. How is IT affecting the business and the business affecting IT? The rising interest in cloud computing models is actually causing IT organizations to rethink this conceptual question.

This means IT has to start looking at its service levels. What have they promised the business around managing the service health? How is the service health? Is the business satisfied with it? This is the management of the service level.

What can be improved? This should be assessed in the business dimension and IT dimension at the same time understanding the projects and programs (new services or demands) from the business. This is the management of the service portfolio.

Continually improving the service health in conjunction with the business. This is the ongoing management of the business services, its correlating IT services with regards to cost, benefits and quality. This is adopting application performance management end-to-end.

Eveline Oehrlich
Senior Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
Forrester Research, Inc.