In Part Two of BSMdigest’s exclusive interview, Kalyan Ramanathan, Director of BSM for HP, talks about BSM and performance management in hybrid environments.

BSM: Is a hybrid environment of public and private the future of cloud?

KR: The prevalent view in today’s market is that, eventually, most enterprises will operate in a hybrid IT sourcing model. This is where an organization provides and manages some IT services in-house and has others provided externally. Ideally, a hybrid approach allows an organization to take full advantage of the cost effectiveness and scalability that a public cloud offers, as well as the internal resource sharing and automated service delivery of a private cloud environment, without exposing the organization’s mission-critical applications and sensitive data to third-party security risks.

BSM: In HP's definition, does a hybrid environment simply mean public and private cloud, or does it also include other virtual as well as physical infrastructure?

KR: HP’s definition of a hybrid environment spans a combination of on-premise, off-premise, physical and virtual environments. In order for organizations to fully realize the benefits of a hybrid cloud environment, and stay competitive, IT organizations must assume the emerging role of a service broker — a vital responsibility built on the fundamental business assumption that the correct mixture of in-house, shared, outsourced, and cloud services, each with different advantages and economics, is the most optimal solution and the most strategic and targeted way to invest IT dollars. In this essential role, IT must excel at making the appropriate sourcing choices — and assure that the resulting services, regardless of their origin, are delivered and managed in a way that maximizes performance and availability, and satisfies the needs of the business.

BSM: What are the IT performance management challenges of a hybrid environment?

KR: While a hybrid cloud environment enables a much more dynamic world and helps to increase business agility, it also increases IT complexity and the rate of change. For this reason, if managed incorrectly the cloud can quickly reverse any gains for organizations seeking to adopt them. This makes smart management of IT operations more important than ever before. Today’s IT organization needs an integrated approach to Business Service Management that combines a top down and bottom up approach to monitoring and that spans both physical and virtual infrastructures found in a hybrid IT environment. The goal is to manage every element of the service — including infrastructure, applications, transactions, end-user experience, virtualization technology, and services delivered via the cloud.

BSM: What is HP's Hybrid Delivery Model?

KR: HP’s comprehensive approach to hybrid IT and multi-source service delivery (or “hybrid cloud”) helps IT organizations manage, simplify and automate the process of deploying business applications into their new hybrid world of virtual, physical, on-premise and off-premise. With HP, IT organizations optimize their service broker approach and performance with a complete service catalog of available services (regardless of source), automated governance and compliance, flexible delivery, comprehensive service optimization, and inclusive end-to-end management and control.

HP provides organizations ongoing visibility into the availability of their hybrid cloud services by helping diagnose and report on potential performance and security issues before they can impact your business. Whether an organization utilizes cloud services for infrastructure (IaaS), platforms (PaaS) or software (SaaS), HP solutions help validate and assess:

Security by scanning networks, operating systems, and Web applications and performing automated penetration testing.

Performance by testing for bandwidth, connectivity, scalability, and the end-user experience.

Availability by testing and monitoring web-based application business processes and identifying and analyzing performance issues and trends.

Cost optimization by providing resource, code, and end-user performance metrics.

BSM: What do the new HP Hybrid Delivery solutions mean for BSM?

KR: The new HP Hybrid Delivery models help IT organizations take full advantage of hybrid cloud computing and move beyond the mere potential of the hybrid cloud and into a world of completely realized business benefits.

Let me provide you a real-world Business Service Management example: A US-based pharmaceutical firm recently moved its IT organization to a hybrid cloud environment in order to increase efficiency, access new technologies faster, reduce costs, and improve overall performance. However, three months after the adoption of the cloud, downtime incidents had increased and application availability has decreased. There were also significant increases in the duration of IT infrastructure, application and service failures.

IT felt strongly that the deployment of HP Business Availability Center (BAC) on SaaS would significantly improve incident management, reduce costs, and increase application availability by reducing the level of effort associated with IT management tasks such as incident detection, classification, diagnosis, resolution, recovery, reporting, and cross team collaboration. With HP BAC on HP SaaS, the IT staff would receive more in-depth information and system alerts and respond faster and more efficiently to resolve system incidents.

Click here to read Part One of the BSMdigest interview with Kalyan Ramanathan, Director of BSM for HP

Click here to read Kalyan Ramanathan's predictions for BSM in the cloud

About Kalyan Ramanathan

Kalyan Ramanathan is Director of Business Service Management (BSM) for Software in the Enterprise Business at HP, where he oversees all outbound marketing for BSM. Over the last 16 years, Ramanathan has held a variety of product management and product marketing roles in the high-tech industry, most recently at Opsware, where he played an instrumental role in executing the strategy behind the company’s automation solution. Before joining HP, Ramanathan served as Product Marketing Lead for IBM Tivoli’s CMDB solution. Prior to IBM, he was Director of Marketing for Collation (acquired by IBM in 2005) and an early member of the team that developed the first CMDB discovery solution. Ramanathan holds an MBA from Stanford University.