On the last day of June, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) published a new report which should be of interest to any user of BSM technology – the “EMA Radar For Business Service Management: Service Impact”. Written by Dennis Drogseth, Vice President of EMA, the report is designed to help IT organizations more effectively plan for the adoption of solutions that deliver a unified view of IT service performance as it impacts business outcomes.

EMA defines BSM Service Impact as a technology market in which vendors have their deepest roots in end-to-end service monitoring with strong business impact analysis capabilities that include but are not usually limited to Service Level Management (SLM). User experience management and/or application-to-infrastructure interdependencies are also common capabilities.

The report covers 14 vendors that Drogseth calls the “BSM Service Impact elite”. These vendors are AccelOps, ASG, CA, Compuware, FireScope, HP, IBM, Interlink, Netuitive, Novell, OPNET, OpTier, Prelert and Zyrion.

None of the vendors paid EMA to be in the report. They were all invited to go through a rigorous evaluation process, which included a lengthy questionnaire, dialog, demos, reviews and interviews with several customer deployments. Several other vendors were also invited to take part in the process but chose not to.

A Decision-Making Guide

The report is meant to be a decision-making guide, and that indicates who the BSM Service Impact Radar is written for.

“The nature of the market is not about a tool that somebody goes off and uses in the corner, it favors a more executive decision point because it is about a portfolio that allows for organizations to function more efficiently,” Drogseth explains. “And that means some thinking about what your objectives are across multiple groups. So the report is optimized for those individuals that tend to be either architects, executives or in some cases process-related experts with some service management association.”

The heart of the report is the BSM Service Impact Radar Bubble chart that illustrates how vendors cluster in terms of combined scores based on architectural and functional product strengths vs. cost efficiency. The “Value Leaders” had the highest scores, and are clustered in the top right of the chart. “Strong Value” companies are the next level, and they all had fairly high scores as well.

Vendors were also evaluated on “Vendor Strength” indicated by the size of the bubble on the chart, and this score was based on the vendor’s vision, strategy, financial strength and partnerships. This type of representation was chosen so that the Vendor Strength did not impact the mapping of the products on the chart, since this type of evaluation can favor larger vendors in terms of vision or financial strength.

Although the report scores the vendors, the Radar notes, “Far more important than scores, or even, strictly speaking, visual clusters, is understanding the design points of the individual vendors themselves and how they relate to your requirements in pursuing a more cohesive way to manage and align your most critical business services.”

This report is the first BSM Service Impact Radar, and Drogseth expects this to become a regular report. If not annually, published every 18 to 24 months.

The report is available free of charge for now, and more detailed profiles of each of the vendors in the report are also available from EMA for a fee.

To find out how each vendor scored, click here to read the BSM Service Impact Radar summary.

To gain more insight into the BSM Service Impact Radar, click here to read BSMdigest’s exclusive interview with Dennis Drogseth of EMA.