Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how ITSM is playing a larger and more important role in IT today.

1. Focus on Data, Risk Control, and Predictive Analysis Drives
New Era of Cloud-Based IT Service Management, Says
Expert Panel
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how ITSM is playing a larger and more important
role in IT today.
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Sponsor: HP Enterprise
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT
to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better
business results.
Our next innovation panel discussion focuses on the changing role of IT service
management (ITSM) in a hybrid computing world. As IT systems, resources,
assets, and information are more scattered across more enterprise locations, and
devices, as well as across various service environments, how can IT leaders hope to know where
their stuff is, who’s using it, how to secure it, and then accurately pay for it?
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Well, it turns out to the advanced software asset management (SAM) methods can enforce
compliance, reduce risk, cut costs, and enhance end-user productivity even as the complexity of
IT itself increases.
We'll now hear from four IT leaders about how they have improved ITSM despite such
challenges, and we'll learn how the increased use of big data and analytics, when
applied to ITSM, improves inventory control and management. We'll also hear
how a service brokering role can also be used to great advantage, thanks to ITSM-
generated information.
To learn more about how ITSM is solving multiple problems for IT, we're joined
by our panel. Please join me in welcoming Charl Joubert, a Change and
Configuration Expert. He is based in Pretoria, South Africa. Welcome, Charl.
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Gardner

2. Charl Joubert: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: We're also here with Julien Kuijper, an expert in Asset and License Management. He's
based in Paris. Welcome, Julien.
Julien Kuijper: Thank you. Good afternoon.
Gardner: We're also here with Patrick Bailly. He is the IT Quality and Process Director at Steria
based in Paris as well. Welcome, Patrick.
Patrick Bailly: Thank you. Good afternoon.
Gardner: And lastly, Edward Jackson joins us. He is Operational System Support Manager at
Redcentric, based in Harrogate, UK. Welcome, Edward.
Edward Jackson: Thank you. Good afternoon.
Gardner: Let’s talk a bit at first about SAM. There seems to be a lot going on with getting more
information about software and how it’s distributed and used. This becomes more of an issue as
users can get software so easily. But how should they get it into the organization and how that
should be managed remains a big challenge.
Julien, tell me a little bit about how you're seeing organizations deal with this issue. On one
hand, they need to allow for innovation, self-service, and decision making around software and,
at the same time, they need to protect an organization.
Complicated circle
Kuijper: SAM has to square quite a complicated circle. One is compliance in a company,
compliance with regard to software installation and usage, and also ensuring that
while doing this, we must ensure that the software that is entering a company isn't
dangerous. It's things like not letting a virus come in, opening threats or
complication. Those are three very technical and very factual environments.
But, you also want to please your end-user. If you don’t please your end-user and
you don’t give them the ability to work, they're going to be frustrated. They're
going to complain about IT. It’s already a complicated enough topic, and you don’t
want to get into this.
You have to square that circle by implementing the correct processes first, while giving the
correct information around how to behave in the whole end-to-end software lifecycle.
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Kuijper

3. Gardner: And there's asset management when it comes to software. It’s not small potatoes.
There are some very big numbers involved if you don’t manage it properly. So perhaps it's
something that you can easily bring to the attention of leadership and get them to fund this.
Kuijper: It’s actually a very inconvenient truth. An audit from a publisher or a vendor can easily
reach 7 or 8 digits, and a typical company has between 10 and 50 publishers. So, at 7 digits per
publisher, you can easily do the math. That’s typically the financial risk.
You also have a big reputation risk. If you don’t pay for software and you are caught, you end up
being in the press. You don’t want your company, your branding, to be at that level of exposure.
You have to bring this risk to the attention of IT leaders at the CIO level, but they don’t really
want to hear that, because it costs a lot. When they hear this risk, they can't avoid investment,
and the investment can be quite large as well.
But you have to compare this investment with regards to your overall software spending.
Typically, if this investment is reacheing five percent of your overall yearly software spending,
you're on the right level. It’s a big number, but still it’s worth investing.
Coming with this message to IT management and getting the ear of a person who is interested in
the topic and then getting the investment authorization, you've gone through half the journey.
Implementation afterwards will be defining your processes, finding the right tool, implementing
it, and running it.
Gardner: When it comes to value to the end-user, by having an understood, clearly-defined
process in place allows them to get to the software they want, make sure they can use it, and look
for it on a sanctioned list, for example. While some end-users might see this as a hurdle, I think it
enables them eventually to get the tools they need when they need them.
Smart communication
Kuijper: Right. At the beginning, every end-user will see all those SAM processes as a burden
or a complication. So you have to invest a lot in communication, smart communication, with
your company and make people understand that it’s everyone’s responsibility to be compliant
and also that it can help in recovering money.
If you do this in a smart way, and the process has a delivery time not longer than three days, then
you're good. You have to ensure, of course, that you have a software catalog which is up-to-
date, with an easy access to your main titles, and once all those points from the end-to-end
software lifecycle are implemented, from software tool, then software delivery, then software re-
usage, software, and also disposal. When all this is lean, then you’ve made your journey. Then,
the software lifecycle process will not be seen any more as a pain, but it will be seen as a
business enabler.
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4. Gardner: Now, asset management doesn’t just cover the realm of software. It includes
hardware, and in a network environment, that can be very large numbers of equipment and
devices, endpoints as well as network equipment.
So Edward at Redcentric, tell us a little bit about how you see the management of assets through
the lens of a network?
Jackson: We have over 10,000 devices in management from a multitude of vendors and we use
asset management in terms of portfolio management, managing the models, the
versions, and the software.
We also have a configuration management tool that takes the configurations of
these devices and runs them against compliancy. We can run them against a gold
or a silver build. We can also run them against security flaws. It gives us an end-
to-end management.
All of this feeds into our ITSM product and then also it feeds into things like the
configuration management data base (CMDB). So we have a complete end-to-
end knowledge of the software, the hardware, and the service that we're giving the customer.
Gardner: Knowing yourself and your organization allows for that lifecycle benefit that Julien
referred to. Eventually, that gives you the freedom to manage and extend those benefits into
things like helpdesk support, even operations, where the performance can be maintained better.
Jackson: Yes, a 360-degree management from hardware being delivered on site, to being
discovered, being automatically populated into the multitude of support and operational systems
that we use, and then into the ITSM side.
If you don’t get it right from the start and you don’t have the correct models defined for a Cisco
device or the correct IOS on that device one perhaps where it has security flaws, then you run the
risk of deploying a vulnerable service to the customer.
Thinking about scale
Gardner: Looking at the different types of tools and approaches, this goes beyond thinking
about assets alone. We're thinking also about scale. Tell us about your organization, and why the
scale and ability to manage so many devices and information is important?
Jackson: Being a managed service provider (MSP), we have about 1,000 external customers,
and each one of those has a tailored service, ranging from voice, storage, to data, and cloud. So
we need to be able to manage these services that are contained within the 10,000 plus devices
that we have.
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Jackson

5. We need to understand the service end-to-end. So there’s quite bit of service level management
in there. It all ties down to having the correct kind of vendor, the correct kind of service
mapping, and information needs to be accurate in the configuration items (CIs), so support can
utilise this information
If we have an incident that is automatically generated on the management platforms, it goes into
the ITSM platform. We can create an effective customer list within say five minutes of the
network outage and email or SMS the customer pretty much directly.
There’s more ways of doing it, but it’s all due to having a tight control on the assets that are out
there on the field, having an asset management tool that can actually control that, and being able
to understand the topology of the network and where everything lies. This gives us the ability to
create relationships between these devices and have hierarchical logical and physical entities.
Gardner: But you have confidence that, regardless of the scale and volume of the devices and
regardless of the amount of data that you are collecting, those aren’t issues in terms of your
performance. You work with tools and platforms that can handle that scale.
Jackson: All the tools that we have are pretty much carrier grade. So we can scale a lot more
than the 10,000 devices that we currently have. If you set it up and plan it right, it doesn’t really
matter how many devices you have in management. You have got the right processes and
structure to be able to manage them.
Gardner: We've talked about software, hardware, and networks. Nowadays, cloud services,
micro services, and APIs are also a big part of the mix. IT consumes them, they make value from
them, and they extend that value into the organization.
Let’s go to Patrick at Steria. How are you seeing in your organization an evolution of ITSM into
a service brokering role, and does the current crop or generation of ITSM tools and platforms
give you a road to that service brokering capacity?
Extending services
Bailly: What’s needed for becoming a service broker that is we need to offer the ability to
extend the current service that we have to the services that are available today in
the cloud.
To do that, we need to extend the capability of our framework. Today, our
framework has been designed in order to run the operation on behalf of our
customers, to run the operation on the customer side, or the operation on our data
center, but more or less, traditionally IT. The current ITSM framework is able to
do that.
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Bailly

6. What we're facing is that we have customers who want to add short-term [cloud capacity]. We
need to offer that capability. What's very important is to offer one interface toward the customers,
and to integrate across several service providers at the same time.
Gardner: Tell us a bit about Steria. You're a large organization, 20,000 employees, and in
multiple countries. Tell us a little bit about your organization.
Bailly: We're an IT service provider, and we manage different kinds of services from
infrastructure management, application management, business process outsourcing, system
integration, etc., all over Europe. Today, we're leveraging the capabilities that we have today in
India and in Poland.
Gardner: Now, we've looked at what ITSM does. We haven’t dug into too much about where
it’s going next in terms of what analysis of this data can bring to the table.
Charl, tell me a little bit about how you see the use of analytics improving what you've been
doing in your setting. How do baseline results from ITSM, the tools we have been talking about,
improve when you start to analyze that data, index it, cleanse it, and get at the real underlying
information that can then be turned into business benefits?
Joubert: Looking at inadequacies of your processes is really the start of all of this. The moment
you start scratching at the vast amount of information you have, you start seeing
the errors of your ways and ways and opportunities to correct them.
It's really an exciting time in ITSM. We now have the ability to start mining this
magnitude of information that’s being locked inside attachments in all of these
ITSM solutions. We can now start indexing all that unstructured data and using it.
It’s a fantastic time to be in IT.
Gardner: Give me an example of where you've seen this at work -- maybe a helpdesk
environment. How can you immediately get benefits from starting to analyze systems and IT
information?
Million interactions
Joubert: In the service desk I'm involved in, we have about a total of a million interactions
over the past few years. What we've done with big data is index the categorization of all these
interactions.
With tools from HP, Smart Analytics and Smart Ticketing, we're able to predict the
categorization of these interactions to a accuracy of about 84 percent at the moment. This assists
the service desk agents to more accurately get the correct information to the correct service
teams the first time, with fewer errors in escalation, which in turn leads to greater customer
satisfaction.
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Joubert

7. Gardner: Very good. Julien, how about you? Where does the analysis of what you're doing with
asset management, for example, play a role? Where do you see it going?
Kuijper: SAM is already quite complex on-premise and we all know today that the IT world is
moving to the cloud, and this is the next challenge of SAM, because the whole point of the cloud
is that you don’t know where your systems are.
However, the licensing models, as they are today, refer to CPU, to on-premise, to physical assets.
Understanding how you can adapt your licensing model to this new concept -- not that new
anymore now -- this new concept of cloud is something to which even the software publishers
and vendors have not really adapted their model.
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You also have to face some vendors or publishers who are not willing to adapt their model,
especially to be able to audit specific customers and get more revenue. So, on one hand, you have
to implement the right processes and the right tools, which are now going to navigate in a very
complex environment, very difficult to scan, very difficult to analyze. At the same time, you have
to update all your contracts, and sometime, this will not be possible.
Some vendors will have a very easy licensing model if you are implementing their software in
their own cloud environment, but in another cloud environment, in a competitor, they might
make this journey quite complicated for you.
So this will be complex and will be resolved by correct data to analyze and also some legal
workforce and purchasing workforce to try to adapt the contracts.
Gardner: In many ways right now, we never really own software. We only lease it or borrow it
and we're charged in a variety of ways. But soon we'll to be going more to that pay-as-you-use,
pay-as-you-consume model. What about the underlying information associated with those
services? Would logs go along with your cloud services? Should you be able to access that so
that you can analyze it in the context of your other IT infrastructure?
Edward, any thoughts as a managed services environment and a management of networks
provider. Do you see that as you provide more services that you are providing insight or ITSM
metadata along with the services?
Page 7

8. IaaS to SaaS
Jackson: Over the past five or six years, the services that we offered pretty much started as
infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but it’s now very much a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering,
managed OS, and everything up the technology stack into managed applications.
It's gotten to a point now that we are taking on the managing of bespoke applications that
customers wanted to hand over to Redcentric. So not only do we have to understand the
technology and the operating systems that go on these platforms in the cloud, but we also have to
understand the bespoke software that’s sitting on them and all the necessary dependencies for
that.
The more that we invest into cloud technologies, the more complex the service that we offer our
customers becomes. We have a multitude of management systems that can monitor all the
different elements of this and then piece them together in a service-level model (SLM)
perspective. So you get SLM and you get service assurance on top of that.
Gardner: We've heard about IDOL OnDemand and Vertica OnDemand, as part of the Haven
OnDemand. They're bringing these analytics capabilities to cloud services, APIs as well. As I
understand it, they're going to be applying them to more IT operations issues. So it’s quite
possible that we'll start to see a mash up, if you will, between a cloud service, but also the
underlying IT information associated with that service.
Let’s go back to Patrick at Steria. Any thoughts about where this combination of ITSM within a
cloud environment develops? How do you see it going?
Bailly: Yeah. The system today exists for traditional IT, and we also have to have the tooling for
designing and consuming cloud services. We are running HP Service Manager for traditional IT,
legacy IT, and we are running HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) for managing and operating
in the cloud.
We’d like to have a unique way for reconciling the catalogue of services that are in Service
Manager with the catalogue of services that are in CSA, and we would need to have a single,
unique portal for doing that.
What we'e expecting with HP Propel is to offer the capabilities to aggregate services that are
coming from various sources and to extend that by also offering them. When we're serving this
live, we need to offer some additional features like collaboration, incident management, access to
the knowledge base, collaboration between service desk and end user, collaboration between end
users, etc.
Page 8

9. There's also another important point and that is service integration. As a service provider, we will
have to deliver and control the services that are delivered by some partners and by some cloud
service providers.
In order to do that, we need to have strong integration, not only partnership, but also strong
integration. And that integration should be multiple point, meaning that, as soon as we're able to
integrate a service provider with this, that integration will be de facto available for our other
customers. We're expecting that from Propel.
And it’s not only an integration for provisioning service, but it’s also an integration for running
the other processes, collaboration, incident management, etc.
Gardner: Patrick mentioned HP Propel, do any of you also have some experience with that or
are looking at it to solve other problems?
Single view
Joubert: We're definitely looking at it to give a single view for all our end users. There are
various supportive partners in the area where I work. The end user really wants one place to ask
for fixing a broken light, to fixing a broken PC, to installing software. It's ease of use that they're
looking for. So yes, we are definitely looking at Propel.
Gardner: Let’s take another look to the future. We've heard quite a bit about the Internet of
Things (IoT) -- more devices, more inputs, and more data. Do you think that’s something that’s
going to be an issue for ITSM, or is that something separate? Do you view that the infrastructure
that’s being created for ITSM lends itself to something like managing the Internet of Things and
more devices on a network? Let’s start with you, Julien.
Kuijper: For me, as asset management experts and software asset management experts, we have
to draw a line somewhere and say, "There is this IoT, and there is some data that we have to say
we don’t want to analyze. There are things that are here on the Internet. That’s fine, but too much
engineering around that might be over-killing the processes.
We also have to be very careful about false good ideas. I personally think that bring your own
device (BYOD) is a false good idea. It brings tremendous issues with regards to who takes care
of an asset that is personally owned by a person in a corporate environment, who deals with IT.
Today, it’s perfect. I bring the computer that I'm used to in the office. Tomorrow, it’s broken.
Who is going to fix it? When I buy software for this machine, who is going to pay for it and
who's going to be responsible for non-compliance?
A CIO might think it’s very intelligent and very advanced to allow people to use what they're
used to, but the legal issues behind it are quite complicated. I would say this is a false good idea.
Page 9

10. Gardner: Edward, you mentioned that at Redcentric, scale doesn’t concern you. You're pretty
confident that the systems that you can access can handle almost any scale. How about that
Internet of Things? Even if it shouldn’t be in the purview legally or in terms of the role of IT, it
does seem like the systems that have been developed for ITSM are applicable to this issue. Any
thoughts about more and more devices on a network?
Jackson: In terms of the scale of things, if the elements are in your control and you have some
structure and management around them. You don’t need to be overly concerned. We certainly
don’t keep anything in our systems their shouldn’t be in there or doesn’t need to be..
Going forward, things like big data and smart analytics layered on top would give us a massive
benefit in how we could deliver our service, and more importantly, how we can manage the
service.
Once you have your processes is in place, and can understand the necessity of those processes,
you have the structure, and you have the kind of management platform that your sure is going to
handle the data, then you can basically leverage things like big data, smart analytics, and data
mining to enable you to offer a sophisticated level of support that perhaps your competitors
can’t.
Esoteric activity
Gardner: It's occurred to me, as I've been listening to many of the speakers today that almost
any of the major challenges, whether it’s big data, cloud service brokering, management of assets
for legal or jurisdiction or compliance, ITSM, the data and the management of that data is central
to any of these problems. I think we've seen in the last several years what was a fairly esoteric
activity. ITSM has become much more prominent and is in the position to solve many more
problems.
I'd like to end our conversation with your thoughts along those lines. Charl, ITSM, is it more
important than ever? How has it become central?
Joubert: Absolutely. With the advent of big data, we suddenly have the tools to start mining this
information and using it to our benefit to give better service to our end users.
Gardner: Julien, the role of ITSM. Am I off on some pie-in-the-sky mentality here or do you
really think it is more core, more central, more important than ever?
Kuijper: ITSM is definitely core to any IT environment, because ITSM is the way to put the
correct price tag behind a service. We have service charging and service costing. If you don’t do
that correctly, then you basically don’t tell the truth to your customer or to your end user.
If you mix this with the Internet of Things and the possibility to have anything with an IP address
available on the network, then you enter into more philosophical thoughts. In a corporate
Page 10

11. environment, let’s assume you have a tag on your car keys that helps you to find them, and that is
linked on the Internet. Those gizmos are happening today.
This brings some personal life information into your corporate environment. What does the
corporate environment do about this? The brand of your car is on your car tag. They will know
that you bought a brand new car. They will know all this information which is personal. So we
have to think about ethics as well.
So drawing a line of what the corporate environment will take care and what is private will be
essential in this Internet of Things. When you have your mobile phone, is it personal, it is
business? Drawing a line will be very important.
Gardner: But at least we will have the means to draw that line and then enforce the drawing of
that line.
Kuijper: Right. Totally correct.
Gardner: Edward, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever or not so much?
Bigger than ever
Jackson: I think it’s bigger than ever. It’s the front end of your business, and the backend of
your business its what the customers see. It’s how you deliver your service, and if you haven’t
got it right, then you are not going to be able to deliver the service that a customer expects.
You might have the best products in the world, but if your ITSM systems and your ITSM team
aren’t doing what they're supposed to be doing then you know it’s not going to be any good, and
the customers are going to say that.
Gardner: And lastly to Steria, and Patrick, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever? How do you
view it?
Bailly: For me, the role of IT Service Management (ITSM) won't change. We did ITSM in the
past and we still continue to have that in the future. In order to deliver any service, we need to
have the detailed configuration of the service. We will have to run processes and not have the
service change. What will change in the future is the diversity of service providers that we use.
As a service provider, we'll have to walk with a lot of other service providers. So the SLA will
be more complex to manage for service management. It will be critical. For the customer, you
will have to not only manage — but to govern — that service even if it is provided by lot of
service providers.
Page 11

12. Gardner: So the complexity goes up, and therefore the need to manage that complexity also
needs to go up.
Bailly: What is also very important in license management in the cloud is that very often the
return on investment (ROI) of the cloud adoption has ignored or minimized the impact of
software cost. When you tell your customers, internal or external, that this xyz cloud offer will
cost them that amount of money, you will most likely have to add up 20-30 percent because of
the impact of the software cost afterwards.
Gardner: I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been talking to a panel of experts
about IT service management and its role in a hybrid computing world. We’ve found out how the
future of analytics plays into ITSM, big data included, as well as many of the other scaling issues
around mobility, Internet of Things, and the licensing and legal issues around all assets in IT.
So a big thank you to our panel. We've been joined by Charl Joubert, the Change and
Configuration Expert based in Pretoria, South Africa. Thank you, sir.
Joubert: Thank you very much, Dana.
Gardner: Julien Kuijper has joined us. He is an expert in Asset and License Management based
in Paris. Thank you, Julien.
Kuijper: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Gardner: Patrick Bailly. He is the IT Quality and Process Director at Steria in Paris. Thank you,
sir.
Bailly: Thank you very much.
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Gardner: And Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric in the UK.
Thank you.
Jackson: Thank you.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of
IT discussion. We have explored solid evidence from a number of adopters and experts on how
big data changes everything, for IT, for businesses and governments, as well as for you and me.
I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining us, and don’t forget to come back next time.
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Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how ITSM is playing a larger and more important
role in IT today. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.
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