Business Service Management in a Service Oriented, Virtualized World

Business Service Management (BSM) is now recognized as one of the most important attributes of a comprehensive systems management solution. Delivering relevant information to business decision makers is now a priority for management tool and application vendors. Recent trends in enterprise software have provided enterprises an opportunity to realize greater efficiencies and cost savings from their software investments. Additionally, these same opportunities have created new challenges for systems management software developers to keep pace with this dynamic environment. In particular, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Virtualization are having a tremendous impact on how enterprises construct their production environments to leverage these efficiencies. SOA encourages enterprises to create more agile, reconfigurable and responsive software solutions, and Virtualization allows these same enterprises to realize cost savings by reducing the amount of hardware required, better utilization of existing hardware and reduction of energy consumption. SOA and Virtualization are now mainstream in the corporate computing environment and systems management tools must account for them in their complete solutions offering. These management solutions must provide substantial value to it given business and. SOA and Virtualization must be a part of any BSM solution. This paper provides the reader with the key ingredients for creating compelling BSM solutions in a Service Oriented, Virtualized enterprise.