Hi Maria,
As Frank counsels, it all depends on where you are starting from and what it is you need to achieve. They key for any IT solution is that it is available and performant to the required business needs. From always available and super performant 24x7 to less critical systems that do not require the expense of those demanding requirements.
The IBM strategy in the world of service management is to help customers gain Observability across simple/complex environments with speed and ease not found elsewhere. We strongly focus on enabling openness to avoid technology lock in such that we enable cost and performance optimisation regardless of the cloud of platforms, core technologies and application choices made. Lastly we are continuing to drive AI solutions to reduce the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) issues, bringing the key/relevant data points from the sea of data to enable rapid insights to fixing issues and indeed proactive management to avoid issues in the first place. If this fits is what you need then IBM can be that one stop shop.
One thing I have seen over my career is that when everyone is allowed to do their own thing that is seems fine for a period, but then then reality sinks in. The many point capabilities are expensive to maintain and hard to move forward as the bespoke solutions are now almost impossible to upgrade and move forward, so with maturity comes the desire to standardise with as few vendors and tools as is practically possible. Sadly, this seems cyclical rather than learning from previous cycles and I feel we are in the Wild West of everyone doing their own cloud thing today.
Right now I am seeing different parts of organisations adopt their own cloud solutions and with that they tend to take the default cloud vendors tooling. With business solutions spanning multiple environments, pulling together all these point capabilities may not give you what you need as you may have many blind spots. Indeed when things go slow or intermittent performance issues arise having a set of differing tools and functions generally means these issues take many weeks/months to address or indeed the root cause cannot be identified. This is because there is little joined up thinking, be that at a single vendor level or with multiple vendors capabilities.
I'd recommend you look at this reference architecture and figure out if you can cover off the key areas for each environment. Not just with a few ticks in a spreadsheet but focus on a comprehensive understanding and validation that teams are delivering on those.
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/architecture/architectures/serviceManagementArchitecture/referenceArchitecture/
If you already have an existing setup of an on-premise virtual environment or perhaps an all cloud environment or maybe a mixture of many then using something unique like Turbonomic to manage and balance performance and costs is an ideal way to right size your environments and optimise performance against the business requirements. This helps bring together many vendors functions into an end to end solution. With our Cloud Pak for AIOps we let you choose your entry point that best suits your immediate pain with a roadmap to covering off many more as you climb the AIOps ladder.
Wishing you well in this new space and feel free to reach out to the community if you have further queries.
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Angus Jamieson
IT Service Management Solutions Architect
IBM
Edinburgh
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Original Message:
Sent: Sun October 31, 2021 07:00 PM
From: Maria Bianco
Subject: Best of breed vs. single vendor for ITOM solutions
Hi everyone,
I'm new to the AIOps and ITOM space, and I was curious to get some thoughts from those of you who are more well-versed in the industry. Are IT professionals today showing a preference towards taking a best-of-breed vs. single-vendor offering approach when it comes to selecting IT products for ITOM and IT event management solutions?
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Maria Bianco
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