So yesterday wasn’t the best of days in the cloud. Initially a couple of outages for Amazon and Microsoft in Europe were the discussion point, but since no one really cares about Europe, it didn’t garner huge amount of attention. What did get people looking though was the fact that they couldn’t stream their NetFlix movies, and if there’s something that tech early adopters can’t do without, it’s consumption on-demand. As an aside, I haven’t yet had a chance to catch up with Adrian Cockroft about what happened to Netflix yesterday – but no doubt there will be some interesting discussion held at both Amazon and Netflix headquarters.
Anyway, into this maelstrom comes BMC who chose today to launch their new cloud operations capabilities to give visibility and control to cloud operations. BMC’s Cloud Lifecycle Management product is integrated with its Capacity Optimization and Performance Management products (such interesting names) to give a closed loop to monitoring, measurement and management. According to the press release, the new packaged offers;
- Introduces cloud operations to ensure users do not experience outages, performance or capacity issues
- Provides a view of operations from the end user to the infrastructure
- Provides a holistic, preventative approach to cloud operations
In the release announcing this product grouping, BMC boasts that Bezeq, Israel’s major telco, recently selected BMC’s cloud management solution and is pleased with the flexibility and agility it gives them in terms of IT service offerings it sells to its own customers.
It’s unclear whether this launch is merely a marketing campaign in light of yesterday’s outages – but regardless of this particular example, I’ve been saying for a long time that, especially for larger enterprises, a solution that integrates monitoring, measurement and management is an important step to building more reliable cloud installations.
Along with these new cloud operations capabilities, BMC is also releasing a Cloud Rapid Deployment service delivered by BMC Global Services. This service allows users to quickly implement the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution “quickly” – BMC is talking about a deployment time of 45 days. While this isn’t exactly speedy in my books, the combination of “enterprise grade” tools, along with a full service offering, makes sense, especially for organizations that are new to the cloud and are happy paying more for a one-stop-solution. As always it’s a case of horses for courses. Some organizations will do better mixing and matching product from different vendors, while for others a one-vendor relationship is preferable – BMC is banking on the second class of customer being sufficient in number for their own needs.
It’s a funny old world. One of the reasons that traditional IT sucks is because of the way it gets bogged down in process, and the archetype for that is the big overarching “manglement” frameworks like BMC, Tivoli and so on. You can colour me skeptical on the possibility of BMC truly getting the point of cloud, but there is definitely scope for something to fix the deficiencies in things like AWS’ lack of decent budgeting tools.
Ben, I’m with BMC, and today’s release was definitely not in response to yesterday’s issues – it has been a long time in the making. We’ve been putting together a portfolio of cloud ops products through acquisitions and organic development that we think hit the major requirements. We certainly don’t mind the fortuitous timing :).