When you consider the transformation of IT in many organizations from enabling function to strategic partner, it’s becoming clear that the business of technology and how it’s monitored and managed has the potential to empower or limit an organization’s ability to deliver on its strategy.

Putting business back into ITSM

In today’s highly complex IT environments, Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is about balancing cost pressures and service levels, while establishing effective external partnerships. That takes care of one side of the balance sheet—expenses, but what about revenue side? As Bill Bulkeley explains in his article, How to be a modern CIO by staying relevant in the cloud computing era, forward thinking CIOs are seeing more than technology and information. They’re spotting opportunities to apply technology that also drives business.

Look at the explosive growth in mobile technologies. When you consider the use of mobile in organizations—66% sales, 65% field service, 45% customer service (2011 State of the CIO, CIO Magazine)—the opportunity to leverage the technology to not only support, but also to grow the business represents significant potential. And in addition to determining whether the innovation is developed in house or outsourced, the role of IT is that of a business line manager answering business questions: How can this improve my business? What is the investment and what is the payback?

Get your head in the cloud

One of the most influential changes to affect ITSM has been the cloud. Bulkeley explains that much of the CIO domain—infrastructure, capacity planning, etc.—has moved to the cloud. Therefore, CIOs have become mangers of services, who establish and deliver on service levels. Add to that the fact that cloud technologies that have inspired a host of out-of-the-box and easy-to-implement IT products, such as Vblock and Nimsoft’s IT help desk solution, Unified Service Desk Management, business line executives are now embracing and making decisions on these new IT products.

Yet the impact of IT touches every aspect of the enterprise, and as Bulkeley says, no one has greater insight into the entire organization than IT. In fact, according to a CIO Magazine 2011 State of the CIO report, over the next three to five years, CIOs will spend 54 percent of their time driving business innovation and 38 percent of their time developing and refining business strategy.

As CIOs play a more strategic role, so too will ITSM. The organization’s ability to effectively monitor and manage the service desk will have even greater influence on business results. CIOs who are more effective at monitoring the end-to-end infrastructure will not only run a more efficient service operation, but also will have more time to spot technology trends that can drive new business.

Schedule a ITSM demo and learn how the Nimsoft Service Desk approach to ITSM adds greater value to the one IT resource that touches every aspect of the enterprise.

The newest “refresh” of ITIL released in 2011 has 26 processes. The just-released version 5 of COBIT has 36 processes. The recently released version of ISO 20000 has nearly 20 processes.

George Spalding, Pink Elephant

Those of us who spend every day looking at this stuff know that there is a LOT of overlap between these different frameworks and standards. Almost total overlap when we focus on the basic operational processes that every IT shop MUST have. It is only the top 5% of organizations that spend any cycles worrying about more than a few key processes, the blocking & tackling of IT operations.

In next week’s webcast, we’ll be focusing on keeping it simple – with 3 questions to ask when considering changing your current service desk solution:

• What does the business really need?
• How much ITIL is enough?
• How do you choose the right SaaS solution?

George Spalding is co-author of ITIL® V3’s Continual Service Improvement core volume, and is one of the world’s most insightful and engaging IT Service Management and Support experts. In addition to his extensive commitment to improving the industry, George spent several years as a consultant to the White House on technical presentations and White House conferences. He also coordinated technical presentations for members of the President’s cabinet, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. George is an ITIL Expert, the highest level in the ITIL certification program, is a regular author of IT articles and white papers, and is a presenter at global ITSM conferences and events. Follow George online via Twitter and Linkedin.

Your IT help desk touches everyone in your enterprise. So it’s important that help desk personnel reflect value and responsiveness. The Nimsoft IT help desk team compiled a list of interview questions and answers that will help you identify qualified and committed candidates for your IT help desk.

1. How would you handle the “I can’t log in” call?
   First I would ask the caller to verify that he has the correct user name and domain. Then I would ask the caller to check if the “caps lock” key was enabled. If that doesn’t resolve the issue I would continue by asking the caller to check the physical connections such as Ethernet.
   The importance of this question is to make sure the candidate covers the basics and doesn’t jump to conclusions without first troubleshooting the basics.

2. Describe how a (substitute any technology here such as WEP, LAN, etc.) works?
   WEP is a means of securing access to a wireless network and is usually established by a network administrator. WEP keys include a series of hexadecimal digits the keys must match between devices in order for them to communicate.
   Most applicants think this is a technical proficiency question; however, it’s really a question aimed at evaluating communication skills. While candidates should be familiar with most popular acronyms they may ask you to explain first, which is fine, as long as they can articulate the answer.

3. In your professional career, what was the most difficult thing you had to do?
   Working weekends. (Bad answer!!!)
   The answer could focus on a specific situation such as making a decision to leave a job. It may also describe a specific IT help desk incident such as challenging conventional wisdom to come up with what turned out to be the right solution based on thorough research of the problem. In any case you’re looking for how the candidate adapted to change.

4. What kinds of people do you currently work with on the IT help desk?
   I work on the incident management team, and we often collaborate with problem managers and operations teams.
   Here you’re looking for answers that reveal how well a candidate works with others. Does the candidate’s answer focus on specific roles or does it mention personality or behavioral characteristics. Does the candidate speak in terms of teamwork such as “our team includes . . .” or “I work with a team of . . .”

5. What do you do to stay current on IT help desk good practices?
   I subscribe to SupportWorld Magazine and am a member of HDI.
   The answer should go beyond attending whatever courses the company provides. You’re looking for a self-starter who seeks information. The candidate should subscribe to industry journals or seek training and certification courses outside of the company’s on-the-job training program.

6. Tell me about a situation when the caller didn’t understand what you were explaining. What did you do?
   I rephrased the question to see if the misunderstanding was my own miscommunication. When that didn’t work, I asked the caller a series of questions, paraphrasing the caller’s answers to make sure that I thoroughly understood.
   The key here is to ascertain the candidate’s communications and customer service capability. Does the candidate really try to see the caller’s perspective? Is the candidate flexible and/or creative in finding ways to articulate the action?

7. Tell me about an issue that you couldn’t initially resolve. What did you do?
   I was working with an irate customer who grew impatient with my questions. So although I knew I would eventually be able to help the caller, I asked the caller if he would prefer that another associate handle the incident.
   In this question, you’re really looking for a candidate who shows ingenuity and customer focus. Did the candidate leverage available tools such as the knowledge base or Performance Management Database (PMDB)? In the answer above, the candidate put the customer first by giving the caller an option that perhaps would uncover an underlying issue of the caller simply wanted to talk to someone else. The next step would be for the interviewer to ask why the caller grew impatient.

8. Tell me how you have dealt with a hostile caller. What was the outcome?
   This help desk interview question requires you to show how you can handle negative and stressful situations. Your answer should show a patient and positive attitude when challenging situations occur and that you do not allow your personal ego to get in the way of helping the caller. Describe the coping techniques you use to keep calm under stress.

Technical proficiency is not enough to determine a good IT help desk candidate. A promising candidate must possess effective problem solving skills, the ability to prioritize and adapt to changing priorities, customer focus and above all, excellent communication skills.

Once you’ve found the right candidate, let Nimsoft provide the tools that will help your IT help desk more efficiently deliver on service desk and business goals.

Applying an ITIL framework to Service Management is less about finding problems and more about treating each problem like a clue. Using IT forensics, each clue by itself is usually not a means to an end, but another step in the journey to a solution. Invoking ITIL change, release and configuration management processes first requires thorough detective work. Taking a situation such as packet loss, Read on to learn how ITIL practices can enable a more proactive approach without compromising Quality of Service (QoS) or Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance.

Can ITIL Help You Get Out of Your Own Way?

A good detective follows a clue to the people who can provide answers or lead the detective to more clues. When it comes to network availability it’s been said and proven time and again that 80% of incidents are the result of human error. Make the first step in your detective work a trip to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to look for clues indicating who made the last configuration change. If that doesn’t provide more clues or a solution, then conduct additional forensic work.

ITIL Works Effectively with Good Monitoring Data

ITIL Service Transition relies on good data. Using our packet loss example, comprehensive network monitoring solution is your best defense against QoS issues or threats to SLA compliance caused by packet loss. In fact, the right monitoring solution can detect an issue before it becomes a Service Desk incident. An ITIL good practice, Service Validation and Testing is another area where forensic data can uncover a potential service level threat, often before it impacts users or applications. So in the case of the missing packets, monitoring data offers additional clues from items such as round trip response time, latency, jitter and dropped packets.

ITIL Service Operation – Separating the Symptom from the Cause

Good detectives are able to read into clues separating symptoms from the cause. ITIL Service Operation framework separates Incident Management and Problem Management. In most cases incidents are clues to a larger problem, although sometimes a major incident points to the root cause or a problem is identified without ever reporting an incident. In the case of the missing packets, if a call experiences jitter, that could be the symptom of an occasional dropped packet, which wouldn’t necessarily indicate a major QoS problem. However, if monitoring data indicate packet loss greater than 0.1%, then follow the clues or incidents to the problem of packet loss and conduct root cause analysis to find a solution.

ITIL provides an approach that puts Service Management into perspective. With effective monitoring tools, technicians and support teams can act as sleuths to uncover clues and piece them together to have a better understanding of network performance. The ultimate goal is to not only handle incidents and problems more efficiently, but also to prevent them from occurring in the first place, or at least indentify potential issues before QoS or SLAs are affected.

Learn how Nimsoft can help you can effectively integrate ITIL solutions within your Service Operation.

In the 1980s, I worked for my father every summer, earning money for the purchase of my first automobile (the dream!). My father owned and ran a mechanical engineering firm that was focused on the newspaper industry. I vividly remember my father, a proud, intense man, lecturing me about how to stay ahead of the competition. By the time I was 12, I could recite each of our major competitors, where they were from and what area they specialized in. At the time, the thought of co-opetition was as foreign to my dad as the concept of an iPhone was.

Fast forward almost 30 years, and all of the organizations my father competed against are gone―victims of a changing world where the big iron of yesteryear has been replaced by digital media. I often wonder, if this group of competitors had understood the dynamics of co-opetition, could they have seen the changing market dynamics coming? Would they have adapted and flourished, rather than fighting their way into extinction?

I recently had a conversation about co-opetition with a newly acquired service provider based in the Southeastern US. We discussed the benefits and opportunities co-opetition presents, as well as the potential pitfalls. Make no mistake, it raises fundamental questions for an MSP: Where does an individual MSP’s “secret sauce” end and the cooperation that could benefit the broader community begin? How could MSPs better leverage their combined expertise, and join forces to enjoy greater collective success—without also risking their competitive position?

The discussion got me thinking about the opportunity that co-opetition presents to the MSP marketplace. Is co-opetition required if the greater MSP ecosystem is to flourish? Today, we are seeing a few large players continue to grow and expand their business, but we’re also seeing a fair number of organizations fail to make the cut.

Pete Harteveld, VP Managed Service Provider Practice at Nimsoft

Moving forward, I believe that co-opetition is going to be an increasingly important strategy for MSPs, particularly for the smaller players in the industry. By joining forces, they can stay competitive against much larger rivals. Co-opetition can help MSPs broaden their expertise and perspective, and avoid operating in a vacuum that can lead to stagnation and irrelevance. In fact, there are several examples of multiple MSPs joining forces to bring better value to the customer—and to effectively grow their own businesses. Ultimately, co-opetition can set the stage for MSPs to fully leverage their acumen and expertise to compete and innovate—so they can keep giving enterprises the price and quality benefits they associate with the MSP market place.

Peter Harteveld, VP of the Nimsoft Managed Service Provider Practice and Business Development, is responsible for the enablement and growth of Nimsoft MSP customers while also looking for innovative ways to expand the capabilities of Nimsoft through strategic partners and relationships. Prior to CA Technologies, Peter spent eight years with Deloitte Consulting where he focused in the areas of post-merger and acquisition integration, organizational transformation and salesforce effectiveness. Follow Peter online via Twitter and Linkedin.

To learn about new advancements in IT, download the free eBook: Definitive Guide to Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment.

It has been a mere 24 hours since we officially wrapped up n·fluence, our 2012 worldwide customer conference.

We led with the theme Welcome to the IT Revolution. The revolution is being fueled, in part, by a massive shift in media consumption habits, and new ways of collaborating amongst IT teams inside and beyond the enterprise. At n·fluence 2012, customers, partners and the Nimsoft team were a case-in-point as we used social media to extend the conference experience.

As I attempt to capture the essence of Nimsoft’s marquee event, I quickly come to the conclusion that the most interesting way to do so is to hand over the microphone to our attendees themselves. They have demonstrated that they are indeed the true drivers of the IT revolution, the managed service providers, enterprise IT, the analysts and thought leaders.

Here are some of the insights and inspiration as told by the people behind it all.

What stuck with you from n·fluence 2012?

May 1st, May Day, is a special day for many people across the world. In times gone by, it would have been a day to parade technological power and military might in front of thousands in Red Square, Moscow. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent political change, the parades still happen but are significantly smaller and there is no longer any military power on show and I for one am very grateful for that.

On May 2nd in Union Square, San Francisco, Nimsoft paraded its technological power in front of hundreds. A more modest parade by comparison to those in Red Square but nonetheless one that has the capability to change the world, at least the world of IT.

I know that I am stretching my analogies to breaking point here, but the fall of the Berlin Wall was a disruptive event in geopolitics that could be compared in the world of IT to the fall of the data center wall or, in other words, the arrival and establishment of cloud computing.

This week, Nimsoft described a post-cloud “SaaS First” future for IT Management solutions. It also described how Nimsoft would be tapping in to the highly disruptive force of social networking and mobile ubiquity. Post “wall” IT will be a completely different place, where Nimsoft will thrive and others will fall by the wayside.

But n•fluence isn’t all about Nimsoft speaking. It is also about Nimsoft listening to its customers, particularly those that presented to the whole group. We had insights from three US based Managed Service Providers, one regional and highly focused, one medium sized international and one massive national provider, each with their own particular business approach to their market segment, who have all taken Nimsoft and wrapped it up in their own highly successful business service offerings that they provide to their customers. Kind of like “Nimsoft Inside”.

As I reported from the EMEA event in February, we value our customers’ input, as it is the only real way that we know that we are heading in the right direction. From what I heard, we are pretty much heading in the right direction with only a few course corrections required.

We also heard from our new leadership. As someone who has been with Nimsoft for a long time, I can happily report that the organization’s ability to execute continues to get stronger every year. This year we have tapped in to even greater resources within the broader organization of CA Technologies. This greater resource will enable us to grow faster than ever before.

In the theme of this week’s n•fluence, “Welcome to the IT Revolution!”

This post finds me back in Orlando only a week after Nimsoft’s exciting fiscal year kickoff. But this time it is for one of the premier ITSM events in the country: HDI 2012 Conference and Expo. While I enjoy the chance to share the latest with our sales teams at kickoff, conferences like HDI are even more fun because of all the customers we get to talk with. With over 2000 attendees, we had a steady flow of visitors to our booth.

The week was filled with presentations, ranging in topics, from Mobile Apps to Big Data. There was even an interactive ITIL Jeopardy presentation! In such an upbeat, educational atmosphere, we learned a great deal from speaking with visitors. One of the primary topics discussed, both in the conference presentations and at the Nimsoft booth, was the future of the Service Desk and how to build customer satisfaction.

Many of our visitors were excited about what Nimsoft Service Desk has to offer. The idea that they could avoid the legacy of heavily customized, high cost of ownership solutions in favor of our action-driven, configurable workflow, SaaS solution really resonated with so many of our visitors. I lost count of how many people walked up saying that they were looking for a new service desk to replace their older solution that had simply become too difficult to take forward. They wanted to focus on their core processes and take advantage of our built in best practices. Even better, since we were sharing the booth with our CA Service Desk Manager colleagues, we were able to offer a solution for those who had a need for a customized solution that could address some of the more complex processes that Nimsoft Service Desk doesn’t cover.

But, the real hit of the show was our unofficial mascot, the Nimsoft frog. He became the spokes-frog in the booth. See his video debut where he tells our story:

To learn about service desk and leveraging ITIL concepts in service desk operations, download our free white paper: Pragmatic ITIL.

There is an IT Revolution happening and the most unlikely person made it all clear to me. In 2007 I persuaded my wife (a lawyer by trade and not into technology) to switch to the iPhone from what she thought was the coolest sounding phone, the flip Motorola Razr. After a lot of coaxing, she finally started using it for the features it had beyond making phone calls. She was pregnant with our first child, and because of the iPhone she started documenting her pregnancy on a personal journal with pictures and thoughts of the day. One day she came to me and asked me how she would get all the pictures and notes off her phone and on to the computer. I said it was easy: just use iTunes, plug in the phone, set up your sync, etc. Then I saw what I call, the stare of, “It just got too complicated for me, you do it.”

Gijo Mathew presents Empowering the IT Revolution: What’s New for Your Business? at n•fluence 2012

Then it happened. The IT Revolution. Right there. As I was syncing the phone, she goes on this diatribe. I was only half listening so I will summarize. Basically she said, why can’t the phone automatically sync to the computer and then when I edit it, the pictures automatically sync back to the phone? iCloud was launched 4 years later.

This innocuous conversation helped me solidify three main trends that are empowering the IT Revolution. First, expectations on technology are high. More people believe that technology can change and improve their daily lives. Next, more people expect the interface to technology to be simple and finally, access to technology should have no boundaries.

Point 1: Tech Expectations are High

The term “more with less” has really become cliché now, but what it translates to is that the expectations on technology solutions are high. We want technology to fill the gap between more value with less people and budget. Many people call this the “new normal,” but to me it is the evolution of expectations. Organizations, and the people that support them, want technology to help bridge the competitive gap. One way to do that is to leverage unified solutions. My wife did not expect to use the iPhone for just making calls. It was the unification of the platform, and the apps that are built on it, that made her see the exponential potential of the technology, and that is a good thing. It made her see more uses for it and helped her do more with less.

Point 2: Simple User Experience

Unification of technology is not enough, though. It has to be coupled with an intuitive user experience. This is a critical mind shift from older models of technology development. In the past, IT solutions were delivered in a technology silo, which means the user experience was based on the product not the user. Sure we created roles and “views” for different people, but it was still limited to the function that the technology solved, not the business goals of the organization. I have worked with so many organizations that had full time people developing the user experience to match their business and breakdown the silos. That has to change.

Point 3: Any-*

Gijo Mathew, Nimsoft Product Management

The revolution didn’t start for my wife on her laptop. It started on her smartphone. Now, the revolution is not just about mobile, but what that represents: the idea of access and use from anywhere, anytime, any device. Nimsoft has embraced this by creating a solution that is both open and accessible, that doesn’t presuppose how organizations will leverage the technology. While Nimsoft leverages best practices and out of the box experience, we enable and encourage organizations to make it their own.

Twitter: @gijo_mathew

Gijo Mathew presents Empowering the IT Revolution: What’s New for Your Business? at next week’s Nimsoft user conference, n•fluence 2012.

We’ve all heard of single-tenant and multi-tenant SaaS applications. What may not be obvious is the economics of the tenancy model. Pundits claim single tenant applications aren’t “SaaS” but that’s not true. Single tenant application can be offered as SaaS however there are cost implications to doing so that should not be ignored.

Quick Review of Single v. Multi Tenancy

A single-tenant SaaS application is an application built upon traditional enterprise application “N” tier architecture. It may support many users (as an Accounting, SCM or HR system might for example) but there is only one instance or ‘tenant’ of the application. There is no concept within the application that there might be more than one instance installed. There’s no supporting structure built by the developers to handle the provisioning and care and feeding associated with multiple instances of the application existing in the same data center.

As a SaaS provider, if you operate single-tenant applications, every time you make a sale you need to chunk down an entire set of the “N” tier architecture associated with the application for the new customer.

A multi-tenant SaaS application is designed and built with the idea that there may be more than one customer using the application instance. This can be accomplished in a number of ways but the end result is that making a new sale does not require deployment of duplicate sets of “N” tier architecture. All other things equal, multi-tenant is the way to go for SaaS providers. Let me show you why this is true.

Economics of Single v. Multi Tenancy

Let’s take a quick look at the economics associated with single and multi-tenant applications. I’m going to use an example constructed around a mythical application using mythical technology. For this example we’ll ignore the network bandwidth costs and make some other simplifying assumptions.

For this exercise let’s assume the following:

General Assumptions
Application Type                   Enterprise Application (SCM, ERP, CRM etc.)
Technology                           Licensed commercial app server and database
# Tenants in ST App             1
# Tenants in MT App            10

Hardware Cost Assumptions
App Server Price                   $2,000
Database Price                      $3,000
App Server # Cores               12
Database # Cores                  12

Software Cost Assumptions
App Server Cost per core     $3,000
DB  Server Cost per core     $3,000

Note that the assumption I make in this exercise is that the single tenant application supports only one tenant (thus the name) and the multi-tenant application supports 10 tenants. In the real world the first assumption tends to hold however in my experience multi-tenant applications typically house many more than 10 tenants.

Assume the development costs for the single and multi-tenant application are equivalent then you can see that clearly at any scale the choice is clear. Multi-tenancy is the way to go. You can see this in the table below, which presents the costs associated with scaling our mythical SaaS application up from 1 to 50 customers.

The following simple model shows the economic consequences of hosting single tenancy v. multi-tenancy.

There are some other lessons from this model as follows:

George Milliken, Director of SaaS Hosting at Nimsoft

• Single Tenant Apps have more infrastructure, therefore more labor
• The economics of scale are flat or negative for the single tenant app
• The economies of scale are positive for the multi-tenant app
• The economies of scale are directly related to the # of tenants per instance

This model grossly over simplifies the situation in many regards but the lesson is clear: Single tenant applications don’t scale up in terms of costs. Go with a single tenant design and you’ll need an army of people for care and feeding of the application.

Deploy a multi-tenant application and you’ll reap the benefits of economies of scale.

George Milliken is the Director of SaaS Hosting at Nimsoft. He has over 20 years of IT experience. Follow George online via Twitter and LinkedIn.

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