IT Week: What do you think is driving the increase in demand for automated IT management technologies?

Richard Muirhead: When you look at IT departments their headcount costs are rising and per-head costs are rising, while most other costs are flat. There are figures from Gartner showing that the percentage of operational expenditure going on manual labour stood at 10 percent 10 years ago, now it is around half of operational costs. Firms are realising they need greater levels of IT automation if they are to reduce that cost and in so doing reduce the risk of losing valuable knowledge when key staff up and leave.

So are IT management tools now essential?

The metaphor I like to use is the Eurofighter Typhoon. In order to make it agile enough to dogfight, it has been designed to be inherently unstable, therefore reliable automated systems are needed to fly it. A human being simply can’t control the plane on their own. That is where the IT department is now. Everyone wants agile systems, but you need automated management systems to handle that inherent instability.

Why has the IT infrastructure become this complex?

Business IT has changed completely in the past decade. It is now tracking people, staff, customers and partners, and all of that data is constantly changing and is often outward-facing. The days when IT was just an inward-facing finance system are long gone, and if systems are to be as agile as businesses demand, you need to automate the management of that IT infrastructure.

How is Tideway Systems looking to tackle this inefficiency?

We are at the beginning of a long process to make the datacentre manageable. At the moment, 95 percent of datacentre problems are not properly addressed and are handled in a dysfunctional and fire-fighting way. We decided to start with the key problem when delivering business apps to customers or end-users: the day-to-day housekeeping of working out where an app is running, how it has changed since yesterday and whether an IT manager should care about that change. Once you have that information you can enable much better manual processes and feed insight into other management apps. Once you have a view over what has changed and where apps are, you can then bring management science to the datacentre.

What do you mean by “management science”?

You can apply the basic management principles of where you are, where you want to be, how you get there and the system of reporting progress against your objectives. That is how finance, marketing and other departments have always operated, but the IT department finds it difficult because they never knew where they were at any one time.

Can you solve this lack of visibility with a configuration management database (CMDB)?

There is currently a complex industry debate about the role of the CMDB. Our opinion is that there is no such thing as a single CMDB. Every application in a datacentre obviously needs some knowledge about what is going on in the infrastructure, but the idea of putting all that information together in one place is a white elephant – it is almost always unfeasible. More achievable is a system of subsets of different CMDBs, where data is shared in an appropriate way – that is the way the industry is heading. What we do is offer application dependency mapping that tracks and validates application changes and provides a bit of a CMDB. Meanwhile, other management apps have their bits of the CMDB and we share the data as required.

So you would argue CMDBs are not the IT management panacea they have been presented as?

They are not a panacea at all. If you were a big vendor and you were used to getting away with selling a framework and suddenly framework becomes a dirty word, you would say “OK, we’ll start selling CMDBs” but that just becomes the framework again. When it turns out to be exactly that and not a panacea you can send in the expensive consultants to help the customer address their requirements and advise how they should handle their data quality issues. Of course the vendors don’t mind that because that is their business model. A huge proportion of CMDB projects fail because of data quality issues – what the world looks like and what the CMDB thinks it looks like are often very different things.

What functionality are you looking to add to Tideway’s application dependency mapping solution?

There is a lot still to do in managing safe, proactive change through supporting “what if” analysis and providing automated best practice suggestions based on the underlying environment. For example, you should be able to get the system to tell you the best sequence in which to make IT changes. There is also a lot of progress to be made on integrating our systems with other vendors’ management tools. The old world of frameworks was all about each vendor building everything themselves, but the new world of software-as-a-service is all about open interfaces and sharing with other management applications. We are seeing the emergence of enterprise 2.0 mash-ups where different management tools are being tied together.

How does virtualisation fit into this world of automated IT management? Was it not meant to make the datacentre simpler?

Virtualisation has gone through successful trials and is now going into production environments, which means it is only now that firms are beginning to hit challenges. Users are now happy with virtual machines and confident they can meet SLAs, but virtualisation does not resolve the central IT issue of how you manage your apps, and how you make sure they don’t break and are changed at the right time. The problem is that instead of server sprawl, we now have virtual sprawl, but this time it is even harder to manage because you cannot even see the machine. You don’t want to clamp down on that because it is bringing agility, but you do need to keep a watchful eye on it, which is what our systems allow. To use a political analogy: you don’t want state control, but you do need regulated capitalism.

How do you sell automated IT management to an IT chief who is used to doing things manually? Especially as the result of automation could be fewer IT jobs?

You need to show the IT director that this automation can make them a hero and free them from the mundane day-to-day stuff. The aim is to help them complete the tasks they don’t enjoy doing, and to ensure they spend less time fighting fires and more time working on interesting new technology. It’ll also help them get down the pub sooner.