With a Push from Cloud Computing, IT Shifts toward Supply Chain Model
New IT Role Is Focused on Business Strategy, Innovation, Communication.
IT organizations are transitioning from role of an owner and operator of IT infrastructure to a role that involves managing a more complex, multi-platform mix of internal and external services. The new IT model maps to a traditional supply-chain model, in which resources (technology, processes, goods, services and people) are organized to deliver services to a customer base.
This white paper concludes that as applications, infrastructure and even business processes migrate to the cloud, IT organizations that can become effective IT supply-chain managers will be able to create value for their business—and position IT as a driver of growth. The paper identifies the new organizational skills, the emerging titles and the mix of the IT environment in this new normal.
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The Fourth-generation Service Desk, and Why It’s a Mandate Today
Over the past 15 years, we’ve seen generations of service management platforms come and go—but many critical limitations persist. Consequently, IT organizations, and the businesses they serve, suffer from a lack of agility, poor service levels and high costs. This paper offers a look at the obstacles of prior generations of service management platforms, and it reveals how a new generation of solutions addresses some of these fundamental limitations.
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Why Your Current Service Desk is Failing Your Business, and What to Do About It
Service management platforms have a vital role to play, but in most organizations, they’re not living up to expectations—delivering far too much complexity and cost, and far too little business value. This proves true even in organizations that have migrated to new solutions in recent years. This paper outlines why legacy service desks and even newer platforms have not delivered on expectations, it describes the requirements for a service desk solution to be truly effective in today’s business environment and it details how CA Nimsoft Service Desk delivers on these key requirements.
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Marketing 101 for MSPs: Social Media
Engaging in social media can be a highly effective way for MSPs to boost their market presence, expertise and market share. However, success in social media initiatives is anything but assured; it takes developing a sound strategy and executing on a sustained basis to yield dividends. “Marketing 101 for MSPs: Social Media” provides the background and guidance MSPs can use to build an effective social media strategy, one that yields real business results.
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Administration in Heterogeneous Virtualized Environments
Overcoming Management Challenges so You Can Unlock the Potential of Multiple Virtualization Platforms
IT teams looking for robust, enterprise-grade virtualization platforms can now choose from VMware, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V and others. Consequently, more organizations are looking to run multiple virtualization platforms. While monitoring and managing performance in virtualized environments has traditionally presented a range of challenges to IT administrators, those challenges are exacerbated in environments running multiple virtualization platforms. This paper looks at how heterogeneous virtualization environments are growing more common in today’s organizations, and it offers a set of best practices administrators can use to efficiently and effectively manage performance in these environments.
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IT Management as a Service
451 Research, November 2011
ITMaaS vendors provide the essential management tools that enable users to access and view an IT environment, monitor and evaluate performance, and ultimately improve the functionality of IT environments through a cloud delivery model. The ability to gain visibility into an internal IT structure and deliver the performance data is a critical component within the management process. Through ITMaaS off erings, enterprises are able to easily capture, analyze and monitor the risks, costs, capacity constraints and other performance metrics that help ensure the optimization of IT resources. The ITMaaS segment is a part of the broader SaaS world. However, the adoption drivers and emerging market characteristics of the segment mimic those of IaaS and PaaS to a greater degree than the enterprise SaaS market.
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Thriving in the Competitive Vortex
The End of IT as We Know It
Today’s enterprises are entering a competitive vortex, a market climate in which fortunes can change in days. In this environment, it is increasingly incumbent upon IT teams to help organizations compete with disruptive new offerings, and to deliver the innovations that foster market leadership. This white paper looks at these changing market dynamics, and it outlines the key requirements these new competitive paradigms create for enterprise IT.
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5 Best Practices for Achieving Peak Performance in SAP Environments
Given how deeply businesses rely on their SAP systems, it’s simple to see that maximizing performance and uptime is critical. What’s not so simple is figuring out how to understand, let alone optimize, performance in these complex, dynamic, and interrelated ecosystems. This paper offers five best practices that can help administrators more effectively measure and improve SAP performance.
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Moving Service Management to SaaS
Key Challenges—and How CA Nimsoft Service Desk Helps Address Them
In areas such as sales force automation and customer relationship management, cloud-based computing services have become the norm—and substantially improved the economics, capabilities, and efficiencies customers have realized. Today, organizations can enjoy similarly substantial benefits by migrating their IT service management functions to a software-as-a-service model. This paper shows how CA Nimsoft Service Desk enables organizations to make the most of this opportunity.
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Pragmatic ITIL
How CA Nimsoft Service Desk Makes it Easier than Ever to Leverage ITIL
While the consensus around the benefits of ITIL is virtually universal, the reality is that organizations’ ITIL initiatives run the gamut—both in terms of costs and benefits. Your service management platform can play a huge role in the degree to which you realize the potential benefits of ITIL in your organization. By combining ITIL-based best practices in a solution that is easy to configure and deploy, CA Nimsoft Service Desk offers a truly pragmatic way to get the most out of ITIL in your organization.
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Configuration, Not Coding
How CA Nimsoft Service Desk Speeds Deployment and Time to Value
CA Nimsoft is the service management solution designed for today’s IT organization and MSPs. For years, many support teams have been hamstrung by their traditional service desk platforms which require complex, time-consuming coding for virtually every aspect of customization. This complexity makes it costly and difficult for support organizations to adapt—and places an increasingly substantial burden on the agility and efficiency of the business as a whole. CA Nimsoft Service Desk is a clearly differentiated alternative to traditional service desk platforms. With CA Nimsoft Service Desk, support organizations can complete their initial deployments quickly and easily, and they can adapt efficiently to the evolving needs of the business. Our solution not only provides action-based workflows built on ITIL standards to help you coordinate all aspects of service delivery – It also unifies Service Management Processes with Operational Monitoring. This unification not only enables your service analysts to have all the contextual information to resolve issues faster, it also allows them to proactively address issues even before your internal customer hears about them. Result: Ability to meet and beat your service level targets.
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Effective Performance Monitoring in SAP Environments
Key Challenges—and How CA Nimsoft Monitor Helps Address Them
When organizations adopt SAP, many of their most critical business services run on this platform. Thus, ensuring optimal performance is a vital requirement, but one that can be difficult to achieve given the complexity and scale of today’s SAP deployments. This paper looks at the key capabilities needed to effectively track and optimize performance in SAP environments, and it reveals how CA Nimsoft Monitor for SAP delivers on these critical requirements.
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Scaling Your Service Provider Business
Getting the “Three Ps” Right to Realize Breakthrough Growth
While some service providers have enjoyed dramatic growth in recent years, many more have not. What’s made the difference? In short, three things: people, process, and products. Read this white paper and get proven strategies and approaches for getting all three right. Based on the lessons of veteran service provider executives, this paper offers specific guidelines service providers can implement to boost their chances for success.
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CA Nimsoft for Server Monitoring
The CA Nimsoft Server Monitoring solution supports iSeries AS400, Netware, Linux, Windows, and UNIX from a single, easy-to-use console. The solution monitors core server resources (CPU, memory, disk, event logs, counters, etc.) and enables centralized management of remote processes and services (automated and manual start/restart/stop).
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Marketing 101 for MSPs: Websites
Enhancing Your Website to Boost Leads
In the busy days of the MSP, enhancing the company website is too often seen as a huge initiative with negligible return, and so relegated to the nice to have, also known as the “will never happen”, section of the to do list. This paper outlines some practical, near-term steps MSPs can take to improve their website, and boost its potential for generating leads and sales.
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The Top 5 Server Monitoring Battles—and How You Can Win Them
The role of servers in your organization has changed substantially—with their uses, requirements, and complexity all increasing dramatically in recent years. Many of the traditional tools and techniques that worked in the past don't suffice any more. Consequently, server monitoring presents several critical battles in today's demanding environments.
This guide looks at some of the most pressing challenges administrators face in ensuring optimal server performance, and it offers insights into the tools and strategies required to address these demands.
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Network Monitoring
A CA Nimsoft Service Level Management Solution White Paper
The CA Nimsoft Network Monitoring solution provides complete network visibility to assure that the highest levels of business service quality are achieved. Having 360o network visibility is critical to today’s network driven business and anything less can have costly bottom line implications.
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CA Nimsoft for SLA Monitoring and Reporting
The CA Nimsoft SLA Monitoring and Reporting solution monitors Operations and business service levels against SLA metrics and forecasts violations with warning alerts. The solution provides a graphical interface for defining SLA parameters, i.e. compliance period, operating period, exclude periods, compliance percentage, compliance calculation methods, and much more.
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Get the Whole Picture: Why Most Organizations Miss User Response Monitoring-and What to Do about It
End user response. To borrow a phrase, it's where the rubber meets the road. You can be armed with vast amounts of performance metrics, but if you don't know what users are actually experiencing, you don't have the real performance picture. While this measure is critical, it is one many organizations fail to consistently capture.
Why? This guide looks at the challenges of user response monitoring, and it shows how you can overcome these challenges and start to get a real handle on your infrastructure performance and how it impacts your users' experience.
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3 Common Pitfalls to SLM - and How to Avoid Them
It seems that for every successful service level management (SLM) initiative, there are several that fail to meet expectations. For all the complexity surrounding SLM, there are three critical facets that underpin every effective SLM implementation. This guide looks at these key facets, outlining the common pitfalls that occur when these aspects are missed, and it offers a wealth of pragmatic guidance for avoiding these pitfalls and ensuring SLM meets objectives and delivers real business value.
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Virtual Certainty
Best Practices for Gaining Monitoring Clarity in VMWare Environments
The benefits of virtualization are unassailable: increased agility, scale, and cost savings to name but a few. However, so too are the monitoring challenges posed by these environments-including complexity, lack of visibility and control, and inefficiency.
This white paper reveals the best monitoring practices to employ in virtualized environments-best practices that are essential in enabling organizations to overcome their monitoring challenges so they can get the most business value from their virtualization investments.
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Optimizing Service Levels through Database Monitoring
The CA Nimsoft Database Monitoring solution monitors a wide array of availability and performance metrics for database servers. Additionally, the solution monitors SQL query response times and transaction rates. The solution supports multiple database platforms: Oracle, Sybase, DB2, MS SQL, and Informix.
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CA Nimsoft Unified Monitoring
A Business Perspective
In the past few years, the enterprise computing landscape has changed dramatically. Virtualization, outsourcing, SaaS, and cloud computing are creating fundamental changes, and ushering in an era in which enterprises distribute increasingly critical IT assets and applications across multiple service providers.
These changes are rendering legacy monitoring tools, which have their roots in the computing environments of a decade or more ago, virtually useless. This paper explores today’s computing trends and their monitoring implications in detail. In addition, it reveals how a new monitoring paradigm, the CA Nimsoft Unified Monitoring™ architecture, uniquely addresses the monitoring realities of today’s and tomorrow’s enterprises—whether they rely on internal platforms, external service providers, or a combination of both.
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CA Nimsoft APIs
Enabling Automated Application and Integration of Monitoring in Cloud and Virtualized Environments
CA Nimsoft offers APIs and automation capabilities that address every layer within the CA Nimsoft monitoring architecture: presentation, application, message bus, and data collection. This comprehensive set of integration and automation points provides the capabilities needed to integrate with any layer of cloud or IT infrastructure management.
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Ensuring High Service Levels for Public Cloud Deployments
Keys to Effective Service Management
When organizations migrate vital business services to the cloud, they confront an entirely new paradigm when it comes to monitoring and managing service levels. This paper looks at the unique service level management challenges cloud environments present, and it then offers detailed insights into the capabilities and approaches that will be required to ensure optimal service levels in public cloud deployments.
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Leveraging Your Service Desk to Scale Your MSP Business
For the MSP, service desk capabilities play a critical role in the level of service that customers receive, and in the degree to which those services are delivered efficiently and profitably. In short, the service desk can make the difference between a service provider's success or failure. This paper offers some key principles MSPs should adopt in order to ensure their service desk most fully supports operational efficiency, optimal service levels, and business growth.
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Successful Managed IT Services
Keys to Outsourcing the Right Service to the Right Provider
Businesses, whether regional shops or global multi-nationals, are increasingly turning to external managed IT services providers for everything from email to archiving to ERP. For all the momentum and growth in the managed services segment, however, deciding when and where to outsource is not straightforward. This paper covers some practical guidance into determining whether outsourcing makes sense, key criteria for finding the right provider, and some fundamental steps to getting outsourcing relationships started on the right track.
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Customer Case Studies
