As we all know, IT has become increasingly more complex. The industry has grown from a few mainframes in the glass house to thousands of Windows and Unix servers distributed throughout the enterprise. Customers can no longer use manual approaches to maintain their inventory and services available. In over simplistic terms, the scale of IT has become so large that it needs to automate itself.
Second, If you compare IT to any other major industry in the last 100 years, a consistent theme appears. At about 40 years of age, a wave of standardization, process improvement, and consolidation occurs. This is occurring in IT today and is why ITIL, COBIT, Six Sigma, and other terms you have heard will continue to entrench themselves. Just as no one builds their own database or billing application anymore, hardly anyone much longer will be able to justify proprietary processes.
The third wave and the one that is getting the most attention these days is the compliance. The big 3 forcing this are SOX, Basil II, and HIPAA. In public sector HSPD-12 and REAL ID are driving this change. Governments are mandating consistency and enforcement. The wild wooly west days in IT are being forced out. Behavior is changing when significant fines or jail time are possibilities.
These three forces are feeding off of each other as well. Now that the problems are stated, talk about Oracle’s overall strategy to solve the problem…
Under Applications Unlimited, Oracle is improving the core application platforms in order to make them more robust, more performant, and more manageable. As for management tools, the Oracle strategy is to standardize on Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide centralized management of all Oracle products. The reason why Oracle chose Oracle Enterprise Manager is because it is the flagship set of products that provide the best capabilities. It is the only set of tools that are capability of managing multiple Oracle technologies, including applications, middleware, database and operating systems. It is also the only tool that is designed to support the implementation of IT best practices such as those prescribed by ITIL. Within the Enterprise Manager product line, the focal point of the Oracle effort to provide better management of the applications start with the application management packs. Oracle has released a set of management packs for Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, BI-EE, Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, and more packs are on their way.
Here are a bunch of white papers that Oracle published a few months ago :
- Achieving a Superior Ownership Experience in Manageability and Quality for Siebel CRM
- Achieving a Superior Ownership Experience in Manageability and Quality for Oracle E-Business Suite
- Achieving a Superior Ownership Experience in Manageability and Quality for PeopleSoft Enterprise
In the old days, a service level agreement is just a document that express the business requirements for application service level. It is something that IT may pull up once in a while and refer to. If organizations really want to enforce it, there is a lot of manual and tedious work involved in collecting the data and reporting it. In fact, it is so tedious that it often ends up not getting done, or getting done improperly.
Now with Oracle Enterprise Manager, the service level agreement comes alive. The business requirements that are expressed in the service level agreement are entered into the tool, and the tool takes care of collecting the information, alerting administrators when problems occur, and providing all sorts of reports using the collected data automatically.