IT Operations Management – Audience Polls at the Gartner Conference

June 23rd, 2008 by Julia Lim

Greetings from the Gartner IT Infrastucture, Operations & Management Summit 2008 – in warm and humid Florida!

A couple of notes from the first day’s keynote address “IT Operations Management Scenarios: Trends, Directions and Market Landscape” by Donna Scott – VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research.

Donna: Today customers are looking for 100% availability for their externally facing business systems. Five 9’s are no longer enough. They expect IT to deliver the right services at the right cost with the right service levels.

My aside: How many of you are like me? When I listen to analysts or read the research, part of me is always asking – how applicable is this to me now? How rooted is what they are saying in the practical day-to-day operations that our customers need help with now? Well, how short-sighted of me.

Donna: “Best-in-class organizations manage through the day-to-day turbulence of change but also keep an eye on the long-term nirvana of IT operations management.” And that creating a continuous optimization culture is necessary to improve over time – this needs to be baked into the corporate IT culture. Food for thought for all of us.

Interesting quick polls of the audience – some results were surprising; some were funny; and some were validating.

I. What are the Top 3 pressures on IT Infrastructure and Operations Management:

1) 24 x7 availability: 82%

2) Business continuity and disaster recovery: 70%

3) Cost reduction and/or cost management: 67%

On a personal note – supporting/deploying SOA came in at the bottom of this poll. Enough said.

II. What grade would you give the IT Infrastructure and Operations Management vendors?

A 1%

B 14%

C 49%

D 17%

F 4%

Last year – the average grade ended up being C- so the grade went up slightly this year.

III. What IT Infrastructure and Operations Management vendor are you most confident in to help achieve “ERP for IT”? (Dave will cover this topic later this week.)

HP 20%

IBM 16%

BMC 16%

CA 4% (lingering bad rep?)

Microsoft 8%

Oracle 4%

EMC 4%

Other 5%

And the winner was “NONE OF THE ABOVE” with 23% of the responses.

Popularity: 4% [?]

June 23rd, 2008