Upload
miguel-siu
View
221
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
1/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
G00214402
Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management,
2011Published: 18 July 2011
Analyst(s): Milind Govekar, Patricia Adams
Adoption of new technology and increasing complexity of the IT
environment continue to attract IT operations vendors that provide
management technology. Use this Hype Cycle to manage your expectations
regarding these management technologies and processes.
Table of Contents
Analysis..................................................................................................................................................3
What You Need to Know..................................................................................................................3
The Hype Cycle................................................................................................................................3
Changes and Updates................................................................................................................4
The Priority Matrix.............................................................................................................................8
Off The Hype Cycle........................................................................................................................ 11On the Rise.................................................................................................................................... 11
DevOps.................................................................................................................................... 11
IT Operations Analytics............................................................................................................. 12
Social IT Management..............................................................................................................14
Cloud Management Platforms.................................................................................................. 16
Behavior Learning Engines........................................................................................................17
Application Release Automation............................................................................................... 18
SaaS Tools for IT Operations....................................................................................................20
Service Billing........................................................................................................................... 22
Release Governance Tools.......................................................................................................23
IT Workload Automation Broker Tools.......................................................................................26
Workspace Virtualization...........................................................................................................28
At the Peak.....................................................................................................................................29
Capacity Planning and Management Tools............................................................................... 29
IT Financial Management Tools.................................................................................................30
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
2/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
IT Service Portfolio Management and IT Service Catalog Tools.................................................32
Open-Source IT Operations Tools.............................................................................................34
VM Energy Management Tools.................................................................................................35
IT Process Automation Tools....................................................................................................36
Application Performance Monitoring......................................................................................... 38
COBIT...................................................................................................................................... 40
Sliding Into the Trough....................................................................................................................41
IT Service View CMDB..............................................................................................................41
Real-Time Infrastructure............................................................................................................44
IT Service Dependency Mapping.............................................................................................. 46
Mobile Device Management......................................................................................................48
Business Service Management Tools........................................................................................50
Configuration Auditing.............................................................................................................. 52
Advanced Server Energy Monitoring Tools................................................................................54
Network Configuration and Change Management Tools........................................................... 55
Server Provisioning and Configuration Management................................................................. 56
ITIL...........................................................................................................................................59
Hosted Virtual Desktops........................................................................................................... 61
PC Application Streaming.........................................................................................................63
IT Change Management Tools..................................................................................................65
IT Asset Management Tools..................................................................................................... 67
PC Application Virtualization..................................................................................................... 69
Service-Level Reporting Tools.................................................................................................. 70
Climbing the Slope......................................................................................................................... 72
IT Event Correlation and Analysis Tools.....................................................................................72
Network Performance Management Tools................................................................................73
IT Service Desk Tools............................................................................................................... 75
PC Configuration Life Cycle Management.................................................................................76
Entering the Plateau....................................................................................................................... 77
Network Fault-Monitoring Tools................................................................................................77
Job-Scheduling Tools...............................................................................................................78
Appendixes.................................................................................................................................... 79
Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels..........................................................81
Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................................83
Page 2 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
3/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
List of Tables
Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases.................................................................................................................81
Table 2. Benefit Ratings........................................................................................................................82
Table 3. Maturity Levels........................................................................................................................82
List of Figures
Figure 1. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011....................................................................7
Figure 2. Priority Matrix for IT Operations Management, 2011...............................................................10
Figure 3. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2010..................................................................80
Analysis
What You Need to Know
This document was revised on 18 August 2011. For more information, see the Correctionspage on
gartner.com.
As enterprises continue to increase adoption of dynamic technologies and styles of computing,
such as virtualization and cloud computing, the IT operations organization faces several challenges:
implementing, administering and supporting these new technologies to deliver business value, and
continuing to manage the complex IT environment. Consequently, the IT operations organization
plays a key role in becoming a trusted service provider to the business. This, however, is a journey
of service orientation and continuous improvement, which will result in favorable business
outcomes.
The expectations of the business in terms of agility, low fixed costs and service orientations have
risen due to increased visibility of offerings, such as cloud computing-based services. The promise
of new technology to deliver these business expectations continues; therefore, the hype associated
with IT operations technology used to ensure service quality, agility and customer satisfaction
continues. Thus, making the right choices and investments in this technology becomes important.
This Hype Cycle provides information and advice on the most important IT operations tools,
technologies and process frameworks, as well as their level of visibility and market adoption. Use
this Hype Cycle to review your IT operations portfolio, and to update expectations for futureinvestments, relative to your organization's desire to innovate and its willingness to assume risk.
The Hype Cycle
As the global economy has shown signs of recovery during the last 12 months, investments in IT
reflect this change. Cost optimization continues to be a key focus for many enterprises; yet there is
a strong drive to make incremental investments in innovation and best practices, especially in the
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 3 of 84
http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/policies/current_corrections.jsp8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
4/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
area of IT service management. According to Gartner CIO polling, IT budgets have increased very
modestly; therefore, IT ops and cloud management platforms are seen as opportunities to reduce
cost through automation thus enabling IT to invest in growth and transformation projects.
Achieving this, in conjunction with reducing their spending, helps IT ops to "run the business."
Changes and Updates
Along with economic changes, IT infrastructure and operations has experienced significant
disruption, which is represented in this Hype Cycle. IT organizations have continued to build upon
their virtualization and cloud computing strategies. The value proposition and risks associated with
private, hybrid and external cloud is gaining traction in some organizations. The disruption is
occurring in several areas, most notably the emergence of the DevOps arena and the intersection
with release management. DevOps represents a fundamental shift in thinking that recognizes the
importance and intersection of application development with IT ops and the production
environment. Just as silos were broken down with the adoption of IT service management that
crossed IT operations disciplines, the shift is now at a higher level i.e., across IT application
development and IT operations to build a more agile and responsive IT organization. In
conjunction with cloud and virtualization, this shift is resulting in new approaches that make IT more
business-aligned and remove many road blocks. However, this is a cultural change that requires
employees to be willing and able to accept, adapt, implement and build upon these new
approaches.
Other changes that have occurred on the 2011 Hype Cycle are in the process and tool areas. With
respect to process, ITIL version 2 (ITIL V2) was retired from the Hype Cycle, as ITIL V3 began to
outweigh ITIL V2 relevance in some of the process design guidelines. The adoption of ITIL V3 has
grown since its introduction four years ago and has almost become mainstream, with a large
number of Gartner clients having adopted at least one component of the most recent books. Thus,
we have just one combined entry (ITIL) for the two ITIL versions.
In 2011, application performance monitoring (APM) technology became a consolidation of the
various related technologies, such as end-user performance monitoring, application transaction
profiling and application management, which are typically part of the APM market. We have also
added behavior learning engines (BLEs). When used with other IT operations tools, BLEs improve
the proactivity and predictability of the IT operations environment. Furthermore, we have combined
virtual resource capacity planning and resource capacity planning tools into capacity planning and
management tools, which reflect the market and evolution of tools and technologies to increasingly
provide a holistic and consolidated approach.
As IT operations increasingly is run like a business, IT financial management becomes important,beyond just chargeback. Thus, we have introduced IT financial management tools to match this
change and subsume chargeback tools. Furthermore, we have added service billing, because it also
is important in this financial context. We have renamed run book automation to IT process
automation to show the precise process-to-process integration and the associated IT operations
tools integrations. We also have renamed network monitoring tools to network fault-monitoring
tools to more accurately describe their functions.
Page 4 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
5/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
To capture the "wisdom of IT operations specialists," social IT management tools that enable and
capture collaboration have emerged, particularly in the IT service desk area, and thus are on this
Hype Cycle. Energy management is always a concern for IT operations organizations and, therefore,
virtual machine (VM) energy management and advanced server energy monitoring tools, for use
specifically within data centers, have been positioned here. PC energy management is already
represented in the PC configuration life cycle management tools. Last, but not least, we are seeing
an emergence of IT operations analytics tools that more-advanced and mature IT operations
organizations are beginning to use to combine financial metrics and business value metrics that
form the platform for business intelligence (BI) for IT.
While the recovery from the recession is still under way, IT infrastructure and operations continues
to be a big part of IT budgets. Well-run IT operations organizations take a service management view
across their technology silos, and strive for excellence and continuous improvement. Thus, to
manage IT operations like a business requires a strong combination of business management
(added to model the ITScore dimensions), organization, processes and tools. This journey toward
business alignment, while managing cost, needs to be managed through a methodical, step-by-
step approach. Gartner's ITScore for infrastructure and operations is a maturity model that has
been developed to provide this guidance.
Virtualization is ubiquitous in production environments to improve agility and resource utilization,
and to lower costs. Cloud computing has the potential for improving agility, and lowering capital
expenditure (capex) and fixed costs in the IT environment, as well as lowering operating expenditure
(opex) through automation with private clouds. However, both these approaches are increasing the
complexity of the IT environment. Managing end-to-end service delivery in this dynamic
environment is challenging, and has led to new management technology entering the marketplace,
with the promise to manage these dynamic, yet complex, environments. Running IT operations as a
business means having a balanced and adaptable combination of organization, processes and
technologies. Therefore, we position organizational governance methodologies (such as COBIT) andprocess frameworks (such as ITIL) on the Hype Cycle and look at a wide range of IT operations
technologies, from new technologies (such as IT operations analytics and cloud management
platforms) to mature technologies (such as end-user monitoring and job-scheduling tools).
Most of the technologies and frameworks have moved gradually along the Hype Cycle. IT asset
management tools have dropped into the Trough of Disillusionment, because they have not
delivered expected benefits. Many of the technologies are climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, as
opposed to landing on the Plateau of Productivity, despite having 20% to 50% adoption, or more
than 50% adoption. The reason is that they have not fully delivered the benefits expected by users
who have implemented them.
This Hype Cycle should benefit most adoption profiles (early adopters of technology, mainstream,
etc.). For example, enterprises that are leading adopters of technology should begin testing
technologies that are still early in the Hype Cycle. However, risk-averse clients may delay adoption
of these technologies. The earlier or higher the technology is positioned on the Hype Cycle, the
higher the expectations and marketing hype; therefore, manage down your expectations and
implement specific plans to mitigate any risk from using that technology.
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 5 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
6/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
We note three important considerations for using this Hype Cycle:
Creating a business case for new technologies driven by ROI is important for organizations with
a low tolerance for risk; whereas highly innovative organizations that have increased their IT
operations budgets likely will gain a competitive advantage from a technology's benefits.
Innovative technologies often come from smaller vendors with questionable viability. It is likely
that these vendors will be acquired, exit the market or go out of business, so plan carefully.
While budget constraints are slowly easing, organizations should consider the risks they're
willing to take with new, unproven technologies, as well as the timing of their adoption. Weigh
risks against needs and the technology's potential benefits.
Figure 1 depicts technologies on the Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011.
Page 6 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
7/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Figure 1. Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011
TechnologyTrigger
Peak ofInflated
Expectations
Trough ofDisillusionment
Slope of EnlightenmentPlateau of
Productivity
time
expectations
Years to mainstream adoption:
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 yearsobsoletebefore plateau
As of July 2011DevOps
IT Operations AnalyticsSocial IT Management
Cloud Management Platforms
Behavior Learning Engines
Application Release AutomationSaaS Tools for IT Operations
Service Billing
Capacity Planning and Management Tools
Release Governance Tools
IT Workload Automation Broker ToolsWorkspace Virtualization
IT Financial Management Tools
IT Service Portfolio Managementand IT Service Catalog Tools
Open-Source IT Operations ToolsVM Energy Management Tools
IT Process Automation ToolsApplication Performance MonitoringCOBIT
Advanced Server EnergyMonitoring Tools
IT Service View CMDBReal-Time Infrastructure
IT Service Dependency MappingMobile Device Management
Business Service Management Tools
Configuration Auditing
Network Configurationand ChangeManagement Tools
ServerProvisioning and
ConfigurationManagement
ITIL
HostedVirtual
Desktops PC Application Virtualization
IT Change Management Tools
IT Asset Management Tools
PC Application Streaming
Service-Level Reporting Tools
IT Event Correlation and Analysis Tools
Network Performance Management Tools
IT Service Desk Tools
PC Configuration Life CycleManagement
Network Fault-Monitoring Tools
Job-Scheduling Tools
Source: Gartner (July 2011)
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 7 of
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
8/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
The Priority Matrix
The Priority Matrix maps a technology's and process's time to maturity on a grid in an easy-to-read
format that answers two questions:
How much value will an organization get from a technology?
When will the technology be mature enough to provide this value?
However, technology and processes have to be in lock-step to achieve full benefits; thus, we also
have process frameworks, such as ITIL and COBIT, on this Hype Cycle.
Virtualization, software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing continue to broaden the service
delivery channels for IT operations. Business users are demanding more transparency for the
services they receive, but they also want improved service levels that provide acceptable availability
and performance. They are looking to understand the fixed and variable costs that form the basis of
the service they want and receive. They are also looking at data security, increased service agility
and responsiveness. Many business customers have circumvented IT to acquire public cloudservices, which has led many IT organizations to invest in private cloud services for some of their
most-used and highly standardized sets of services.
They often have sought a harmonious mix of organization, processes and technology that will
deliver IT operational excellence to run IT operations like a business. There are a few truly
transformational technologies and processes, such as DevOps, ITIL and real-time infrastructure
(RTI). Most technologies provide incremental business value by lowering the total cost of ownership
(TCO), improving quality of service (QoS) and reducing business risks.
Fairly mature technologies, such as job-scheduling tools and network fault monitoring tools, enable
IT operations organizations to keep IT production workloads running through continuousautomation and lowering network mean time to repair (MTTR). However, the complexity of IT
operations environments continues to rise, as the implementation and adoption of service-oriented
architecture (SOA), Web services, virtualization technologies and cloud computing increase. This
presents challenges in such areas as IT financial management and improving IT operations
proactive responses to deliver business benefits.
Meanwhile, due to cost pressures, open-source visibility has increased in IT operations
management. These tools provide basic monitoring capabilities, and most of the implementation of
automated actions is done by script writing, resulting in fairly high maintenance efforts and longer
implementation times. The focus of these tools has changed from monitoring individual
infrastructure components, including networks and servers, to monitoring activities acrossinfrastructure components, from an end-to-end IT services perspective. Furthermore, these tools
have evolved to automate processes such as incident management. Such tools have the potential
to lower the license costs of commercial tools, but pure-play open-source tools may increase the
total cost of support.
IT financial management, along with IT asset management, and automation technologies will take
center stage through 2011 as IT operations' quest for continuous improvement and lower costs
continues. The focus on the cost of data will provide cost transparency for costs associated with
Page 8 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
9/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
the service portfolio, catalog tools and APM tools to rise through 2011. The integration of IT
operations tools is continuing at the data level, using technologies such as the configuration
management database (CMDB), and at the process level, using technologies such as IT workload
automation broker and IT process automation (ITPA).
Overall, there is no technology on this Hype Cycle that will mature in more than 10 years, and thereis only one technology (social IT management) that has relatively low benefit, but this could change
in the coming years as it matures (see Figure 2). The advantages of implementing IT operations
management technologies continue to be to lower the TCO of managing the complex IT
environment, improve the quality of service and lower business risk.
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 9 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
10/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Figure 2. Priority Matrix for IT Operations Management, 2011
benefit years to mainstream adoption
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years
transformational DevOps
ITIL
Real-Time Infrastructure
high Behavior LearningEngines
Hosted Virtual Desktops
IT Service Desk Tools
PC ApplicationVirtualization
Application PerformanceMonitoring
Capacity Planning andManagement Tools
Cloud ManagementPlatforms
Configuration Auditing
IT Change ManagementTools
IT Financial ManagementTools
IT Service DependencyMapping
IT Service View CMDB
IT Workload AutomationBroker Tools
Open-Source ITOperations Tools
Server Provisioning andConfigurationManagement
Service Billing
VM Energy ManagementTools
Workspace Virtualization
Business ServiceManagement Tools
IT Operations Analytics
IT Process AutomationTools
IT Service PortfolioManagement and ITService Catalog Tools
moderate Advanced Server EnergyMonitoring Tools
Job-Scheduling Tools
Network Fault-MonitoringTools
Network PerformanceManagement Tools
PC Configuration LifeCycle Management
Application ReleaseAutomation
COBIT
IT Asset ManagementTools
IT Event Correlation andAnalysis Tools
Network Configuration andChange ManagementTools
PC Application Streaming
SaaS Tools for ITOperations
Service-Level ReportingTools
Mobile DeviceManagement
Release GovernanceTools
low Social IT Management
As of July 2011
Source: Gartner (July 2011)
Page 10 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
11/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Off The Hype Cycle
Some of the technologies on this Hype Cycle have been subsumed or replaced by other
technologies. For example, virtual server resource capacity planning and resource capacity tools
have been combined into one entry called capacity planning and management tools; chargeback
tools are now part of IT financial management tools; end-user monitoring tools, applicationmanagement tools and application transaction profiling tools are now part of APM tools; ITIL V2 and
ITIL V3 process frameworks have been combined into the ITIL entry; mobile service-level
management tools and business consulting services are off the Hype Cycle, due to their lack of
direct relevance to the IT operations area.
On the Rise
DevOps
Analysis By:Cameron Haight; Ronni J. Colville; Jim Duggan
Definition:Gartner's working definition of DevOps is "an IT service delivery approach rooted in
agile philosophy, with an emphasis on business outcomes, not process orthodoxy. The DevOps
philosophy (if not the term itself) was born primarily from the activities of cloud service providers
and Web 2.0 adopters as they worked to address scale-out problems due to increasing online
service adoption. DevOps is bottom-up-based, with roots in the Agile Manifesto and its guiding
principles. Because it doesn't have a concrete set of mandates or standards, or a known framework
(e.g., ITIL, CMMI), it is subject to a more liberal interpretation.
In Gartner's view, DevOps has two main focuses. First is the notion of a DevOps "culture," which
seeks to establish a trust-based foundation between development and operations teams. In
practice, this is often centered on the release management process (i.e., the managed delivery ofcode into production), as this can be a source of conflict between these two groups often due to
differing objectives. The second is the leveraging of the concept of "infrastructure as code,"
whereby the increasing programmability of today's modern data centers provides IT an ability to be
more agile in response to changing business demands. Here, again, the release management
process is often targeted through the increasing adoption of automation to improve overall
application life cycle management (ALM). Practices like continuous integration and automated
regression testing should also be mastered to increase release frequency, while maintaining service
levels.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:While DevOps has its roots in agile methodologies,
and, from that perspective, is not totally new, its adoption within traditional enterprises is still verylimited, and, hence, the primary reason for our positioning. For IT organizations, the early focus is
on streamlining release deployments across the application life cycle from development through to
production. Tools are emerging that address building out a consistent application or service model
to reduce the risks stemming from customized scripting while improving deployment success due
to more-predictable configurations. The adoption of these tools is not usually associated with
development or production support staff per se, but rather with groups that "straddle" both
development and production, typically requiring higher organizational maturity.
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 11 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
12/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
DevOps does not preclude the use of other frameworks or methodologies, such as ITIL, and, in fact,
the potential exists to incorporate some of these other best-practice approaches to enhance overall
service delivery. Enterprises that are adopting a DevOps approach often begin with one process
that can span both development and operations. Release management, while not mature in its
adoption, is becoming the pivotal starting point for many DevOps projects.
User Advice:While there is growing hype about DevOps, potential practitioners need to know that
the successful adoption or incorporation of this approach is contingent on an organizational
philosophy shift something that is not easy to achieve. Because DevOps is not prescriptive, it will
likely result in a variety of different manifestations, making it more difficult to know whether one is
"doing" DevOps. However, this lack of a formal process framework should not prevent IT
organizations from developing their own repeatable processes that can give them both agility as
well as control. Because DevOps is emerging in terms of definition and practice, IT organizations
should approach it as a set of guiding principles, not as process dogma. Select a project involving
development and operations teams to test the fit of a DevOps-based approach in your enterprise.
Often, this is aligned with one application environment. If adopted, consider expanding DevOps to
incorporate technical architecture. At a minimum, examine activities along the existing developer-
to-operations continuum, and experiment with the adoption of more-agile communications
processes and patterns to improve production deployments.
Business Impact:DevOps is focused on improving business outcomes via the adoption of agile
methodologies. While agility often equates to speed (and faster time to market), there is a somewhat
paradoxical impact, as well as smaller, more-frequent updates to production that can also work to
improve overall stability and control, thus reducing risk.
Benefit Rating:Transformational
Market Penetration:Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity:Emerging
IT Operations Analytics
Analysis By:Milind Govekar; David M. Coyle
Definition:IT operations analytics tools enable CIOs and senior IT operations managers to monitor
their "business" operational data and metrics. The tools are similar to a business intelligence
platform utilized by business unit managers to drive business performance. IT operations analytics
tools provide users the capabilities to deliver efficiency, optimize IT investments, correlate trends,
and understand and maximize IT opportunities in support of the business. These tools are capable
of integrating data from various data sources (service desks, IT ECA, IT workload automation
brokers, IT financial management, APM, performance management, BSM, service-level reporting,
cloud monitoring tools, etc.), and processing it in real time to deliver operational improvements.
These tools are not the same as data warehouse reporting tools. Data from IT operations analytics
tools will typically send data to data warehouses and other IT operations tools (e.g., service-level
reporting) for further non-real-time reporting. IT operations analytics tools may have engines, such
as complex-event processing (CEP), at their core to enable them to collect, process and analyze
Page 12 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
13/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
multidimensional business and IT data, and to identify the most meaningful events and assess their
impact in real time.
There are many business intelligence and analytics tools on the market (see "Hype Cycle for
Business Intelligence, 2010"), but these tools are not focused on the specific needs of the IT
operations organization. IT operations analytics tools must have IT domain expertise andconnectors to IT operations management tools and data sources in order to facilitate IT-specific
analytics and decision making. IT operations management vendors often partner with established
business intelligence vendors (for example, BMC Software partnering with SAP Business Objects)
to offer their customers advanced analytics capabilities.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:As IT operations analytics tools provide real-time
analytics that can improve IT operations performance, IT management can use these tools to make
adjustments and improvements to the IT operational services they deliver to their business
customers. For example, they can delay the acquisition of hardware by showing the cost of unused
capacity or help in consolidation and rationalization of applications based on utilization and cost
data. Analytics tools are well-established, but have experienced slow adoption in the IT organizationdue to their expense and lack of IT domain knowledge, and because IT organizations often lack the
maturity to consider themselves a business. Organizations at a maturity of at least Level 3 or above
in the I&O ITScore Maturity Model will be able to take advantage of these tools (see "ITScore for
Infrastructure and Operations"):
Rationalization of applications and services based on their utilization and their cost to and value
for the business
Delaying the acquisition of hardware (e.g., server/computer and storage) by revealing the cost
of unused capacity
Determining more-cost-effective platforms or architectures through what-if and scenarioanalytics
Optimizing the vendor portfolio by redefining contractual terms and conditions based on cost
and utilization trends
User Advice:Users who are at least at ITScore Level 3 or above in IT operations maturity should
investigate where and how these tools can be used to run their operations more efficiently, provide
detailed trend analysis of issues and deliver highly visible and improved customer service. Most of
the tools available today take a "siloed" approach to IT operations analytics; i.e., the data sources
they support are rather limited to their domains, e.g., severs, databases, applications, etc., or are
specific to agents from a single vendor.
Additionally, their ability to integrate data from multiple vendor sources and process large amounts
of real-time data are also limited. However, the IT operations analytics tools that have emerged from
specific IT operations areas have the potential to extend their capabilities more broadly. Most of
these tools rely on manual intervention to identify the data sources, understand the business
problem they are trying to solve and build expertise in the tools for interpreting events and providing
automated actions or recommendations.
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 13 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
14/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Investments in these tools are likely to be disruptive for customers, particularly as newer, innovative
vendors get acquired. This means that the product must have significant value for the customer
today to mitigate the risk of acquisition and subsequent disruptions to product advancements, or
changes to product strategy. A critical requirement for choosing a tool is understanding the data
sources it can integrate with, the amount of manual effort required to run analytics and the training
needs of the IT staff.
Business Impact:IT operations analytics tools will provide CIOs and senior IT operations managers
radical benefits toward running their own businesses more efficiently, and at the same time enable
their business customers to maximize opportunities. These tools that will provide a more accurate
assessment of the correlations among the business processes, applications and infrastructures in a
complex and multisourced environment.
Benefit Rating:High
Market Penetration:Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity:Embryonic
Sample Vendors:Appnomic; Apptio; Hagrid Solutions; SL; Splunk; Sumerian
Social IT Management
Analysis By:David M. Coyle; Jarod Greene; Cameron Haight
Definition:Social IT management is the ability to leverage existing and new social media
technologies and best practices to foster the support of end users, capture collaboration among IT
staff members and collaborate with the business, promoting the value of the IT organization.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:The impact on social media and as a mechanism for
collaboration, communication, marketing and engaging people is a well-known concept in personal
and business life (see "Business Gets Social"). It is only natural that social media would find its way
into the IT organization; however, the business value is only starting to be conceptualized.
We have identified three areas where social media can assist the IT organization with increasing
end-user satisfaction, increasing efficiencies and fostering crisper collaboration among IT staff:
Social networking acts as a medium for peer-to-peer support. End users have for years relied
on their immediate coworkers to better understand how to leverage internal systems, and for
help in solving technology issues. Often, this end user-to-end user support was done by email,instant message or walking to the co-worker's cubicle. Social media tools now allow end users
to crowdsource other end users through the entire organization to receive assistance. This
allows end users to become more productive in using business technologies. The IT support
team has the opportunity to be part of this collaboration to offer improved IT service and
support.
Social media tools can also facilitate the capture of collaboration among IT staff that would not
typically be captured via traditional communication methods. For example, the discussion
Page 14 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
15/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
regarding the risk of an upcoming infrastructure change is often done via email and IM, but that
information is not captured in the change management ticket. These ad hoc and informal
collaborations and knowledge-sharing instances can now be turned into reusable and audited
work assets (see "Collaborative Operations Management: A Next-Generation Management
Capability"). Collaboration technology will also become increasingly important in the emerging
DevOps arena as development and operations begin to work more closely to coordinate
planning, build, test and release activities.
Social software suites and text-based posts can allow the IT organization to promote the value
of IT services to the business. Typically, IT organizations unidirectionally inform the business of
planned and unplanned outages, releases and new services via email or through an intranet
portal. This type of communication is often disregarded or ignored. Social media enables
dynamic communications whereby users can generate conversation within these notifications to
understand the specific impact of the message in a forum open to the wider community of
business end users. End users can follow the IT organization announcements, services and
configuration items that are important to them through social media tools.
User Advice:It is important to develop a strategy for social media for the IT organization, because
end users are increasingly expecting this type of collaboration, which is so prevalent in other
aspects in their lives. If IT doesn't embrace and create a social media initiative, the risk is that end
users and IT staff will create many often-conflicting social media tools and processes themselves. IT
should not expect the use of social media tools to be high, and investments should be tempered
since the ROI will be difficult to quantify in the beginning. Therefore, social media initiatives should
be accompanied by the development of project plans, usage guidelines and governance. Also, be
prepared to change tools and strategies as new technologies and collaborative methods emerge,
and since social media usage within businesses is still immature.
Business Impact:Social media tools and processes increase end-user productivity by leveragingknowledge and best practices across the entire organization. Social media tools and processes with
enable the IT organization to increase end-user productivity, communicate easier with the business
and capture ad hoc and informal interactions that can be leveraged in the future. Additionally, a
social media strategy will provide the business with a perspective that the IT organization is
progressive and forward-thinking.
Benefit Rating:Low
Market Penetration:Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity:Emerging
Sample Vendors:BMC Software; CA Technologies; Hornbill; ServiceNow; Zendesk
Recommended Reading:"Collaborative Operations Management: A Next-Generation
Management Capability"
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 15 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
16/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Cloud Management Platforms
Analysis By:Cameron Haight; Milind Govekar
Definition:Cloud management platforms are integrated products that provide for the management
of public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The minimum requirements to be included in thiscategory are products that incorporate self-service interfaces, provision system images, enable
metering and billing, and provide for some degree of workload optimization through established
policies. More-advanced offerings may also integrate with external enterprise management
systems, include service catalogs, support the configuration of storage and network resources,
allow for enhanced resource management via service governors and provide advanced monitoring
for improved "guest" performance and availability. A key ability of these products is the insulation of
administrators of cloud services from proprietary cloud provider APIs, and thus they help IT
organizations prevent lock-in by any cloud service or technology provider. The distinction between
cloud management platforms (CMPs) and private clouds is that the former primarily provide the
upper levels of a private cloud architecture, i.e., the service management and access management
tiers, and thus do not always provide an integrated cloud "stack." Another way of saying this is thatcloud management platforms are an enabler of a cloud environment, be it public or private, but by
themselves they may not contain all the necessary components for it (i.e., such as virtualization
and/or pooling capabilities). This distinction holds true for public clouds as well.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Although the demand for cloud computing services is
increasing, the market for managing the applications and services running with these environments
is still modest, including for infrastructure as a service (or IaaS) clouds, be they private or public.
This is likely because IT organizations adopting cloud-style technologies are not running many
mission-critical applications and services on these infrastructures, which might necessitate greater
monitoring and control.
User Advice:Enterprises looking at investing in cloud management platforms should be aware that
the technology is still maturing. Although some cloud providers are beginning to offer management
tools to provide more insight and control into their infrastructures, these are limited in functionality
and generally offer no support for managing other cloud environments. A small (but growing)
number of cloud-specific management platform firms is emerging; however, the traditional market-
leading IT operations management vendors aka the Big Four (BMC Software, CA Technologies,
HP and IBM Tivoli) are also in the process of extending their cloud management capabilities. In
addition, virtualization platform vendors (e.g., Citrix Systems, Microsoft and VMware), not to
mention public cloud providers such as Amazon, are also broadening their management portfolios
to enhance the support of cloud environments.
Business Impact:Enterprises will require cloud management platforms to maximize the value of
cloud computing services, irrespective of external (public), internal (private) or hybrid environments
i.e., lowering the cost of service delivery, reducing the risks associated with these providers and
potentially preventing lock-in.
Benefit Rating:High
Market Penetration:Less than 1% of target audience
Page 16 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
17/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Maturity:Emerging
Sample Vendors:Abiquo; BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cloud.com; Cloupia; Gale
Technologies; HP; IBM Tivoli; Kaavo; Microsoft; Platform Computing; Red Hat; RightScale;
ServiceMesh
Recommended Reading:"The Architecture of a Private Cloud Service"
Behavior Learning Engines
Analysis By:Will Cappelli; Jonah Kowall
Definition:Behavior learning engines (BLEs) are platforms intended to enable the discovery,
visualization and analysis of recurring, complex, multiperiod patterns in large operational
performance datasets. If such engines are to realize their intent, they must support four layers of
cumulative functionality:
Variable designation this supports the selection of the system properties that are to be
tracked by the platform and how those properties are to be measured
Variable value normalization this is the automated ability to determine (usually by an
algorithm that regresses measurements) what constitutes the normal or usual values assumed
by the system property measuring variables
Observational dependency modeling this is a set of tools for linking the individual property
measuring variables to one another, where the links represent some kind of dependency among
the values taken by the linked variables; commercially available BLEs differ significantly with
regard to the degree to which the dependencies must be pre-established by the vendor or user
and the degree to which the dependencies are themselves discovered by BLE algorithmsworking on the performance datasets being considered
Assessment the means by which, once the normalized values and dependency map are
determined, the resulting construct can be used to answer questions about the values assumed
by some variables, based on the values assumed by others
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:When using IT operations availability and
performance management tools, many IT organizations struggle to deliver a proactive monitoring
capability, due to the vast amounts of disparate data that needs to be collected, analyzed and
correlated. BLEs gather event and performance data from a wide range of sources, identifying
behavioral irregularities, which allows IT operations to understand the state of the IT infrastructure in
a more holistic way.
BLEs detect subtle deviations from normal activity and how these deviations may be correlated
across multiple variables. This enables more effective and rapid root-cause analysis of system
problems and encourages a more proactive approach to event and performance management. The
adoption of BLEs is being driven by the emergence of virtualization, an increased focus on cross-
silo application performance monitoring and the need to gain a holistic understanding of the virtual
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 17 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
18/84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
19/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Definition:Application release automation (ARA) tools focus on the deployment of custom
application software releases and their associated configurations, often for Java Platform,
Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and .NET applications for middleware. These tools also offer versioning
to enable best practices in moving related artifacts, applications, configurations and even data
together across the application life cycle. ARA tools support continuous deployment of large
numbers of small releases. Often, these tools include workflow engines to assist in automating and
tracking human activities across various tasks associated with application deployment for
auditability. Some tools focus on the build and development phases and are now adding the
capability to deploy to production, though many still provide only partial solutions.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:IT organizations are often very fragmented in their
approach to application releases. Sometimes, the process is led by operations, although it can also
be managed from the development side of the organization. This means that different buyers will
look at different tools, rather than comprehensive solutions, which results in tool fragmentation. The
intent of these tools is fivefold:
Eliminate the need to build and maintain custom scripts for application updates by adding morereliability to the deployment process with less custom scripting, and by documenting variations
across environments.
Reduce configuration errors and downtime.
Coordinate releases between people and process steps that are maintained manually in
spreadsheets, email or both.
Move the skill base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less costly resources.
Speed the time to market associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes to
deploy and configure across all environments.Adoption and penetration of these tools are still emerging (1% to 5%), because they are being used
for only a small percentage of all applications. For large enterprises with mission-critical websites,
adoption is becoming more significant (5% to 20%), because of the criticality of improving agility
and reducing disruption. Even in this scenario, we still see the largest "competitor" of these tools
being in-house scripts and manual processes.
User Advice:Clients must remember that processes for ARA are not standardized. Assess
application life cycle management specifically deployment processes and seek a tool or tools
that can help automate the implementation of these processes. Organizational change issues
remain significant and can't be addressed solely by a tool purchase.
Understand your specific requirements for applications and platforms that will narrow the scope of
the tools to determine whether one tool or multiple tools will be required. Some vendors have
products that address application provisioning (of binaries: middleware, databases, etc.) and ARA.
When evaluating tools, consider your workflows and the underlying software you are deploying; this
will increase time to value for the tools. Determine whether life cycle tools can address the needs of
multiple teams (such as development and testing), while meeting broad enterprise requirements, as
this will reduce costs. Organizations that want to extend the application life cycle beyond
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 19 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
20/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
development to production environments using a consistent application model should evaluate
development tools or point solutions that provide out-of-the-box integration with development
tools.
Business Impact:ARA tools can eliminate the need to build and maintain time-consuming custom
scripts for application updates. They can add more reliability to the deployment process with lesscustom scripting and by documenting variations across environments, to reduce configuration
errors and downtime. In addition, with more consistency, there will be an increase in
standardization, which will enable all the benefits standardization brings in terms of economies of
scale, cross-training, documentation, backups, etc. ARA tools can supplement or enhance the
coordination of releases among people, as well as the process steps that are maintained manually
in spreadsheets, email or both. By reducing the scripts and manual interactions with automation, IT
organizations can move the skills base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less
costly resources. The most significant business benefit of ARA tools is that they improve the speed
associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes to deploy and configure
applications across all environments by creating consistent application models that improve the
likelihood of successful deployments to production.
Benefit Rating:Moderate
Market Penetration:1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity:Emerging
Sample Vendors:BMC Software; HP; MidVision; Nolio; Urbancode; XebiaLabs
Recommended Reading:"Cool Vendors in Release Management, 2011"
"Managing Between Applications and Operations: The Vendor Landscape"
"Best Practices in Change, Configuration and Release Management"
"MarketScope for Application Life Cycle Management"
"Are You Ready to Improve Release Velocity?"
SaaS Tools for IT Operations
Analysis By:David M. Coyle; Milind Govekar; Patricia Adams
Definition:Software as a service (SaaS) is software owned, delivered and managed remotely byone or more providers, and purchased on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on usage
metrics. All IT operations management tools that can be 100% managed through a Web client have
the potential of being licensed as SaaS. SaaS enables the IT organization to have new pricing,
delivery and hosting options when acquiring IT operations management tools, in addition to the
traditional perpetual model. Not all IT operations SaaS use multitenancy and elasticity, which are
the hallmarks in a cloud computing delivery model.
Page 20 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
21/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:SaaS has been a viable pricing model for many
software products, such as CRM and HR, for several years; however, it is newer to the IT operations
management tool market. Fewer than 5% of IT operations management tools are bought utilizing
the SaaS licensing model. Few traditional software vendors have licensed their tools as SaaS, but
this model is increasingly being added to product road maps. However, growth in the acceptance of
SaaS as a licensing model in the software industry as a whole, plus the use of the Web-only client
for IT operations management tools especially IT service desk, resource capacity planning and
end-user monitoring tools will ensure that this model becomes pervasive in IT operations
management.
Mature resource capacity planning tools have been offered as a service since the mainframe days,
and can be good candidates to fit the SaaS delivery model in today's computing environment. For
IT organizations that are experiencing budget constraints, SaaS solutions that are paid for monthly
or quarterly and come from the operating budget can be viable alternatives to a large capital
software purchases.
In particular, small or midsize businesses (SMBs) have begun to favor SaaS-based capacitymanagement and planning. SaaS IT service desk vendors currently have 8% to 9% of the overall
market; however, by 2015, 50% of all new IT service desk tool purchases will use the SaaS model
(see "SaaS Continues to Grow in the IT Service Desk Market"). Because many of the IT service desk
vendors also offer IT asset management (ITAM) tools, which are tightly integrated, we expect to
begin to see SaaS extend to ITAM implementations where software license models aren't overly
complex.
Similarly, end-user monitoring tools have been consumed as a SaaS delivery model for more than
five years, and we are beginning to see increased interest in this delivery model. In addition,
chargeback tools are being sold as a SaaS model. However, security, high availability and stability
of the vendor infrastructure, heterogeneous support, integration and long-term cost are some ofenterprises' primary concerns. In some cases, the tools architecture may not lend itself to the
functionality being delivered in a SaaS model. Customers that need to customize software to meet
unique business requirements should be aware that there is risk associated with customizing SaaS-
delivered software that may cause conflicts when new versions become available.
User Advice:Clients should evaluate the inherent advantages and disadvantages of SaaS before
selecting this model. Trust in the vendor, customer references, security compliance, contracts and
SLAs should be foundational when buying SaaS. Clients should compare the SaaS vendors'
products with the more-traditional, perpetually licensed products in terms of features, functionality,
adherence to best practices, total cost of ownership through the life cycle of the tool, high
availability, manageability and security. They should ensure that they don't choose one product overthe other, based solely on licensing model or cost. If choosing to operate the SaaS tool within your
data center, it is important to understand the hardware required, the architecture models and the
differences in pricing.
IT operations tools do not exist as an island, and some level of information, data and process
integration is required, which should be an important SaaS evaluation criterion. Finally,
organizations that have unique requirements may find that the one-size-fits-all approach to SaaS
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 21 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
22/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
might not be a good fit for business requirements that require tool customization to increase the
value of the tool.
Business Impact:SaaS offers new options for IT organizations to purchase, implement and
maintain the IT operations management tools in their environment. More choices will enable IT
organizations to become agile, use IT budgets more appropriately and gain more flexibility withvendor negotiations. Implementation time frames should also be faster, potentially leading to faster
payback.
Benefit Rating:Moderate
Market Penetration:1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity:Emerging
Sample Vendors:Apptio; BMC; CA; Cherwell Software; Compuware; InteQ; Keynote Systems;
Service-now.com
Recommended Reading:"SaaS Continues to Grow in the IT Service Desk Market"
Service Billing
Analysis By:Milind Govekar
Definition:Service-billing tools differ from IT chargeback tools in that they use resource usage data
(on computing and people) to calculate the costs for chargeback and aggregate it for a service.
Alternatively, they may offer service-pricing options (such as per employee, per transaction)
independent of resource usage. When pricing is based on usage, these tools can gather resource-
based data across various infrastructure components, including servers, networks, storage,databases and applications. Service-billing tools perform proportional allocation based on the
amount of resources (including virtualized and cloud-based) allocated and used by the service
for accounting and chargeback purposes.
Service-billing costs include infrastructure and other resource use (such as people) costs, based on
service definitions. As a result, they usually integrate with IT financial management tools and IT
chargeback tools. These tools will be developed to work with service governors to set a billing
policy that uses cost as a parameter, and to ensure that the resource allocation is managed based
on cost and service levels.
Due to their business imperative, these tools will first emerge and be deployed in service providerenvironments and by IT organizations that are at a high level of maturity. These tools are also being
deployed for cloud computing environments, where usage-based service billing is a key
requirement.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Shared sets of resources for on-premises or off-
premises implementations require the ability to track usage for service-billing purposes. As the IT
infrastructure moves to a shared-service model, resource-oriented chargeback models will evolve
into end-to-end collection and reporting approaches. Furthermore, the service-billing tools will work
Page 22 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
23/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
with service governors to proactively manage the costs of services and their associated service
levels.
User Advice:This is a new and emerging area, and its visibility has risen sharply. Most commercial
tools are being developed by cloud computing service providers for their own environments, or by
cloud infrastructure fabric vendors in private or public cloud computing environments, in addition tocommercial off-the-shelf tools. Service-billing tools will take a life cycle approach to services, will
perform service cost optimization based on underlying technology resource usage optimization
during the entire life cycle and will provide granular cost allocation.
The emergence of these tools, to accommodate the vision of dynamic automation of real-time
infrastructure, will involve their integration with virtualization automation tools that dynamically move
virtual environments, based on resource or performance criteria to assess the cost effects of such
movement. For example, enterprises that want to incorporate virtual server movement automation in
their environments should assess these tools, as they emerge to assist with controlling costs in their
data centers.
The available service chargeback tools aggregate costs mainly for static environments, where there
is no automation or dynamic control of resources. These tools will emerge from startups, as well as
traditional chargeback vendors, asset management vendors, virtualization management vendors
and software stack vendors.
Business Impact:These tools are critical to running IT as a business, by determining the financial
effect of sharing IT and other resources in the context of services. They also feed billing data back
to IT financial management tools and chargeback tools to help businesses understand the costs of
IT and to budget appropriately.
Benefit Rating:High
Market Penetration:1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity:Emerging
Sample Vendors:Apptio; Aria Systems; BMC Software; Comsci; Digital Fuel; IBM Tivoli; MTS;
Unisys; VMware
Release Governance Tools
Analysis By:Ronni J. Colville; Kris Brittain
Definition:Release governance tools enable coordinated, cross-organizational capability that
manages the introduction of changes into the production environment, including those affecting
applications, infrastructures, operations and facilities. The two main focuses are release planning
and release scheduling. Planning orchestrates the control of changes into a release by governing
the operational requirements definition (designing with operations in mind, versus just building to
business functional specifications alone early on) and integrated build, test, install and deploy
activities, including coordination with other processes required prior to rollout (such as system
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 23 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
24/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
management and documentation). Scheduling activities are focused on ensuring that prerequisites'
and corequisites' requirements are met and that rollback planning is coordinated for the execution
of changes and release bundles, to ensure that no conflicts occur prior to production deployments.
Release governance tools have tended to develop as an extension to existing IT operations tools.
For example, change management tools have similar workflows that IT service desk vendors have
extended for release workflows. Sometimes, run book automation tools, which can supplement or
augment automation processes' and activities' interactions, can have release workflow templates.
In addition, application life cycle management release tools for tracking release requests are
sometimes being extended to include broader release workflows beyond an application focus.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:There continues to be an increase in focus on
developing a comprehensive release management process across development and production
control, as well as on automating various aspects of release management (e.g., planning for
governance and release provisioning and deployment). This interest in formalizing the process and
supplementing manual efforts has four main drivers and approaches: (1) ITIL process improvement
initiatives are focused on several processes (such as problem, incident, change and configuration),
where the release is often one of the processes being addressed but, often, later in the timeline
of the initiative; (2) the increase in number of composite applications being deployed (such as Java
Platform, Enterprise Edition [Java EE] and .NET) into production; (3) continuous deployment
techniques (e.g., agile and DevOps) for the introduction and maintenance of applications to the
production environment; and (4) the rise in the frequency of changes and the need to bundle, align
and control them more efficiently. Release process adoption in ITIL initiatives tends to be at later
phase of the project, and most often will force a reshaping of early change and configuration
management process work.
Release governance tools become critical in ensuring that the appropriate planning and scheduling
has been done to reduce disruption to the production environment, along with appropriate
communication and reporting mechanisms. These tools can also reduce costs, but only whenviewed across the entire organization, from project management to application development to
release management to operational support. Release governance tools also are becoming more
commonly integrated with project and portfolio management (PPM), application life cycle
management, change management, incident/problem management, and IT operations management
tools. Configuration management works hand in hand with release management for distribution
activities of software packaging, deployment and rollback, if required.
The main benefits of release management include:
More consistent service quality as a result of better planning, coordination and testing of
releases, as well as automated deployment through configuration management tools
The ability to support higher throughput, frequency and success of releases
Reduced release risk through improved planning
Reduced cost of release deployment due to fewer errors
Despite these benefits, fewer than 25% of large enterprises will formalize release management
through 2014, up from less than 5% today. The reason that so few organizations will achieve
Page 24 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
25/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
success with release governance tools is twofold. First, success with formal release management
requires that implementations of change and configuration management be in place to integrate
with; thus, release management is normally implemented in the latter phases of an ITIL or IT
process improvement implementation. During the past five to 10 years, most of the focus on
process improvement has been on change management, and, more recently, on configuration
management surrounding configuration management databases (CMDBs). Release management
has only recently become a focus in ITIL programs as progress has been made on change and
configuration, and because there has been an increase in the number of changes.
Second, release governance tools require a coordinated release management process and
organizational role integration across business processes, applications, project management and
operations. As a result, it is one of the more-difficult disciplines to implement, requiring significant
top management commitment and, often, organizational realignment and/or the establishment of
competency centers. Contributing to the inhibitors is that organizations will need to build labs to
perform integration testing to ensure the validity and integrity of the release in the production
environment. Today, testing is done in the application life cycle management (ALM) process, but
these test environments rarely mirror the production environment. Therefore, it is critical to plan for
and establish an integration test lab prior to production rollouts. In some cases, organizations can
effectively use the existing independent test organization, which is usually affiliated with the
development team. Such independent quality assurance (QA) functions are a hallmark of Maturity
Level 3 development organizations, specifically in their use of methodologies, such as Capability
Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI). Funding process projects in this way is often easier to justify
than the inclusion of new hardware, software and resources to support a test lab.
User Advice:IT organizations need to ensure that solid objectives based on the needs of the
business are established for release planning and release distribution activities, and that those are
mapped to stakeholders' specifications. Because releases occur throughout and across the IT
application and infrastructure organization, release management will require the participation ofmany IT groups, and may be considered part of development, operational change management,
production acceptance/control, and the tail end of the IT delivery life cycle. With the addition of
SOA-based applications, the granularity and frequency will add to the fluency with which releases
need to occur. Successful release management will require a competency center approach to
enable cross-departmental skills for release activities.
Release management takes on greater significance, much as production control departments did in
the mainframe era. Planned changes to applications, infrastructure and operations (such as system
and application management, documentation and job scheduling) processes are integration-tested
with the same rigor that occurs on the development side. Working with architecture groups, more-
rigorous policies are put in place for maintenance planning (such as patches and upgrades) and theretirement of software releases and hardware platforms in adherence to standard policies. The
release management group also will be responsible for preproduction testing and postproduction
validation and adjustments to policies related to dynamic capacity management and priorities for
real-time infrastructure.
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 25 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
26/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
IT organizations should:
Establish a project team composed of application development and operations resources to get
the foundation of a release management policy in place.
Be prepared to invest in infrastructure to establish integration testing for production control (asis done for preproduction and development).
Organizations that have already implemented change and configuration management
processes should:Look to formalizing a release process as one of your next investments, and
one that will greatly improve overall service quality (in an additive way).
Implement release governance tools to provide a mechanism for tracking the life of a release
(singular or a bundle) for planning and scheduling.
Business Impact:Because new releases are the first opportunity for IT customers to experience
IT's capabilities, the success or failure of a release management process will greatly affect the
business-IT relationship. Release governance tools will provide automation that facilitates the manystakeholders required to ensure successful deployments into the production environment. It is
important, therefore, that releases are managed effectively from inception to closure, and that all IT
groups work in concert to deliver quality releases as consistently as possible using release
governance tools.
Benefit Rating:Moderate
Market Penetration:1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity:Emerging
Sample Vendors:BMC Software; CA Technologies; HP; IBM Tivoli; Service-Now
IT Workload Automation Broker Tools
Analysis By:Milind Govekar
Definition:IT workload automation broker (ITWAB) technology is designed to overcome the static
nature of scheduling batch jobs. It manages mixed batch and other non-real-time workloads based
on business policies in which resources are assigned and deassigned in an automated fashion to
meet service-level objectives, for example, performance, throughput and completion time
requirements. These tools automate processing requirements based on events, workloads,
resources and schedules. They manage dependencies, (potentially, across multiple on-premisesand off-premises data centers) across applications and infrastructure platforms. ITWAB technology
optimizes resources (e.g., working with physical, virtual and cloud-based resource pools)
associated with non-real-time or batch workloads, and is built on architectural patterns that
facilitate easy, standards-based integration for example, using SOA principles across a wide
range of platforms and applications.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Some characteristics of ITWAB were defined in "IT
Workload Automation Broker: Job Scheduler 2.0." A federated policy engine that takes business
Page 26 of 84 Gartner, Inc. | G00214402
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
27/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
policies and converts them into a technology SLA is over two years away from being deployed in
production environments. ITWAB can emerge in vertical industry segments for example,
insurance where a set of standardized, risk model calculation processes is driven by a common
definition of business policies. Alternatively, ITWAB is emerging in situations where decisions need
to be made on use and deployment of computing resources; for example, to finish processing
workloads associated with business processes by a certain deadline, ITWAB may make decisions
to use cloud-based computing resources, as needed in addition to on-premises resources. An
intermediate stage of tool development will be the manual conversion of business policies into
technology SLAs.
Visibility, discovery and optimization of resource pools across the entire physical, virtual and cloud
computing environment isn't possible today. Intermediate solutions based on targeted
environments, such as server resource pools through the use of virtualization management tools,
will emerge first. Some tools have integration with configuration management databases (CMDBs)
to maintain batch service data for better change and configuration management of the batch
service to support reporting for compliance requirements. Integration with run book automation
(RBA) tools, data center automation tools and cloud computing management tools to provide end-
to-end automation will also continue to evolve into enterprise requirements during the next two
years in order to facilitate growing or shrinking the pool of resources dynamically, i.e., in an RTI
environment to meet batch-based SLAs. Furthermore, critical-path analysis capabilities to identify
jobs that may breach SLA requirements are being adopted by many of these tools.
User Advice:Users should use these tools instead of traditional job scheduling tools where there is
a need to manage their batch or non-real-time environment using policies. Users should also keep
in mind that not all ITWAB capabilities have been delivered yet (as highlighted above). Tools that
have developed automation capabilities such as run book automation (or IT operations process
automation) and/or are able to integrate with other IT operations tools should be used to implement
an end-to-end automation.
Business Impact:ITWAB tools will have a big impact on the dynamic management of batch SLAs,
increasing batch throughput and decreasing planned downtime, and will play a role in end-to-end
automation. ITWAB will be involved in the initial stages of implementing the service governor
concept of real-time infrastructure.
Benefit Rating:High
Market Penetration:5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity:Early mainstream
Sample Vendors:BMC Software; CA Technologies; Cisco (Tidal); IBM Tivoli; Orsyp; Redwood
Software; Stonebranch; UC4 Software
Recommended Reading:"IT Workload Automation Broker: Job Scheduler 2.0"
"Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling"
Gartner, Inc. | G00214402 Page 27 of 84
8/10/2019 Hype Cycle for It Operations
28/84
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]
Workspace Virtualization
Analysis By:Terrence Cosgrove; Mark A. Margevicius; Federica Troni
Definition:Workspace virtualization tools separate the user's working environment (i.e., data,
settings, personalization and applications) from the OS or any applications on the PC or Mac onwhich it executes. This allows users to run a corporate-managed workspace (i.e., one that is
patched, provisioned, secured, etc.) on a corporate or user-owned PC or Mac. Because these tools
allow the workspace to execute on the local client (as opposed to hosted virtual desktops [HVDs],
which execute in the data center), users can have a secure, data-leakproof, device-independent
workspace, while leveraging local processing power and working offline.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification:Adoption of workspace virtualization tools was
originally driven by organizations that wanted to separate workspaces to prevent data leakage (e.g.,
financial services or government). Growing interest in this technology is driven by:
Employee-owned PC programs (see "Checklist for an Employee-Owned Notebook or PC
Program")
Organizations looking for new ways to manage mobile or distributed users (see "New
Approaches to Client Management")
Organizations that want to give nonemployees temporary access to a corporate system (e.g.,
contractors)
The technology has matured enough to support thousands of users; however, the large vendors do
not have mature products, and the mature products come from small vendors. We are starting to
see this change as major client computing industry players, such as Intel, HP and Lenovo, start to
bring workspace virtualization tools to market. This will drive adoption and awareness of the
technology, and secure the viabilit