BSM 2.0

Business service management (BSM) has been the battle cry of IT management software vendors for several years now. As a technology, it is founded on the ability to map business services to infrastructure components: This should provide visibility into IT from a business standpoint and give IT the ability to become more efficient and better-aligned with the needs of the business. However, the foundation technologies of application mapping and the CMDB have not yet fulfilled their promise. The result? BSM runs the risk of disappointing customers and eventually becoming a piece of IT management software detritus that litters the road to IT improvement. To avoid this fate, IT management software vendors need to revive their efforts in automated discovery and provide a mapping of applications to business services on top of what exists today — as well as a more granular discovery of the details of online applications underneath what currently exists. We call this evolution BSM 2.0 and highlight the major differences that these improvements will bring to IT management.