B. V. Shiva Shankar

With companies trying to co-relate information in order to enhance efficiency at minimal cost, interaction between multiple consoles and multiple management areas has become the need of the hour. And this business need is the driver behind integration of IT assets. Companies resorting to consolidation of their IT assets are on the quest for a single management console, but that still seems to be a mirage.

In today’s fast-moving scenario, the business model has become a chameleon that changes its color every moment. The change may be fueled by technology, but it is in turn urging technology to change itself faster to keep up with the business need for faster delivery of goods and services to customers. This being the driver for technology evolution, the challenges before a CIO are galore.

Among the challenges, management of IT infrastructure is prominent. According to IDC, in 2006, the overall infrastructure management software market in India stood at US $24 million and is likely to grow at a CAGR of 22.6 percent over the period 2006-2011, with leading players in the market being HP, IBM and Computer Associates.

“IT Services Management, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery and Consolidation have emerged as the top three focus areas for enterprises across India ", says Praveen Sengar, Manager, Software & Services Research, IDC India.
 
According to him, major drivers for organizations exploring the decision to adopt an IT process standard or best practice approach to IT asset management are: better IT security, lower IT cost, improved availability of IT assets, faster response to users and reduced incidents of errors in new deployments.

Dwelling further on the infrastructure issue, he says: “The major challenges organizations face today are multiple tool sets, heterogeneity and complexity in the IT environment with difficulty in having a single interface to co-relate all problems in business impact terms. IT services management (ITSM) should be looked at from a top-down, business driven approach to help evolve a management system that specifically addresses business value generated by the IT assets. Organizations need to clearly define and understand the need for IT services, set priorities, get top management buy-in and focus on adopting standard processes for ITSM.”

Data is the key
As data is the heartbeat of an enterprise, availability of data has become the watchword; data anytime, anywhere, for anybody, the mantra. The mantra is reverberating in the name of business transparency and agility. However, transparency has security threat as an inbuilt challenge. Achieving data availability with ensured security, with the disparate applications and systems in place, is not only a daunting task but also a formidable technological challenge. While there is no assurance that each new piece of technology bought should ready to talk to the legacy system, an IT manager is looking for an entity that holds all, as an Upanishad verse goes Sarvam kalvidam brahma, A single console that controls all. If all the systems, which are multiple in nature, can consolidate into one work station then the IT manager, who holds the key will be a real Brahma. There lies the origin of the quest for integration of IT assets.

This quest has taken the IT sector to the irrefutable heights of innovation. But one cannot rest on his laurels. Multiple information islands, still existing in organizations, hold eloquent testimony to the confounding status. Many organizations are still struggling to utilize the enormous IT investments to link vital networked resources and information assets. In fact, it is not uncommon for organizations to have silos hosting hundreds of applications and databases that cannot communicate with each other. The result: Inability to co-relate information across the organization.

Consolidate or perish
The tryst with integration started when the idea of network cropped up in the minds of innovators decades ago. LAN/WAN built on an initial foundation of TCP/IP was a baby step toward integration. It was followed by the Internet, which provided an effective tool. Since then, the exercise has covered a lot of ground and reached up to the Intelligence Information network (IIN). The concept of IIN has grown up to the stage that it can help global IT organizations to take care of the problems of disparate systems and address new challenges such as the deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOA), Web services, and virtualization. Facilitating integration of the hardware and software, IIN, makes it possible for the organizations to better align IT resources with business priorities. Network is marching ahead on the path of evolution to achieve perfect integration, which is still a mirage.

However, a near perfect integration has to be achieved now because elimination of technology islands is the need of the hour. They have to be eliminated to achieve the much needed efficiency and agility. The infrastructure that is compactly linked to and responsive to the requirements of the applications, resources, and devices connected to it increases the better usage of technology. It minimizes the power consumption, which is a major cost component because of the distributed multiple systems. The consolidation not only gives the cost effectiveness to the organization but also ensures ROI.

There is a need to build an ecosystem with applications vendors, hardware and software giants, so that organizations can integrate business processes tightly with IT and allow computing resources to be dynamically allocated to users as needed. This can be achieved by a fresh approach to the whole system including data, security and network.

Not easy
It is not a cakewalk for anybody who ventures into this exercise. This involves huge skilled workforce and continuous developmental activities, without disrupting the services currently offered. While you select a product you must look for the scalability and ability to interact with the console or talk to the common source. Otherwise, you end up in spending money on equipment or solutions that are bound to be outdated and integration will not happen. It is not enough that you make old systems perform at their best in a consolidated atmosphere but you should ensure their relevancy for the future. And that is the greatest challenge.

However, as they say necessity is the mother of invention, the consolidation exercise goes on and on as Integration of IT assets is the necessity of the day.

 CIOL Bureau