Most people within IT fraternity agree that cloud computing does impact the manner in which technology is used in the industry, and also brings about a change in the way IT operations man-age infrastructure. So I am not surprised when a number of traditional "point- product" IT Service Management (ITSM) products make way for the new cloud computing operational paradigm.

When I read Gartner's report titled Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management 2009, I was struck by the number of technology categories that may really need to change in a cloud model. In fact, cloud computing was at the peak of Gartner's overall Technology Hype Cycle for 2009. In my assessment, there are five ways in which an ITSM product could transform in a cloud model:

Overall increase in use due to IT operations created by the automation within a cloud infrastructure. With more dynamic resource requirements, a few ITSM tools may become more valuable than others. For example, take a billing or chargeback application. Clearly any provider of cloud computing will need them to provide the pay-as-you-go economic model, particularly as individual resource needs shift over time. Same holds true for tools such as dynamic workload brokering, etc.

Overall decrease due to the automation or virtualisation within a cloud infrastructure. As automation begins to manage resources within the cloud, certain closely-monitored managed services may simply get obviated. Take for example application-specific capacity planning; no longer will this matter to the degree it used to now that we have "elastic" cloud capacity.

Similarly, things like event correlation might no longer be needed by the end-user because automation shields them from need to know about infrastructure-related issues.

Shift in use to the cloud operator will have its own impact. The IT service provider will tend to use certain ITSM tools more. For example, Asset Management, Global Capacity Management and QoS tools necessarily mean nothing to the end-user now, but may still be critically-important to the SP.

Shift in use to the cloud end-user i.e. the cloud user may tend to use certain ITSM tools more because they do not directly 'own' or manage the infrastructure anymore. They just manage executable images. i.e. end-users using IaaS clouds will need to maintain their application and service portfolio tools to manage uploadable images, etc. Conversely, users may no longer care about configuration auditing tools since that would not be managed by the cloud provider.

Transition from being app-specific to environment-specific is a shift from tools being used to monitor a limited-scope application stack to a large shared infrastructure. Capacity and consolidation planning tools are no longer of any interest to the end user. But to the cloud operator, knowing global capacity and utilisation is critical.

In retrospect, I can probably concoct exceptions to almost every example above. So keep in mind the examples are illustrative only! The diagram (see figure, IT Ops Tool Shift and Cloud Computing) is also mostly conceptual; I am not an ITSM professional. But while it may be a bit of a 'hack', I'm hoping it provides food for thought on how certain tools may evolve, and where certain tools may be useful in new/different ways. I've selected a number of ITSM tools from Gartner's IT Ops Management Hype Cycle report to populate it with.

koestreich@egenera.com