Biz software mgmt catches fancy of India Inc

Business Software Management (BSM) solutions are fast catching the fancy of Indian firms like Tata Motors, VSNL and Wipro.

For Wipro, a provider of comprehensive IT solutions and services to corporations globally, the implementation of a BSM solution in its Global Command Centre -- a 24*7*365 operation -- meant the "automatic routing of calls to the right department and person with the right skillsets. Additionally, BSM also automatically allocated focus on call priorities depending on type of incident and the criticality of the affected asset," according to G K Prasanna, vice president, Technology Infrastructure Services, Wipro Technologies.

BSM tools, according to Forrester, do not replace the existing monitoring and management tools that IT uses. These monitoring tools are simply data collectors and produce raw data. The raw data produced by the data silos must be made relevant to a business service model to provide true information on the state and health of a business process. "Operations account for 75 per cent of the overall IT budgets, and firms can save 25 per cent of their IT budget by implementing BSM or automation solutions," states a Forrester report.

Toyota Motorsport GmBH, for instance, uses BSM solutions to help it provide complete end-to-end design and manufacturing of the Formula 1 (F1) cars in-house with requirements of manufacturing modified versions of the car from design to testing within a week.

Waldemar Klemm, IT Systems manager at Toyota Motorsport says: "BSM solutions provide us with the best opportunity to understand and avoid the business consequences of IT failures. For instance, if the SAP system becomes unavailable, parts cannot be ordered. Without parts, construction is delayed and productivity falls. If productivity falls, service suffers and we may fail to honor Service Level Agreements, these situations are now aviodable with BSM. It offers detailed accurate information about each service, servers, clients and the power to manage the lifecycle of assets across the entire infrastructure. Using the historical information we have gathered, we can predict the potential impact of losing any one service and plan strategies for managing such situations that will minimise their impact."

The BSM market, according to a Forrester report for the first quarter of 2007, "is a relatively new field with the technology still in 'work in progress', and no complete end-to-end vendor solution still available as of today." However, industry demand for BSM solutions are already on a roll. "BSM is a $5-6 billion solutions market and growing at 10-12 per cent on an average," according to Kia Behnia, chief corporate architect, CTO office, BMC Software, one of the leading provider of business service management solutions.

The problem is obviously much larger. "The labour cost for management of IT infrastructure is a $160 billion market growing at 10 per cent per annum, hence automation is a pressing industry need," notes Behnia, who adds: "BSM is about people, processes and automation on top as against just automation for the sake of automating."