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PR03074 5 Jun 2003
Microsoft Launches Operational Excellence Vision to Help Customers Reduce the Total Cost of IT Ownership
London - UK - June 5th 2003 - Microsoft is today announcing its Operational Excellence initiative, aimed at reducing cost of ownership and improving quality of service in the Microsoft environment, through simplified infrastructure and improved service and systems management. The initiative, developed in response to customer feedback, delivers a mix of best practice guidance, services, solutions and tools to help customers significantly improve return on investment and achieve enterprise class availability, manageability and security.
Many IT organisations place most importance on technology. Gartner however estimates that over 80% of downtime is actually caused by people or process failures and that only 20% is caused by technology failure itself. They also estimate that by adopting service management best practices, organisations could achieve a reduction in their annual total cost of ownership (TCO) of up to 48%.
This initiative has been developed with this in mind and aims to simplify the management of a company's infrastructure, in any circumstance, resulting in reduced down time, improved quality of service and lower IT costs.
"Operational Excellence forms the cornerstone of our service provision effort. In the management of our Microsoft infrastructure it took three months to implement a service management solution. In that time we went from "zero to hero" in terms of realising true levels of service benefits for our Microsoft based customers." Brian Popperwell, technical services manager, LogicaCMG.
Peter Cummins, head of business critical services at Microsoft UK said: "For a variety of reasons many customers feel that their Microsoft environment is too complex, that they have too many servers to support their required services and that there is too much diversity across the Microsoft domain, making it difficult and costly to manage change. We recognise the need to address this and by working alongside our partners, we are helping our customers move closer towards Operational Excellence and our vision of making Windows the best-managed environment in the IT landscape."
Microsoft's approach to achieving this improved state of "Operational Excellence" has two strands. Firstly, simplify the infrastructure through a process of architectural rationalisation and server consolidation. Secondly, better management of the essentials, embracing service management (better adoption of best practices and processes) and systems management (introduction of automation and tools).
"This approach is interdependent and our recommendation is for customers to assess themselves and identify the relevant areas for improvement. Microsoft's tools and best practice guidance will help them to put good change management and effective processes in place to automate this," explained Cummins.
Dave Bingham F.I.S.M., global practice leader at Fujitsu, said: "The recently launched Windows Server 2003 offers many new features aimed at improving operational excellence, enabling clients to achieve high levels of manageability and operability across all their platforms. True Operational Excellence will always be a mix of process, people and technology. These new initiatives from Microsoft are a major contribution to Operational Excellence. For organisations with a significant Microsoft estate, the potential business benefits are significant."
Having an operationally excellent Microsoft environment will enable IT organisations to respond to the needs of the business with agility, accommodating the introduction of new changes to existing services more quickly and effectively.
There are three key areas underpinning Microsoft's Operational Excellence offering -
1. Simplified Architecture
Microsoft Systems Architecture (MSA) is a target architecture for the core infrastructure in an IT environment. It has been designed to provide customers with best practice guidance on how to combine Microsoft products with each other, and with the third party products required, to create a complete infrastructure solution. MSA provides a tested blueprint for new data centers as well as a means of benchmarking a current infrastructure. MSA is available for both the Internet Data Center and Enterprise Data Center. www.microsoft.com/solutions/msa)
2. Management
Service Management
tThe Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is a Microsoft-specific variant of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of service management best practices documented by the UK Office of Government Commerce.
MOF provides guidance for achieving mission-critical reliability, availability, supportability and manageability on Microsoft technologies. It does this through the provision of white papers, operations guides, assessment tools, operations kits, best practices, case studies, templates, support tools and services. These resources address the people and processes as well as the technologies needed for effective management of complex, distributed mixed-vendor environments (www.microsoft.com/mof).
Systems Management
Customers can optimise systems management of their windows environment by exploiting the management features built into the platform as standard and also by adoption of systems management tools. The Microsoft offerings include:
Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) - helps reduce the day-to-day support costs associated with running application and services and provides the operational knowledge necessary to keep mission-critical applications and systems running smoothly. (www.microsoft.com/mom)
Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) - delivers real business value in a number of areas including more robust security, up-to-date inventories, rapid deployments, cost-effective support and fast troubleshooting. (www.microsoft.com/smserver)
Microsoft Application Center - Application Center is Microsoft's deployment and management tool for high-availability web applications. Application Center deploys applications quickly and easily whilst minimising in-depth application knowledge requirements. This in turn reduces application management complexity, manages many servers as one and streamlines application deployment. (www.microsoft.com/applicationcenter)
3. Service and Systems Integration
Microsoft's Solutions for Management (MSM) combine best practice implementation services and best practice automation to help customers address real management challenges on the Microsoft platform. The first release of MSM offers four service offerings:
Critical Patch Management - Services that enable deployment of patches, fixes and service packs securely and effectively, using Systems Management Server 2.0 (SMS) or Software Update Services (SUS).
New Application Deployment- Quick and effective roll-out of new applications such as Microsoft Office XP, using an automated and repeatable method; a comprehensive plan for deploying new applications using Systems Management Server 2.0 (SMS).
Service Monitoring and Control - To help in delivering high levels of availability and performance, this service includes an improvement component for monitoring plus control procedures and best practices for monitoring, control and implementation of Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 (MOM).
Operations Assessment - This service identifies the top issues, process gaps and technology gaps within the IT operating environment and then provides the templates and tools for addressing each in a logical, structured way.
(www.microsoft.com/solutions/msm)
To bring further emphasis to this, Microsoft has formed a consulting group - Business Critical Services - who is completely focused on helping customers bring technology, management systems and processes together. From planning through to operations, this group offers both the proactive consulting and reactive support services required to deliver improved Operational Excellence to customers in areas such as availability, manageability and security. Some of these services include critical systems orientation and review, critical incident services, incident prevention services, MOF assessment, dedicated support and Premier support.
Partner Services - Microsoft Partners offer a range of complementary consulting and support services to help customers achieve improved operational excellence at all stages of the solution lifecycle. Microsoft is working with four key partners to effectively deliver the Operational Excellence initiative to customers. These partners are Fujitsu, Avanade, Unisys and HP.
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