The Community Portal Web site is where you will be able to get early information on releases, share your experiences openly with us and other customers, have access to product knowledge bases and technical notes, make suggestions on new features, upload and download new software recognition definitions, automated application uninstall Package Definitions, and so on. 

We look forward greatly to the improvements this will bring in customers’ experience as users of our products, and to the help this will give Vector in allocating its resources to best serve its expanding customer base.  If you are interested, please send mail to me at cbartram@vector-networks.com.

All the best for Christmas and for 2009.

Virtual machines usually increase the efficiency of use of existing computing resources, and that can drive rapid growth in numbers. As a result, some IT departments are finding virtual machines are spiraling out of their control; they become invisible. For organizations adopting best practice processes of asset management and change management, such as ITIL, or ISO 19770, this loss of control is a particular headache. But even without adopting any of these governance framework approaches, your software policies, software licenses and inventory information are as important for virtual machines as they are for standard, ‘real’ computers.

Some vendors have unique solutions for virtual machines, but what organizations really have is a mix of both, real and virtual, and from different vendors.

While I wait for our main Web content and product collateral to be refreshed, I want all our customers and visitors to know that Vector already provides full visibility and complete information of the hardware and software of virtual machines from VMware, Microsoft and other leading vendors.

For most of the time, real and virtual machines will be managed as a single population. However, Vector Asset Management discovers, recognizes and differentiates virtual machines from real machines and allows the IT administrator to manage them in the most effective way.  Specifically, the ability to define virtual machines in dynamic groups enables administrators to target particular actions to one sub-set of PCs or another. For example, an application update could be distributed to only the virtual machines in a particular department. In our v5.5 release, which is currently out in the field as Release Candidate, default Dynamic Groups are provided to segregate different vendor VMs in your environment.

Why not grab a feed from this Blog to hear when v5.5 is on general release? Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your views on the management needs for the VMs in your networks.

But just about everyone is convinced that they have under-used and totally unused applications installed across their network.  So the first item on the agenda - even before an audit - is to quantify the what and where of your unused applications. Then, when your audit is complete, you are already armed with information on where you have spare, unused application copies that can be removed to assist in achieving compliance on licensing. Monthly reports highlight any new anomalies that could indicate potential savings.

The whole Software Asset Optimization process of assessing true application requirements, deploying only where needed, and monitoring usage as the feedback loop, is now a practical proposition. We believe it is long overdue.

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Everywhere you look today most people and organisations are looking at ways of saving money to get through what the media refer to as the “credit crunch”.  In our day-to-day lives this means cutting back on life’s little luxuries but what does this mean to organisations who are also having to deal with spiralling energy and travel costs?

Here at Virtual Network Partners, and in collaboration with our partners, we are focussing on assisting organisations to understand their software licensing and recommending how money can be saved through licensing optimisation.  Combining Vector’s Asset Manager and Application Jukebox, we are offering our AppVelocity service to both customers and MSPs alike.

Through speaking to businesses, it is clear that many organisations aren’t sure what is installed on their PCs or even how many licenses are being used, especially if employees home work or spend a lot of time away from the corporate LAN.  Recent research has shown that some 26% of software is being run illegally throughout the UK alone. This unlicensed software may have been installed from the end user’s own collection or simply downloaded from the internet.

Recently we have been field testing the new web-enabled IT asset management software from Vector Networks. We’ve decided it will provide what we need to be able to provide a web-based solution enabling any size organisation to quickly understand where they can save money through optimising their software licenses.  As part of the AppVelocity service the savings would be achieved through the Application Jukebox, where hosting and tightly managing a software library for those expensive but rarely used applications means they can provided to users strictly as required. We believe the AppVelocity package is ideal for those companies selling a service into organisations.

Here at Virtual we believe the ability to audit and understand application installation patterns and usage will prove to be invaluable for those organisations looking to save money in today’s business environments. 

I want to focus for a minute on the statement that “With IT asset management becoming more seamlessly integrated into overall business management, Vector field engineers were finding that customers had a need to layer the capabilities of Issue Tracker onto their Vector IT Asset Management installations.”

I have always believed this was inevitable, as IT matured from being an isolated, backroom function beyond the grasp of the boardroom, to a key factor in delivering and maximizing profit and enabling business agility. But in these last five years, a significant new factor has come into play, that of corporate governance. Under this label we can collect the new legislation around accountability in areas such as security of data, (SOX, etc) and new standards such as ISO19770 on Software Asset Management.

Now, it doesn’t just matter what you do, it matters how you do it. Whether you have taken enough care over decisions that in any way affect your stakeholders, whether staff, customers, shareholders or members of the public.

The ability to show that due diligence was exercised in day-to-day decisions such as deciding which software to buy, or how to respond to the crisis when a laptop is stolen with a bunch of customer records, is important for everyone with accountability on their plates. 

I am hoping to be able to provide some real-life examples in the coming weeks. If you identify in any way with these statements, please comment or get in touch directly.

Most system administrators have spent their careers in stabilising the end-user computing environments. Homogeneity and consistency have been virtues. At a superficial level, the self-service model can appear to be a threat to this old order. The idea of the ‘typical’ end-user desktop community having access to a general catalog of applications is scary. Pity the help desk if the typical mortal starts playing with MS Project, or decides it’s time they got familiar with desktop publishing.

There will of course be categories of user where these risks are minimal. But I suspect that most sysadmins will want to ensure that the applications that 99% of their users can see on offer to them are closely profiled to their needs - potentially controlled through Active Directory. In which case - how does this differ from having applications conventionally deployed through AD?

I think the answer lies not so much in streaming itself, as to what it enables. If we take the definition of application streaming offered by Barb Goldworm, principal analyst at Focus on Systems,

“Application streaming is a form of on-demand application deployment, where the application is broken up into blocks and streamed over a network to be executed in a remote server or desktop, typically executing in a virtual application environment. The application image is stored centrally, but executed on the remote server or desktop.”

There is no limit here to the intelligence which can be layered on top, and through the control of the virtual application environment on the desktop. Application Jukebox, the streaming implementation  that we are concerned with, has powerful user-grouping and application administration capabilities that provide the owner with far more control than the product name implies, and more than can be achieved with conventionally installed applications. At Vector we have a particular interest in layering a request approval process over Application Jukebox, using the issue tracking and workflow capabilities of our HelpDesk architecture to handle instances where a user asks for an application for which they do not already have de-facto approval.

For our next post on this topic I’m hoping to welcome a guest blogger, Warren Free, of Virtual Network Partners. He gets to spend more time face to face with people charged with taking their organizations virtual, and it will be good to hear his latest feedback from the real world.

The other is a major review of ”Desktop and Application Delivery Alternatives” published by Focus Consulting.  The review provides down to earth profiling of the major takes on application virtualization, and relates them to the challenges of optimizing and managing the end-user environment. It includes 19 vendor solution summaries, principally so each one can be correctly categorized. The review can be purchased through Focus’s Web site, and to tempt you I am delighted to be able to offer the Executive Summary for free download.

Meanwhile, we are looking forward to transitioning from Endeavor’s AppExpress to Application Jukebox in our Application Provisioning solution, and I’ll be delighted to bring you our impressions as we get to know the technology more intimately.

Since we introduced Software Usage Monitoring and enabled customers to identify unused application copies and hence reduce their inventory of installed software, we have found that economics is the primary driver for Software Asset Management in the USA, with compliance coming in second. That echoes what the CEO of the UK’s Federation Against Software Theft once told me, that a feasibility study circa 2005 on opening a FAST office in the US had found that concern over lack of license compliance was nearly non-existent at that time. “It’s only the big guys that get raided.” was a typical response from the mid-range corporation.

I’d very much like to hear what you think about this. Is software license compliance a board-level issue in your organization? Are you pursuaded by the argument that addressing license compliance will often reveal more opportunity for ditching unused software than need to buy extra licenses?   Please post your comments on this, or if you prefer,  Mail me your views, under the Subject heading Global SAM Attitudes. And no, we wont be passing any comments on to either BSA or FAST!

The aim of this blog is to keep in touch with daily realities, so I have to note that over the years we have seen that multi-vendor interoperability can usually be achieved by either of two basic routes: a) error-free adoption of ’standards’, and b) a mix of pragmatism, openness and cooperation - which can be very potent and efficient and to the customer’s benefit.

The only technical requirements for a help desk from Vendor A to be able to import configuration data from Vendor B’s asset database are -

1) A common back-end database standard; it isn’t vital but it can help if both products run off SQL-compatible databases.

2) A published schema for the configuration data, and some sample SQL queries that illustrate the simplest expressions for extracting popular items of data.

We have seen this work both ways, with inventory data being pulled in from someone else’s database into our HelpDesk UI, and with configuration information being pulled from our AM Database into another vendor’s help desk, such as Remedy.

Meanwhile we wait to see what practical benefits can be derived from the standard emerging from CMDBf. Somehow I don’t think it will do away with the need for pragmatism, openness and cooperation in ensuring effective multi-vendor interoperability.