The agility and speed required by today’s digital businesses can seem impossible to manage. If you’re running your infrastructure and operations (I&O) in a hybrid environment, you’re likely scrambling to support business operations and keep applications performing at their best amid ever-expanding data streams. How are digital leaders tackling this? One word: integration. By converging IT operations management (ITOM) and IT service management (ITSM) into a single artificial intelligence (AI)- and machine learning (ML)-enriched platform, businesses are quickly achieving competitive advantages that include actionable data insights, event noise reduction, and quicker problem resolution.

A new white paper, Maximizing the Value of Hybrid IT with Converged Operations and Service Management Processes, examines the results of a worldwide survey by BMC Software and Hanover Research of 340 I&O leaders at companies of all sizes, industries, and regions. The survey and the paper sought to understand the trends, benefits, and challenges of moving toward a comprehensive platform that integrates ITOM and ITSM into a single, converged view. While few companies have fully merged both teams, 73 percent of respondents have a strategy in place and 19 percent have proceeded to integration.

Survey respondents cited service quality and speed as the expected benefits of implementing a unified solution.

57 percent expect to leverage big data and AI/ML to understand user behavior and manage huge volumes of data and complexity.
42 percent hope to accelerate time-to-market by removing roadblocks and delivering quality services faster.
42 percent want to leverage cross-discipline expertise to increase productivity and cut costs.

Instead of adopting disjointed toolsets and lightly integrated platforms that are inherently more prone to errors, it makes the most sense to turn to a single platform that can address all of your requirements. In this age of multi-cloud complexity, DevOps initiatives, huge volumes of data, and new cloud-native apps, the importance of monitoring and event management is increasing.

To ensure better performance in the digital economy, companies are aware of the need for a holistic monitoring and intelligent event management strategy that’s centralized into a single pane of glass across hybrid environments. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions have emerged as the model of choice for the new breed of converged platforms, with ease of deployment and upgrade, elastic scalability, and enterprise-grade performance as the major benefits. It’s no wonder, then, that 71 percent of respondents are already using SaaS.

Even with such significant benefits awaiting and a widespread awareness of SaaS, companies still face internal hurdles before converged ITOM-ITSM is the new normal. The biggest obstacles for survey respondents include outdated IT systems (70 percent), the costs of the overhaul (68 percent), and obtaining executive buy-in, which ranged from 54 to 77 percent, variable by region.

For more information on the trends, benefits, and challenges of moving to a an ITOM and ITSM platform click here for the full Maximizing the Value of Hybrid IT with Converged Operations and Service Management Processes white paper.

Want a Unified Approach to Monitoring and Event Management? You’re Not Alone.