The solutions listed below are solutions to some of the existing problems that ITf(x) has knowledge about. Definitely most IT organizations have one or more of the following problems. There are some products targeting individual problems. Customers are facing difficulties to buy multiple products for each problem and managing them. Think of managing 10 products for 10 problems, their patches, their configurations. Just think of the complexity managing 10 agents on servers in the data center. In addition to all this customers do not want more hardware into their data center because of manageability reasons. Customers want software that runs on existing hardware.

Application Change Management :

An application is a group of files, configuration settings, registry entries, database configurations, complus+ settings, os user, and os group. In ITf(x) an application can be modeled by grouping the related assets into one application group. This asset group which is an Application Asset Group can be snapshotted/audited across servers.

The advantages of this modeling:

• Application Asset View which shows all the assets that the application is dependent on.
• Downtime because of change or differences in versions of the files etc can be reduced drastically.
• Application can be tracked and detected on the servers. Even if there is a partially installed application on servers (legacy) the tool will detect.
• Configuration knowledge stored digitally and verified in scheduled intervals.

Server Change Management :

Same as Application Change Management. Server consists of configuration files that should be kept under control, like network settings, rsh settings, ssh settings, users, groups. Keep control of all the configurations by auditing the change regularly reducing the configuration drift b/n servers which causes problems in majority of the situations.

Advantages:

• Auditing of the servers will help control the change across the organization.
• Reports on how many changes were done over a day, month, quarter and year. With these reports organizations can control the change by scheduling once every month unless the changes are very critical. This will control adhoc changes. Adhoc changes lead to disasters in IT.

OS Provisioning :

Automating the bare metal provisioning process. Bare Metal provisioning process involves installing the operating system, configuring all network settings and installing software components.

All vendors has this because it is very straight forward to implement. Takes a couple of months to implement OS Provisioning.

Patch Management :

Automated Patch Management depending on the organization policies. Patch Management for windows is very straight forward and there are lot of tools to do that. Patch management for all flavors of Unix is what industry needs.

Very obvious advantages like accountability, reports on what patches are installed, when, compliance on the servers.

Script Management :

Manage all the scripts in the organization in a central database. Control access to scripts depending on the user, group permissions. View output from the scripts in a hierarchical manner. Existing scripts can be stored and versioned in a central database. No need of rewriting scripts. Supports all kinds of scripts like perl, python, ksh, bash, even executable files etc.

Snapshot and Audit output from the script at any scheduled time.

NOTE: ITf(x) manage scripts not write scripts. ITf(x) can write scripts if the customer needs through professional services. As we gain customers we can deliver libraries of scripts for their daily use. The important thing to note hear is the parsing of the output and tying actions to the parsed data.

Customers have tons of scripts already written and finding difficulties to manage them. The admins spend 80% of their time looking at the outputs from the script instead of automating them. IT f(x) provides a convenient way to parse the output compare them with templates and taking actions.

Adhoc Administration :

The fundamental objects in building a product like this will help in adhoc administration.

Some examples are:

• Live Browsing all kinds of server assets like file system, services, processes, configuration files, output from the running scripts etc. In windows browsing registry, metabase, complus, .NET administration information. All of these from a single console.
• Running any command live on any number of servers.

Deployment of packages :

Deployment of packages of any format. Some of the formats of packages rpms, lpps, depots, tar, zip, msi etc. Support for all format packages with multiple stages for deployment.

Packaging the audit changes and deploying the discrepancies b/n the master and all the other servers which IT industry calls as Closed Loop Automation (or) self healing.

Configuration Management Database (CMDB), SOX and ITIL :

CMDB is Configuration Management database which is used to account for all IT assets, to provide accurate information to support other Service Management processes, to provide a sound a base for Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management, to verify records against infrastructure and to correct exceptions. ITf(x) automates collection of data and builds a CMDB which will help IT organizations achieve ITIL and SOX compliance faster than ever.

Financial Management for IT infrastructure:

The object of Financial Management for IT infrastructure is to provide cost effective stewardship of the IT assets and the financial resources used in providing the IT services to manage the IT assets.

Financial management provides the essential management information to ensure that services are run efficiently, economically and cost effectively.  An effective financial management system will assist in the management and reduction of overall long term costs, identify the actual cost of services and their provision, provide accurate and vital financial information to assist in decision making, identify how IT adds value to the customers business, enable the calculation of TCO and ROI, make customers aware of what services actually cost (if appropriate), support the recovery costs, from customer if appropriate, in a fair and equitable manner, provide measurements of value for money, and provide incentives to produce quality services aligned to business needs, help influence customer behavior for example by providing incentives for using non-critical resources, encourage more efficient use of resources, provide better cost information and control of external contracts and suppliers, and to assist in the assessment and management of changes.

Financial Management for IT services is responsible for enabling the organization to account fully for the spend on IT assets both hardware and software licenses and to attribute these costs to the services delivered to the organizations Customers, assist management decisions on IT investment by supporting detailed business cases for Changes to the IT services, and to control and manage the overall IT budget and enable the fair and equitable recovery of costs (by charging) for the provision of IT services.

Some clear examples for this is How much will it cost an organization to migrate from Windows to Linux? How much will it save the organization? How much will it cost to move from Web Logic to Apache?

For this ITf(x) has a vision and a solution to integrate with financial product like SAP, People Soft or any homegrown products.

Release Management for IT organizations :

Release Management should be used for large or critical hardware roll-outs, major software roll-outs and bundling or batching related sets of changes.Release management co-ordinates the many service providers and suppliers involved with a significant Release of hardware, software and associated documentation across a distributed environment.

Release Managements is responsible for planning and overseeing the successful roll-out of new and changed software and associated hardware and documentation, liaison with Change Management to agree exact content and roll-out plan for the Release, ensuring that all items being rolled out or changed are secure and traceable via the CMDB and managing Customers and Users expectations of Releases and roll-outs.

ITf(x) helps IT organizations by integrating ITf(x) Deployment Engine with release management products to give end to end information of what was packaged, when the package was deployed by whom? This information helps to build a full CMDB automatically and accelerate the ITIL process.