Configuration Management is at the heart of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and forms the foundation for Business Service Management (BSM). In fact, it is safe to say that neither the ITIL IT Service Management (ITSM) processes nor the BSM functions that leverage ITSM can be efficiently carried out without accurate configuration and dependency information.

Written by: IDC Abner Germanow, Jonathan Edwards, Lee Doyle IDC believes the convergence of communications and mainstream IT architectures will drive significant innovation in business processes over the next decade.

Many businesses struggle to guarantee application and data availability for Windows applications. They may protect the application from one type of outage (like a disk failure) while ignoring other risks. Or they can end up deploying multiple point solutions to handle different aspects of availability, increasing overall cost and complexity.

This white paper is a business briefing for C-Level Executives on how integrating a range of technologies - including unified communications, service oriented architecture, virtualization and cloud computing - can transform the productivity and profitability of large enterprises.

This is a case study which shows how Leicester Theatre Trust (LTT) implemented a revolutionary communications solution based around a service-orientated Unified Communications architecture from NEC.

This is a case study which shows how Voorhees College implemented a revolutionary communications solution based around a service-orientated Unified Communications architecture from NEC to provide students, faculty and staff in five locations with software-based voice and desktop communications tools to achieve a 40 percent savings over its previous traditional telephony solution.

Businesses over the past ten years have used email archiving solutions in order to meet record retention compliance, facilitate electronic discovery, and control message-related storage costs. Despite these benefits, many organizations still have not adopted an archiving solution and still simply enforce mailbox quotas or message deletion policies as the best way to manage messaging environments.

Enterprise content is growing at an average rate of 200% per year-and the risks of noncompliance are growing even faster. This paper examines the business and technical difficulties of managing content from disparate systems and presents the most viable alternatives for addressing these challenges.

Application management requires visibility from multiple vantage points within the IT enterprise, combined with a centralized information store that pulls the technology pieces of the application puzzle into a coherent whole.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides guidance for the management of IT, and has quickly become the worldwide standard for IT Service Management (ITSM).

Limited visibility has tethered CIOs' success in both IT and business. However, using federated CMDB technology, CIOs can view the complete IT infrastructure and the entire lifecycle of a business service.

In order to provide high quality, cost effective business services in complex, distributed environments, improved IT management strategies are required. Business Service Management (BSM) is a strategic approach to managing IT services in support of improved business performance.

New Enterprise challenge has emerged. With the number of APIs growing rapidly, managing them one-off or via Excel or corporate wiki is no longer feasible. The smartest organizations have discovered a set of best practices to design powerful APIs that leverage existing services, to effectively manage those APIs throughout their lifecycle and to scale their deployment across consumers and devices. This eBook examines the relationship between APIs and services and presents the key elements of a successful API strategy in the form of 7 habits. In this eBook you will learn: - How to leverage existing services in the API economy - Where to get started with your API strategy - Key criteria for selecting an API Management solution - Strategies to overcome API security and identity challenges - How and why to apply the fundamentals of API First Design

IT used to be so simple. Companies owned their own technology equipment and purchased enterprise licenses for many of the applications anybody in the organization might care to use. But then the cloud emerged, and mobile, and social media, and IoT; the world of IT has never been the same. Today's businesses are software-driven enterprises with technology capability distributed throughout the company, utilizing countless third-party cloud-based applications. This new organization requires an cultural shift in the IT organization. Read this whitepaper to learn: -How businesses can reorganize themselves into lightweight, agile, modular businesses able to respond to innovations in SaaS, mobile, and analytics -How to build a technological architecture that can accommodate new technology yet still extract value from on-premises systems -The advantages of an API-led connected architecture vs. old SOA approaches

With IBM MobileFirst and IBM’s Smarter Process, you can redesign how you deliver services and support more streamlined business processes. Therefore, you can help enable your customers to have a more superior mobile experience.

Read about what makes data warehousing as a service different from traditional data warehousing–it’s more than just a data warehouse in the cloud.

Data volumes are getting out of control, but choosing the right information lifecycle governance solution can be a huge challenge, with multiple stakeholders, numerous business processes, and extensive solution requirements. Use this requirements kit from the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council (CGOC) to find the tools and technology you need.

This ebook explains how the TIBCO Fast Data architecture delivers the right information—and the right decision—at the right place and time.

Transitioning your organization to a service-defined model will help your IT department deliver critical applications and capabilities that your lines of business need to stay competitive, at the pace your line of business managers need them. This brief discusses five considerations that will help you understand the benefits of the service-defined enterprise and help make the transition from technology-defined to service-defined a smooth one.

For years, experienced data warehousing (DW) consultants and analysts have advocated the need for a well thought-out architecture for designing and implementing large-scale DW environments. Since the creation of these DW architectures, there have been many technological advances making implementation faster, more scalable and better performing. This whitepaper explores these new advances and discusses how they have affected the development of DW environments.

An innovation-centric approach that combines SOA and API management provides you with a robust integration from the Internet of Things to enterprise back-end systems. An approach to integration that can also generate new business insight and opportunities.

The design principles of SOA make it possible for you to develop new engagements in a way that optimizes value for your organization. IBM provides a strong application foundation and business agility technologies that help you to become a truly engaging enterprise.

Information technology is at a crucial turning point. Enterprise IT departments are under constant pressure to meet user and application demands, aware that cloud deployments offer an easier and faster alternative but often pinned down by legacy deployment models. The problem stems from the inability of those legacy models to adapt to meet expectations for rapid provisioning, continuous delivery, and consistent performance across multiple environments. Read this whitepaper to learn more about the evolution of application delivery and the services your enterprise can utilize to successfully manage the increased pressure on network and application infrastructure.

The application delivery controller has evolved into a key component of the data center architecture, and enterprises should evaluate ADCs based on how they integrate with this architecture and support more-advanced features, such as user and traffic control and monitoring.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has conducted extensive research investigating the integration and management challenges created by the convergence of on-premise and public Cloud hosted applications. Research conducted in mid-2012 uncovered some compelling statistics about the role of Cloud integration in today's companies: Nearly 50% of the companies surveyed have already deployed tiered transactions spanning public Cloud and on-premise computing environments (one form of "hybrid Cloud") Approximately 35% have integrated (or are in the process of integrating) multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. As one IT professional put it, "Everything is connected to everything." Because of this fact, any discussionof public Cloud as a standalone technology is outmoded. Few modern on-premise applications exist as"silos," and the same is true of Cloud-delivered applications.