Hey Axton, I agree completely that what you are describing is a better technical design. I guess the big question in terms of BMC's ITSM apps is, is that kind of design in BMC's interest as much as it is in a customer's interest? I'm not crapping on BMC specifically for this, but the goal of all large software companies that create integrated apps is to sell those apps. Thus, they don't want to make it too easy to mix and match with other vendors tools, but rather want to pass muster on the purchasing checklist that says "it can be done". The larger a software company becomes, the more true this is. >From an ARS platform perspective, Remedy/BMC have done an excellent job, better then most, at making the tools available to integrate any way you want. When it comes to the apps themselves, it is a different story, at least so far. I suspect in the battle for development funds, making it easier to integrate some other vendor's app as a replacement for one of the ITSM suite apps will always come second to new features/apps, better performance, etc... The only way that will change is if the market demands it or some other internal BMC driver forces it as a way to sell something new. That is just a business reality. But from a technical design perspective, I think your RFC dart is in the bullseye! Cheers!
_____ From: Axton [mailto:axton.gr...@gmail.com] Sent: November 1, 2011 7:59 PM Subject: Request for Comments ** This is more a high level discussion and is concept/design oriented. Please feel free to chime in with your thoughts. I look forward to the collective wisdom of this list. I is my hope that a a constructive discussion can happen around this subject and the powers that be can gain insight gleaned from the discussion. First, a little background. I was in the Help Desk/ITSM space, left that arena for a few years, and have since returned. After working with the ITSM application for a few short months I am realizing how tightly ingrained these applications are with one another (incident, problem, asset, change, cmdb, etc.). The tightly coupled integrations make certain tasks exceedingly difficult, for example: - using an outside system for change management (or any other process, for that matter) - upgrading a single application in the stack (e.g., change management) - integrating outside applications with the ITSM applications Non-remedy or custom remedy applications are unable to easily or effectively communicate with the ITSM applications in the same way that the ITSM applications communicate with one another. Even different versions of the applications are unable to effectively communicate. Consider that each application facilitates a well defined process. Each process has inputs, outputs, and actions. The ITSM applications could have (and leverage, internally) interfaces to communicate their inputs and inputs, outputs, and actions. Java Interfaces are an implementation of this design pattern that are a prime example of the flexibilities that this can afford. Interfaces form a contract between the class and the outside world... -- http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/concepts/interface.html Interfaces can be versioned (e.g., 'Create Incident' interface version 1 supports a field ,Priority; 'Create Incident' interface version 2 supports a new field, Urgency, etc.). By creating an interface (i.e., a contract) and back-end instrumentation to implement the interface, applications could be upgraded independent of one another; all the communicating components need to know is the version of the interface and that dictates the capabilities of said interface. With this idea, I am borrowing from the approach that many of the SOA stacks are implementing: One the most popular approaches for dealing with changes is versioning. Versioning assumes simultaneous existence of multiple (different) implementations of the same thing, with every implementation distinguishable and individually addressable. In the case of SOA, service versioning equates to coexistence of multiple versions of the same service, which allows each consumer to use the version that it is designed and tested for (see Figure 1). In this case, a new version of a service is created based on the requirements of one or more consumers, which can start using this new version immediately. The other consumers of this service do not need to switch to using the latest version immediately, but can continue to use the versions of the service they were designed for and tested with. They can switch to the latest version of service, based on their own development and testing schedule. Multiple coexisting versions of the same service in the system allows for the independent life cycles of services and their consumers and minimizes the overall impact of the introduction of changes. Although the necessity of such versioning mechanism may be obvious to anyone who has ever dealt with services, this topic still has not penetrated the mainstream of SOA publications and implementations. -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491124.aspx#jour11version_topic3 A few key concepts here: - Interfaces and versioning - Well defined interfaces - Interface life-cycle (e.g., the last 3 major versions of the interfaces will remain supported, after which, they are deprecated) - Loosely coupled applications (to the extent that the applications could run on different physical servers/databases) that leverage only the interfaces the applications provide as a means of communication Such a change to the current paradigm would open the doors to a lot of things that are simply not feasible at this time, all of which start with better interoperability. This is something that is important in the cloud space. A proper implementation of the above ideas would lead an application that is easily pluggable into a SOA backbone so that the services the applications provide can be used by any other application that is able to reach out to the SOA backbone. I think that running each application within ITSM on separate servers would be a good gauge of an effective implementation of this paradigm. I look forward to your thoughts. Regards, Axton Grams _attend WWRUG12 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
