July Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Systems Management and Remote Management

Message from Taos CEO and Co-Founder, Ric Urrutia, and Co-Founder, Alexis Tatarsky

It may be axiomatic - as society develops, our lives grow more and more complex. But perhaps the same need not be said for our IT departments or the jobs of the people who staff them. It will be quite some time before the holy grail of self-maintaining computing infrastructure is achieved, but there are emerging opportunities today for substantially simplifying the administration and maintenance of systems, networks, and applications. And with that simplification come substantial cost savings, increases in reliability, and improvements in the flexibility of both applications and infrastructure.

There are more systems and more complex interactions between systems today than ever before, and hands-on system management is fast becoming a quaint idea from a simpler time. Ultimately, some version of “middleware” needs to know not only about systems configurations and application resource requirements, but also about our businesses and the myriad ways our businesses relate to our suppliers and customers as well.

Underlying this “big picture” vision is a simpler concept: Remote Management and the associated concept of remote monitoring as applied to systems, networks, and applications. In this issue of IT Intelligence, we take several views of the opportunities that lie in remote management.

This month’s client-contributed article is by Brian Higginbotham, the Remote Management Architect for a Fortune 500 company. Higginbotham manages a multi-thousand user SMS client-base, and writes specifically about the technologies available for Microsoft environments. He discusses WMI, Microsoft’s implementation of the web-based enterprise management framework WBEM, as well as applications of SMS for hardware and software inventory and distribution, application metering, remote troubleshooting and more.

This month’s CIO interview is with Jeff Lucchesi of Corio, Inc. Corio is a very successful Application Service Provider whose business depends on effective monitoring and management tools. Corio provides ERP and CRM solutions including Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and other applications on an ASP basis. Its customers demand an exceptional level of service and reliability, as well as competitive pricing, and Corio has responded by making the most of tools such as BMC, RealTec and HP Openview and developing an excellent set of tools itself for managing security and datacenters across the U.S. and the around world.

Finally, Taos ’s own Professional Services Group talks about a number of ways we have helped customers implement systems and remote management solutions to address a variety of specific goals and objectives. In some cases, the best solution has involved commercially available products. In other cases, g iven today’s IT climate - with many IT managers, directors, and CIOs still remembering the lessons in IT spending learned during the “Dot-Com” boom and subsequent bust - it comes as no surprise that many companies prefer to lean more towards open source tools or custom solutions. In other cases, some combination of commercial, open source, and custom code has proved the best.

Whatever the approach, the effective deployment and utilization of remote management tools is a competitive advantage at the heart of every leading IT organization today. Taos helps our clients achieve that advantage by providing the specialized expertise needed to make the most of the opportunity. If you would like to discuss the potential in your own environment, please let us know.

Ric Urrutia

CEO & Co-Founder

Alexis Tatarsky

Co-Founder

Taos

"delivering excellence in IT”