Total estimated project time is six to eight weeks. InterBank will deploy 1,200 agents; three core servers with high availability; and between eight and 10 configuration templates across Windows, Linux and VMware. Throughout the process, deep involvement on the organization side will ensure a smooth transition, including an internal project manager and representatives of the various roles involved in the use and administration of the SCM system. The job will be scoped by the vendor and will be a fixed-price engagement. InterBank's implementation will combine internal staff and professional services over six to eight weeks, for a total cost of $108,462 to $144,616.
We're limiting costing to only SAS and Operations Manager. However, big technology investments are not just about today's project; they're but one step along the IT service management journey. Therefore, it's worthwhile to dig into these vendors' complementary offerings, which in many cases will be the primary differentiator.
For example, while SAS takes care of auditing and distribution configurations, Opsware also has entered the IT service dependency mapping market through its Visual Application Manager. With this product, customers can discover communications among application components and illustrate how an app is distributed and dependent on other elements of the infrastructure. Opsware includes this VAM component for $25,000 for each core server and $100 additional per agent.
BladeLogic enables service dependency discovery through its Discovery Manager, which provides much of the same underlying data as Opsware's VAM. However, Opsware VAM provides richer visualization of this data.
Through acquisition and OEM, respectively, Opsware and BladeLogic offer complementary products to handle orchestration of activities that must take place in the incident-, change- and release-management processes. These IT automation suites make it significantly easier to fit configuration management products into CMDB, trouble ticketing, fault management or change workflow tools.
