Method and apparatus for technology resource management

• US 20060293942A1
• Filed: 08/28/2006
• Published: 12/28/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 04/06/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Corio, Inc (International Business Machines Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Corio, Inc (International Business Machines Corporation)
• Inventors: Rai, Kamini, Whittle, John, Masrani, Sandeep, Gallie, William Stuart, Martinez, Tino, Chin, Arthur L., O'Crowley, Oisin Joseph, Chaddha, Parmeet S., Milatovich, Mark
• Granted Patent: US 7,660,731 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/7.12
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/0631 Resource planning, allocation, distributing or scheduling for enterprises or organisations
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/0639 Performance analysis of employees; Performance analysis of enterprise or organisation operations

Abstract

Apparatus, and associated methods, manage technology resources in hosted applications including: demand, service level agreements, assets both hardware and software, projects, labor, knowledge and provisioning. The apparatus includes an asset manager configured to couple to host servers and a network, to manage the host servers and software deployed thereon. In embodiments of the invention the asset manager: determines demand for new assets and allocates available assets to meet the demand; determines assets not in compliance with existing software licenses; determines which host servers have actual service level metrics which are not compliant with the target service level metrics; and determines availability of a patch or upgrade for selected software and instances of the selected software among the assets. In an embodiment of the invention the asset manager couples to a contract manager with the asset manager determining the assets for which actual monitored service level metrics violate contract service level metrics. In an embodiment of the invention the asset manager couples to a product manager and scans the host severs to determine which have actual security metrics which are not compliant with the target security metrics managed by the product manager. In an embodiment of the invention the asset manager couples with a product manager, a work manager and an accounting manager to compare the actual costs of the new assets from the accounting manager and the work manager with the price of the assets from the product record.

Claims

1. An apparatus for managing technology resources including host servers selected ones of which provide at least one application accessible to clients across a network;

and the apparatus comprising;

a contract manager managing contracts for each client and with each contract expressed in terms of contract parameters including at least service level metrics; and

an asset manager coupled to the contract manager and configured to couple to the host servers and to the network, and the asset manager managing assets including the host servers and software deployed thereon by monitoring actual service level metrics of the assets and by determining the assets for which actual monitored service level metrics violate contract service level metrics.

2. The apparatus for managing technology resources of claim 1, wherein the asset manager further monitors service level metrics over a portion of a billing interval and projects service level metrics for an entire billing interval to determine the assets for which projected service level metrics may violate contract service level metrics.

3. An apparatus for managing technology resources including host servers selected ones of which provide at least one application accessible to clients across a network;

and the apparatus comprising;

an asset manager configured to couple to the host servers and to the network, to manage assets including the host servers, software deployed thereon, and associated leases and licenses, and the asset manager comparing monitored software utilization on each of the host servers with the corresponding licenses to determine non-compliant assets.

4. An apparatus for managing technology resources including host servers selected ones of which provide at least one application accessible to clients across a network;

and the apparatus comprising;

a product manager managing product definitions including a catalog with product records each of which lists the assets associated with each product and security metrics for each asset; and

an asset manager coupled to the product manager and configured to couple to the host servers and the network, to manage assets including the host servers and software deployed thereon, and the asset manager comparing actual security metrics from a scan of each host server with target security metrics for the corresponding host server in the corresponding product record to determine which host servers have actual security metrics which are not compliant with the target security metrics.

5. The apparatus for managing technology resources of claim 4, wherein the asset manager further tags non-compliant assets with a warning indicia.

6. The apparatus for managing technology resources of claim 4, wherein the security metrics include at least one of:

port availability, service availability, and password vulnerability.