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Posts Tagged ‘hybrid car’
Examples of software and IT services related to business
I was intrigued by the tagline on this new blog, g2zero: Better Code == Business, which I take to mean that better code is equivalent to better business. I wondered if they would be like-minded about the principles of our Business Service Management concepts, so I took a look. And, I was rewarded for my perusal with this gem of a post: Entries from the Software Failure Hall of Shame. It has several examples of software problems and their direct affects on the business’s bottom line.
Yes, software and IT services will fail, but your ability to react and keep the priorities of the business and the customer first will set the standard for your success. This Toyota Prius hybrid car example is an excellent one, showing that you can manage your incidents gracefully and proactively and avoid negative publicity. I have posted before about hybrid car technology so this was right up my alley.
The Toyota Prius engine management flaw. In October of 2005, the Toyota Motor Company voluntarily recalled 75,000 of its hybrid vehicles because a software glitch that may have shut down the engine. Given the high price of gasoline at the time and the rising interest from consumers in hybrid vehicles, the recall could have been a major blow to the manufacturer. However, due to Toyotas quick response, most consumers never experienced the flaw, and while the company may have suffered slightly from the negative publicity, it managed to avoid having its defect become permanently associated with the vehicle line or with hybrid safety.
Great set of examples. I plan to keep an eye on this blog.
Hybrid approach for performance monitoring
A recent news story points out that hybrid cards aren’t getting gas mileage that drivers expected based on EPA testing. Consumer Reports is testing hybrids with their own standards, which they hope offer a realistic test environment. The automotive industry is responding by encouraging drivers to take courses that will help drivers change their driving habits so that the combined technologies are optimized. However, the winning proposition given by a hybrid vehicle is that the combination of two technologies should give you the benefits of each while lessening the detrimental affects of one or the other. Each technology should be able to help the other.
Interestingly, electric and gas combustion combinations aren’t the only hybrids available either. Before the holidays, slashdotters were talking about the fact that BMW just announced a steam hybrid engine that collects 80% of the heat off the exhaust systems and reuses it to assist the gas engine, offering power and torque gains. With these automotive hybrids, you gain the extra power and pickup of a gas-based vehicle when you need it, but also conserve gas and dollars at the pump by relying on electric power when you can.
Much like a hybrid vehicle’s technology choices, BMC Performance Manager has choices for you to deploy agents to collect data, or to use a lightweight piece to collect only the data you’re most interested in, or do remote monitoring only. How you optimize your system for data collection depends on the type of “driving” you do and what your goals are for the environment you’re monitoring. Bill Hunter and I recently co-authored a white paper titled “Agentless or Agent-based Monitoring? Choose a Hybrid Approach with BMC Performance Manager” that offers more explanation of the relating your monitoring to the business and choosing the approach that makes the most sense for the type of monitoring. Here’s the introductory paragraph.
As most administrators know, some IT components are more important than others. Most availability and performance-monitoring products, however, cannot make that distinction. Consider for example, that a router serving a single employee fails while that employee is at home eating dinner two time zones away. Do you need to be awakened in the middle of the night just to fix the router, which the employee will not even need until the next business day? Most likely the answer is no. Ideally, you need the flexibility to monitor what matters at the level of granularity that is required by the business. Choosing between robust products with deep functionality and simple ones with “good enough” functionality is a common dilemma.
The BMC® Performance Manager product from BMC® Software resolves this issue by combining the robust functionality of BMC® PATROL® product architecture with the simplicity of BMC® Performance Manager Express.
Download the paper if you’d like to read more. What do you think about hybrid technology offered to us today? Feel free to let us know your thoughts.
