Richard Ptak Talks IT Operations

Posted April 22nd, 2008 by Joe Pendry

We had the opportunity to talk with Richard Ptak of analyst firm Ptak, Noel & Associates on his views of IT Operations, trends, problems and potential threats to the industry. Ptak, Noel & Associates is a leading analyst firm addressing converging IT trends and how to leverage them, focused on IT operations and management. Richard has over 30 years experience in systems product management working closely with Fortune 50 companies in developing product direction and strategies at a global level.

StackSafe: Tell us about yourself. How did you become an analyst focused on IT Operations?

Richard Ptak: I became an analyst/consultant after being laid off in the very early 90’s. I had just returned from 8 years in Europe and had few US industry contacts. I landed my first contract to evaluate Network Management tools for a major Telcom Service Provider.

I leveraged the resulting feature/function matrix into a series of consulting engagements that took me into enterprise IT operations groups in hospitals, fast food, insurance companies, etc. I saw a clear disconnect between vendors focused on selling their latest technology and IT operations needing to solve operational problems. Voila, I recognized a niche that grew larger over time.

StackSafe: What do you see as the biggest IT management trend or advancement during the past five years?

Richard Ptak: Far and away, I think its been the ability to access, manipulate and perform analytics on the data stored in all the distributed databases that exist in the enterprise. That access coupled with sophisticated analytical tools and visualization technology has allowed IT to provide their business counterparts more actionable and understandable information in support of business operations - which is the real function of IT in the enterprise.

All of the sophisticated infrastructure, the availability of processing power, cheap storage, networking, etc. doesn’t amount to much if you are not delivering services, information, results that directly contribute to the achievement of the functions and goals of the business, enterprise, institution, etc. Success in achieving those goals is what drives the use of IT.

StackSafe: What problems do you hear most frequently from the companies you advise?

Richard Ptak: Today, the majority of problems still have to do with handling change - changes in infrastructure settings, lack of formal processes (as well as adherence to these where they exist) to request, evaluate, test, approve, implement and check changes. There also is a concern over the escalating demands of semi-educated users - they see and hear about all of the wonderful things that can be done with the IT infrastructure but lack any context to understand the ‘dirty and not so little’ details of implementation, maintenance and adaptation of those new services especially with tight spending controls.

Finally, there is the concern over staffing skill levels. There seems to be a conviction that the old adage of ‘you get what you pay for’ is suspended for IT. I hear complaints about the cost of skilled talent. The statistics show the demand for IT staff continues to grow even in a media-defined failing economy, that’s good. However, as reported in the IT press, the vast majority of this growth is at the low end of the pay scale.

Despite the best and continuing efforts of vendors to provide solutions that are easy to use, automated and simplify complex tasks, you still need skilled personnel. To attract them, you have to pay them. To attract the best to an IT career, there needs to be a visible, secure and profitable path for growth. There exists a lot of skepticism about that path being in IT. Hysterically hyped and well-rewarded statements about the end of IT, CIOs, and basic, pervasive products are not reassuring.

StackSafe: What do you view as the biggest threat to availability for IT operations teams?

Richard Ptak: The continuing lack of commitment to and understanding that complex operations must be well-managed if they are to succeed. This holds true for infrastructure, applications and services as much as it does for people. Engineering and technical types all too often lack an understanding and appreciation of the role of management. This is fine as long as you have siloed operations and functions with little interaction or dependency on other parts of the organization.

In the increasingly complex, interdependent, and interactive world of today’s enterprise - going it alone just will not work. And, management at multiple levels is an absolute must. I won’t even begin talk about people management. Just think of the complex interaction necessary to assure virtualized servers are properly created, properly allocated, properly protected, retired, maintained, etc.

Then, add to the fact and complexity of business services that are created from other services delivered using multiple, distributed and componentized applications, many of which are under the control and responsibility of other business functions. You need management at multiple levels in order for all of it to work correctly.

StackSafe: What is your opinion of the alignment between developers and IT operations with regards to improvements to business applications?

Richard Ptak: A match made in heaven. This is intimately related to my answer to the previous question. Operations can’t succeed with our applications and services developed with full awareness and appreciation of the real world operations environment. Think about the potential for operational problems with transaction services that involve accessing multiple distributed services for data, calculation, and reporting that fail to take into account latency inherent in a geographically distributed environment.

The fact is that no matter how hard they try, developers cannot totally reproduce the production environment. Therefore, they must depend upon feedback and communication with operations to make sure their products are operationally robust. Open communication and active collaboration between these two organizations are fundamental to meet the demanding requirements of an increasingly complex operational environment with users demanding increasingly sophisticated, adaptive, dynamic solutions.

StackSafe: Which vendors do you think have the most interesting technologies to help IT organizations achieve business success and/or improved uptime?

Richard Ptak: Ha! Interesting and useful technologies can be found in the largest vendor players as well the smallest and everywhere in-between. It’s been my contention that it isn’t the technology that drives business success but the ability of a vendor to deliver solution to a pressing business problem at a price that is lower than the cost the continued existence of the problem extracts from the business.

I think that the technologies for intelligent discovery, documenting and modeling of dynamically changing and context sensitive relationships and dependencies (ala ClearApp) and the cutting edge thinking about operational useful dynamic process modeling going on at BMC, IBM and EMC - have some very interesting, practical potential for significant payback.

StackSafe: If a company could focus on one area to improve uptime and availability, where would you recommend they begin?

Richard Ptak: I’d say look to your management tools. All too often, these are the neglected children in the IT tool box. Management tools, especially automated ones, have significant potential to free IT staff from repetitive, routine but highly necessary maintenance tasks. But, they can’t do that if they aren’t used as they were designed to be used.