Whatever happened to SLM?

It's amazing how many vendors can be completely reborn in so short a time and offer major new marketing initiatives - often without any new products. But this incredibly abrupt transition might lead you to wonder, is there any relationship between the e-business buzz and the service-level management buzz? Are we looking at hundreds of secret apostasies or at a market evolution? And if it is indeed an apostasy, then where is that great SLM junkyard where last year's models have been put out to pasture?

I think one of the reasons for the speed of this theme-park magic show is that in fact it is a statement of evolution. I would even argue that e-business is exactly what it will take to make SLM more real and more pervasive than, say, Hegelian philosophy.

The au courant phrase that most closely applies to SLM is "e-business performance management," which comes in a variety of flavors - but, to keep things simple, let's look at two.

First, the term quite frequently refers to marketplace, competitive and customer intelligence, to risk analysis of marketing promotions and to other related marketing capabilities. A good example of a product set with a broad suite of solutions here is Visual Insights. There are also many, many more players focused on customer intelligence, such as NetGenesis. Others, like Vigil, focus on competitive intelligence. There are, of course, the end-user-oriented equivalents, shopping search engines and products like Cyber Investigator that "allow you to find out everything you ever wanted to know about your employees, friends, relatives and spouse." No comment there.

Then there's e-business performance management in the way that we infrastructurecentric types have come to know and love: managing the network for performance, managing the system for performance and managing the application transaction for performance. This area is being addressed by major players such as BMC and Hewlett-Packard, midtier players such as NextPoint Networks and Resonate, and newer players more focused on e-business such as Manage.Com and Viewpoint. (Please don't take this list to be anything near complete. These are just token examples.)

I delineated these two types of e-business performance management for a reason. For those of you who still remember, the apex of SLM was, and still is, uniting IT services with business dynamics. What's happening in the e-business space is a wild run on both fronts in multiple directions. These new products make use of automated software solutions that often draw from common technologies and design points to accommodate market and IT performance issues. Certainly, Computer Associates has made a lot of its Neugents for doing just this. More quietly, Manage.Com announced a portal that can keep track of performance dynamics for partner supply chains - and also for competitive partner chains. Here, the same knowledge from the same tool sets can inform the business on IT decisions, reinforce the requirement to upgrade service-level agreements (SLA) with partners or actually inform on how to best switch partners.

With these kinds of tools, each company's IT performance becomes very visible, and it's likely to stay that way. Legal intervention may protect consumers' privacy, but it is not likely to do much to keep IT shops from living in an Internet glass house, from a performance management perspective.

All this suggests that new forms of SLAs will emerge, driven by the ferocity with which automated tool sets can gather business and performance data across the Internet. These SLAs will not be academic exercises, but do-or-die commitments among partners and businesses trying to create some stability within an increasingly chaotic marketplace. Management software and marketing intelligence software will work together to set common priorities that address both business and IT services. Sometimes, the tool sets will be one and the same.

The real impact of this potential brave new world for SLAs has not quite hit yet. It will probably take a while before the tool sets mature and businesses and service providers - another important part of this equation - catch their breath just enough from first-phase stampedes to deal more seriously with these interrelationships. In the meantime, and for many years to come, there will still be a need for advances in basic capabilities for correlating SLM information to make it useful. Such advances will mean that information that reflects relevant user and partner experiences will be obtainable without having to get out too many slide rules or resort to a server farm full of data warehouses.