Example of a solution flyer in the Energy and Utility Industry

1. Business Service Management
Energy and Utility Management
“The U.S electric grid is still years away from being intelligent enough to prevent blackouts and
other disruptions, but there are existing and emerging technologies that can help it to repair itself.”
“Healing Power”, Computerworld 08/01/2005
Thomas Hoffman
There are several key systems and aspects to the energy suppliers, providers
and users in the market and are as follows:
I SCADA/EMS – managing the security of the power grid (Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition/Energy Management Systems) is mission
critical. Supervising, controlling, optimizing and managing the generation,
transmission and distribution of electricity has the highest availability
requirements of systems in use today. Managing grid security is the
operational management of the grid controlling temperatures, voltage,
transmission, usage, etc.
This complex technology infrastructure also aids in reducing risk in four key areas: threats, deterrents, vulnerabilities and
protective measures. Threats are physical, unauthorized destruction of the system that deny service, but the ability to predict
and prevent a threat serves as a deterrent, while the same potentially protective measure may also be leveraged to mitigate risk
at known points of weakness or vulnerability.
I MARKET SYSTEMS – brokering the state of the energy marketplace, monitoring of the bids and quotes, setting prices,
determining demand/capacity as well as analysis of the transactions. Availability is also mission critical for these systems
in performing analysis in balancing the market’s capacity and demand requirements for energy and at what price point.
These management platforms have evolved from proprietary host systems to
the complexity of distributed technologies bringing and with that added concerns
regarding management technology leveraged to supervise and control the power
grid. Enter Managed Objects Business Service Management solution, facilitating
a service centric approach in managing the technology and the systems of the power
grid, energy market place and retail consumer market.
The issues of governance, incident management, prediction, proactive response,
market analysis and MTTR (mean time to respond, restore, resolve) are clearly at
hand whether it be the security of the grid, availability of market systems and/or the
availability/performance of the supporting technology. The Managed Objects solution
“integrates” all incidents whether they are power grid, market trading or technology
related. Once consolidated, the Managed Objects solution applies “intelligence”
correlating, prioritizing, predicting and proactively managing the service of the power
grid, market system and supporting technology. The final piece of the Managed Objects
solution is “visualization” and the ability to apply the appropriate action.
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Managed Objects®

2. What is the connection between IT and the power grid or energy marketplaces? The supervisory, control and management of these
systems are ever reliant upon technology and the Managed Objects BSM solution provides the ability to meet the requirements of an
energy provider in the areas of governance, incident management, prediction, proactive responsiveness, increased
availability/performance, decreased MTTR and increasingly growing complex environments as follows:
I GOVERNANCE – Separation of duties between management
systems. The Managed Objects solution provides a centralized
alarm view of incidents whether they were initiated by: system
management technologies monitoring performance and availability
of market bid/offer systems or SCADA/EMS power grid management
technologies reporting alarms regarding the power grid.
This requirement is enabled through bi-directional integration of the
Managed Objects solution directly into the SCADA/EMS system for
the consolidation of alarms and incidents as well as performance/
availability monitoring of the market bid/offer systems. The integration
enables the acknowledgement of alarms back into the SCADA/EMS
system, management of performance/availability of the market
bid/offer system and is secured through the backup of the alarms in a data store until they have completed processing into
the Managed Objects solution insuring they are not lost in transmission during a potential power outage.
I CORRELATION & PRIORITIZATION – Through the consolidation of alarms/incidents into a centralized alarm system, the
Managed Objects solution provides the ability to apply correlation of the alarms/incidents in assessing risk and impact of
service outages in managing “good” and “bad” outages of service and the availability of the market systems. An outage is
never the desired outcome, however, a good outage is one that is “contained” and is prevented from initiating a “bad” outage
that results from a “cascading”, out of control set of events.
The Managed Objects solution provides the visualization of services impacted and the ability to apply simplistic to complex
rules in assessing the situation as a correlated set of alarms/incidents impacting a service or system and prioritizing which
alarm/incident requires immediate attention and those that can wait in context of the situation.
I PREDICTIVE & PROACTIVE – The Managed Objects solution provides
the ability through the centralized alarm/incident console to be both
proactive and predictive during an incident to the power grid or the
market systems.This enables the ability to prevent an incident from ever
occurring or “containing” an incident such that it does not have the
opportunity to become a “bad” incident “cascading” without control.
I MTTR – Mean time to respond, restore and resolve is a critical event
whether it be the supporting technology or the power grid. Most
organizations have high availability systems that require decreased
MTTR and increased availability. Power systems and energy market
systems are of a highly critical nature and the decreased MTTR and
increased performance and availability comes with tremendous cost
savings or the reverse, cost.
The Managed Objects solution provides energy and utility organizations with a solution enabling the key factors previously
defined that are critical in managing the power grid, energy market systems and the supporting management technologies: threat,
deterrence, vulnerability and protective measures. Threats are identified and contained and quickly through root cause and service
impact analysis. Deterrents are the ability to proactively and predicatively manage correlated, consolidated alarms/incidents that
are presented with intelligence rather than data points. The risk of vulnerabilities can be managed again through proactive, protective
measures as a benefit of the centralized, consolidated and correlated view of the power and technology infrastructures holistically.
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Business Service Management
Energy and Utility Management
Managed Objects®

3. I MANAGED OBJECTS BSM INITIATIVES
With Managed Objects’ BSM Initiatives, you can establish complete
alignment between IT and the business, in an incremental way that
makes sense for your organization. Our BSM Initiatives bring together the
software, services and methodologies that make sense for each project.
By leveraging the IT management, asset and configuration data you
already have, Managed Objects lets you more effectively monitor,
manage, and measure the IT Services you deliver to the business and
tackle the issues that most impact the business first – whether they’re
about finding and resolving availability or performance problems,
improving response time, managing the impact of change, or reporting
service level metrics to the business.
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Business Service Management
Energy and Utility Management
Managed Objects®
I END-TO-END SERVICE MANAGER – Effective enterprise availability and performance management
across an entire IT infrastructure has always been a daunting, resource-intensive task. With
End-to-End Service Manager, IT operations can monitor and manage their complete end-to-end
IT environment in real-time leveraging business service views that logically group physical
infrastructure elements into the set of services IT delivers to the business. Now you can manage
your IT services as a business – not just a set of components.
I BUSINESS SERVICE CONFIGURATION MANAGER – Business Service Configuration Manager
(BSCM) integrates IT service topology information with virtually any configuration or asset data
source. In addition, BSCM maps complex IT service relationships to formulate and visualize a virtual
Configuration Management Data Base (vCMDB™). Leveraging this unique federated CMDB approach,
Managed Objects’ BSCM provides real-time alerts when changes occur anywhere within the IT service
configuration.What’s more, BSCM represents new software technology that facilitates faster adoption
of process maturity models like ITIL.
I BUSINESS SERVICE LEVEL MANAGER – Business Service Level Manager (BSLM) enables
organizations to monitor, measure and report on IT service level quality allowing them to more
effectively deliver high quality IT services to the business – in terms that are meaningful to the
business. Because BSLM works with SLAs in real-time or historically, IT organizations can
accurately ensure that committed levels of IT service quality are met.
I BUSINESS SERVICE DASHBOARDS – By consolidating essential IT service quality metrics,
key performance indicators (KPIs), and business process health into one interactive view,
management dashboards provide a real-time and historical window into overall business
performance. With a dashboard window of real-time service quality, managers not only know
the health of their business, they can ensure the right processes are tracked as well – all
ensuring complete regulatory compliance.