ITIL: Microsoft and Open Source

My friend Dustin Puryear just wrote this whitepaper for Microsoft. Dustin is primarily a Linux guy, but he's not particularly religious about it. We spent a couple of weeks travelling together on the Tech-X roadshow for Windows IT Pro magazine a year or so ago, and he never once called me "evil", or asked how I liked paying for Bill Gates' daughter's braces. The paper investigates the various ITIL disciplines, and compares how well Windows and Open Source solutions support the ITIL framework. As you might expect, the conclusion is somewhat equivocal, but even so, the paper is well thought out and written. If you are dealing with a mixed Windows and linux environment, it's certainly worth reading.

Summary

IT must be fully aligned to the needs of all customers, internal and external. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a strategy to define, implement, and monitor that alignment across the full spectrum of IT processes, ranging from Incident and Problem Management to Security Management. In this paper, we focus specifically on the choices available from Microsoft and the open source community to assist critical elements of ITIL.

While ITIL focuses on the strategy and process of IT management, in the end much of ITIL must be implemented in software systems. And the scope of ITIL does not guarantee that a single solution exists, nor should it. Instead, each element of ITIL involves a microcosm of vendors and software products. This gives organizations many choices in how to implement ITIL.

Both Microsoft and the open source community offer solutions which can assist critical elements of ITIL. Some solutions are similar, while others are distinctive. Indeed, throughout the paper we find examples of different approaches to the issues which ITIL raises.