Rather than rehashing my resume for my debut Zenoss blog post, I’ll open by disclosing what drew me to the company. Service Dynamics changes the way that I look at IT, by reminding me that IT delivers a service, whether it’s in a cloud or in the company’s basement.
What impressed me about Zenoss, especially Zenoss Service Dynamics, is its Service-Oriented nature. So, rather than dealing with the delta between infrastructure and services, Service Dynamics makes it easier to manage everything as a service – which, at the end of the day, is what IT is really providing.
Admittedly, it took a while for this Marketing guy to grasp the impact of what Service Dynamics is really doing. Predictably, I spent my first few minutes of playing with the product, doing what I’ve always done; show me a switch, show me an application metric, etc. But the light bulb went off in my head, when a Zenossian (I’m still getting used to that name) asked me what hypothetical problem I was trying to solve. I said “I want to see the size of a message queue, to assess the state of the Exchange server”. And he replied,” what about the health of mail service?” He then started navigating views that were service-oriented, rather than the traditional element-centric view. I could rapidly assess the health of a service, and isolate faults, without knowing where to hunt for “the usual suspects”. I could navigate and assess the health of a service, without wading through a sea of meaningless noise. And I could do all of this, regardless of where the infrastructure lived. Yep, this was different.
I had seen companies pushing “service-oriented” solutions that sounded similar, in the past, but they were usually point-products that plugged into a myriad of other point products, with a healthy dose of duct tape and bailing wire - that sounds like a deployment nightmare, and a maintenance impossibility. Yet, Zenoss seemed to be delivering the whole stack. And yes, it appears to work. In-fact, there are actually organizations using it.
Did I have reservations about working for ‘The Cloud Management Company’? Yes, a couple decades in this industry have made me a bit wary of buzzwords. Did I have any reservations about working for a company that delivers a unified Service-oriented IT Operations platform? No way! It’s about time somebody built that, and actually got it to work, wherever their infrastructure is. So, yes, I came here because I believe in the product. And I’m happy to be here!
