FireScope Opens BSM Online Marketplace

FireScope's new online business service marketplace seeks to make IT operations management more efficient.

Business service management startup FireScope will launch a new online marketplace on Dec. 10 that pulls together products and resources aimed at helping IT departments improve efficiency in operations management. To date, the new FireScope Marketplace offers more than 200 different products in its catalog from six different vendors that can help increase IT effectiveness, according to FireScope President Mark Lynd. FireScope Marketplace is also intended to serve as an online gathering place for IT professionals, where they can share ideas and compare notes on IT operations management issues.
"Most data centers have 12 to 15 point solutions—something for Exchange, something for operating systems, network equipment, security, power and air. Those are all the different things that make up a service, but there's still no business information that allows for budgeting and other things against that service. We thought there needed to be a marketplace that allows people to get additional functionality," Lynd said. FireScope Marketplace offers a variety of catalogs or sections, including a best practices section that includes an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) readiness assessment kit and ITIL starter kits from another partner, The Art of Service, an online IT training and support provider. The best practices section also includes an IT Manager Development Series of e-books from MDE Enterprises. A portlet catalog includes InfoView collaboration tools from PortletWorks and survey portlets from Cogix. To read more about FireScope's IT operations management offerings. click here. FireScope also intends to add its own portlets designed to connect an IT operations portal to a Splunk server to allow the functions of the Splunk IT search engine to be used within a portal interface. Other resources in FireScope Marketplace include industry-standard JSR-168-compliant portlets that allow Java developers to create modular Web applications that can be integrated into a variety of Java portals, as well as Web 2.0 components. Compared to other open-source marketplaces, FireScope sought to create a more open framework that allows IT customers and developers to use it any way they want, the company said. And it was designed to make it easy for anyone to add more functionality to the marketplace. "Others have a specific way they want you to use the product. This gives a lot of flexibility," Lynd said. FireScope Marketplace was initially rolled out earlier in 2007 in a prototype. Thus far, early users have used it in very unique ways, according to Ryan Counts, FireScope marketing director. "We've discovered that almost every client has used it for a completely different purpose. One client is an ISP that uses it to deliver information to clients on bandwidth usage and cost," Counts said. FireScope Marketplace is up and running now. Check out eWEEK.com's Infrastructure Center for the latest news, views and analysis on servers, switches and networking protocols for the enterprise and small businesses.