Enterprise management software vendors still have a lot of ground to cover when it comes to educating the market on Business Service Management. Last week's Systems Management Pipeline poll shows that while nearly half of the respondants think BSM sounds terrific in theory, they believe the products associated with it are either too expensive or too complex for them to implement. Forty-one percent of the respondents said that while they like the concept, they are far to busy fighting fires to stop and implement something as complicated as BSM sounds.So in spite of some fairly ambitious marketing campaigns and product launches focused around Business Service Management (BSM) by both large and smaller enterprise management software vendors, a scant 18 percent of the respondents think vendors were doing an excellent job of helping them implement an effective BSM strategy. This may have as much to do with lack of clarity as to what BSM actually means. Forty-one percent of those polled said what they really needed was more direction as to what BSM entails, admitting that they had difficulty sorting out the difference between the concept and things such as Service Level Management.

Of course, BSM is a process which involves much more than just a collection of products. But it does require a fairly significant technical component. So naturally, vendors will play a key role in educating enterprises on the benefits and the realities of implementing BSM. And on that score, there is still much work to be done.