Distributed systems, deployed across different platforms, and integrating a variety of Web-based, front-office, back-office, legacy and packaged applications and databases, increase the number of places and interactions that can cause critical failures or slow response times for customers using e-commerce applications.

But during the ebizQ webinar Business Service Management for the WebSphere Environment, part of the series sponsored by BMC Software, Improving Business Agility Through Business Service Management, BMC Consulting Product Manager Jim Byrd shared numerous ways to identify, control and optimize WebSphere components to help align business and IT goals.

“Customers commonly build and integrate their most business-critical systems on the WebSphere foundation, and predominantly rely on the WebSphere Application Server to develop and deploy new application services, WebSphereMQ to integrate a variety of applications across the enterprise, and WebSphere business integration brokers to control complex and high-volume message traffic.

“Ensuring the availability and performance of these components is critical. If any central WebSphere technology fails or performs poorly, all applications, users, and business processes that rely on these technologies are at risk. Managing these components to help you achieve reliable business processing and deliver required services is essential.”

Along those lines, Byrd offered a detailed explanation of how Business Service Management (BSM) can help companies improve business performance, simplify IT complexity, and reduce cost. Identifying critical business components – and adopting strong systems management procedures – are the crucial first steps.

He advocated a ”Service Impact Management” approach that enables enterprises to tie service-level agreements to business needs, rather than technology metrics. That facilitates companies “identifying and automatically fixing IT problems without human intervention before they impact the business.”

Byrd covered how to use WebSphereMQ message-oriented middleware to build efficient data-sharing business services, and cautioned that, “WebSphereMQ availability and reliability are absolutely critical to business productivity.” With numerous components and functions, MQ can present “an interesting management challenge.”