Infrastructure Management Assessment Services are key components of IBM's Infrastructure Management offerings, formerly known under the code-name "Project Symphony". The services provide ongoing assessments of corporate IT systems with special focus on the following areas:

• Systems Management: Ongoing operational health checks using proven methods for monitoring system availability across multi-platform IT hardware, software and network resources.
• Asset Management: Systematic, multi-vendor asset management through consolidated assessment and tracking of hardware and software assets to managing even complex monitoring and usage environments.
• Change Management: Processes that help decrease risk of IT system downtime.
• Service Management: Interlock of test, migration, and production schedules for smooth integration and transition of new technologies into an existing data center environment.
• Security Management: Assessment of security strategies, policies, and protocols for deploying security techniques.

By having clear assessments of the IT environment, the services help users define the technical and business requirements designed to enable improvements in server, storage and network utilization, standardize their computing environment and evaluate their security needs using automation software and processes.

"Customers that manage their own data centers have a huge opportunity to re-claim money spent manually directing the hundreds or thousands of computer systems in their enterprise," said Dev Mukherjee, vice president of e-business on demand strategy, IBM Global Services. "By designing an IT framework based on industry standards and proven business processes, customers can substantially increase the efficiency and utilization of their existing IT resources.

"Just as enterprise resource planning and six sigma made company manufacturing and supply chains more efficient and flexible, applying more discipline to a corporate data center can bring similar benefits to a company's overall IT operations," added Mukherjee.