A 30-Year Odyssey
in IT Management
Over the course of my career spanning more than 30 years, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the IT world transform from within. Starting with a business degree as a marketeer in the 1990s, my journey started when I became involved in selling Tivoli software through IBM. The years that followed brought not only new technologies and concepts but also fundamental shifts in how organizations manage and optimize their IT landscapes. In this blog, I’ll take you on a journey through time, from the early days of IT management to today’s AI-driven automation.
The Beginnings
Rule-Based IT Management with Tivoli
In the second half of the 1990s, I joined IBM and began working with Tivoli, a recent acquisition by the company. Tivoli promised something revolutionary: a vendor-agnostic system that allowed businesses to manage their entire IT infrastructure—whether they used Unix, Microsoft, or IBM platforms like mainframes and AS/400s.
Tivoli’s framework gave companies visibility into their IT landscapes. Using its modules and the Tivoli Enterprise Console, organizations could implement rules that provided a comprehensive view of their environments. This approach was groundbreaking, as much of this knowledge and these processes were previously siloed in the minds of IT administrators.
However, over time, a problem emerged, which I refer to as “rule spaghetti.” The sheer complexity of managing hundreds of rules resulted in constant additions without cleaning up older, obsolete ones. When IT administrators left the company, the new generation found it increasingly difficult to untangle this web of rules. What had once been revolutionary became cumbersome and inefficient.
From Rules to Databases
The Oracle and HP Era
After my time at IBM, I moved to Oracle, shifting my focus toward the application side of IT. Oracle’s eBusiness Suite placed customer data and processes at the heart of a centralized database—a concept that became familiar again during my later role at HP.
At HP, I was involved in the company’s acquisition-driven strategy, which included Peregrine, Mercury, and Opsware. These acquisitions helped create what HP called “Business Technology Optimization,” centered around a configuration management database (CMDB) model. This database-focused approach, using metadata models and configuration items (CIs), aimed to streamline IT management.
The CMDB model was a marked improvement over the rule-based systems of the past, but its success hinged on disciplined processes. I often compare it to a dishwasher: if you don’t properly load your changes into the CMDB—just as you must place cups inside a dishwasher correctly—it ends up empty or filled with “dirty cups,” representing inaccurate data.
Despite its advantages, the CMDB model still couldn’t address all the challenges of IT management. With the rise of the cloud, the rules of the game changed once again, as organizations began relying heavily on external providers for their IT infrastructure, reducing their control.
Embracing the Cloud
The SaaS Revolution
After my time at Oracle and HP, I ventured into entrepreneurship, founding a company dedicated to guiding clients through their cloud transformation. Our mission was clear: to help businesses transition to Software as a Service (SaaS). We positioned ourselves as a SaaS broker-as-a-service—or, as we called it, “SaaSBaaS.”
A critical aspect of this transformation was managing data that no longer resided on physical servers but in the cloud. This posed new challenges: How do you monitor and manage data that is no longer within your data center? Our solution was Splunk, a platform that enabled us to derive valuable insights from the vast amounts of data generated by cloud systems.
Unexpectedly, we grew into one of the largest Splunk knowledge hubs and resellers in the region. However, as our focus shifted to Splunk, we lost sight of our original mission. This expertise and market position ultimately led to our acquisition by Belgium-based Proximus in 2018.
Though IT management and CMDBs took a backseat, we began to explore how we could create greater value from the Splunk platform we had implemented for several major clients. This gave birth to a new project, Metasis, where we developed use cases with a strong focus on networks. This aligned with our expertise and our belief that:
“To build from the ground up,
you must manage from the top down.”
The Shift to Ontology
A Foundation for Automation
What we didn’t realize at first was that the foundation of Metasis was essentially an ontology. Borrowed from philosophy and applied in computer science, ontology is the practice of defining categories and relationships within a domain. By describing these relationships and defining rules and formulas, you can calculate how the elements interact.
This ontology became the key to automating processes that were previously manual or semi-automatic. By mapping relationships and positions within IT environments, we simplified processes like compliance checks and reporting. What was once a static model evolved into a dynamic one, capable of calculating real-time actions within the system.
This ultimately led to the creation of Metadino (Meta Data Informed Next-gen Ontology), a model that not only automates IT processes but also lays the groundwork for AI to play a larger role in the future. By understanding and calculating underlying data structures, it became possible to automate real-time reporting, streamline compliance checks, and conduct architecture audits automatically.
The advent of Metadino shows how AI-driven ontologies enable businesses to automate compliance, reporting, and audits, setting a new standard for IT management.
Looking Ahead
The Future of IT Management
Over the past 30 years, I’ve witnessed numerous IT paradigms come and go. From Tivoli’s rule-based systems to Oracle and HP’s database-driven approaches, and now to AI-driven automation with ontologies, each model has brought valuable lessons and transformative potential.
However, I believe the latest shift—to dynamic, self-learning models—brings us closer than ever to fully automated IT processes. With the rise of AI and automation, we’re on the brink of embracing a new, highly efficient way of managing IT.
Thanks to these new technologies, businesses can focus on their core activities while IT systems manage and optimize themselves. I’m excited for what the future holds and confident that we are closer than ever to realizing fully automated IT processes.
Author
Erik Witte
CEO & Co-Founder
Erik is a seasoned executive and serial entrepreneur. Visionary thinking, connecting people to the vision and to each other is the essence of his professional career.