ITIL seminars cancelled over budget cuts

BMC Software's annual ITIL seminars will not go ahead in the Asia-Pacific region this year after budget cuts forced the vendor to cancel them.

The seminars, which detailed for enterprise users how to adopt the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology, ran in 10 locations last year. These included Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra in Australia, as well as regional centres such as Wellington, Beijing and Hong Kong.

BMC global best practices director Ken Turbitt told ZDNet Australia the seminars had been scheduled to go ahead until the vendor ruled them out in March.

"It was planned, we had the cities all marked," he said of this year's event.

"But the budget for my function, best practices, got cut."

The seminars had been well attended in previous years, he said.

"This would've been our third year...[but] I do hope to bring it in next year."

The seminar series had only run in the Asia Pacific region.

Lifecycle update for ITIL

The ITIL methodology is currently being updated to version three via a review of the core ITIL textbooks by a number of experts selected by the IT Service Management Forum.

The new version is expected by the end of the year, and would centre on lifecycle service management, according to Turbitt. BMC had tendered to review some of the texts.

"The old books were about business to IT alignment," said Turbitt.

"The new focus is about lifecycle service management. So it's about the concept of what is a new service? How do I look at, review and define a new service? How do I then implement that new service?

"How do I then operate that new service? How do I then have a continuous improvement program to improve that service?"