Digital Transformation in Latin America It’s A Digital World

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We all spend many hours talking about digital transformation at work. At home we book our movie tickets on our phones, make payments using internet banking, and grocery shop on Amazon.

Statistics show that 71% of shoppers in the US and up to 91% in APAC countries prefer to shop online and this tendency is growing around 23% year over year. Up to 58% of these operations are performed via mobile devices like phones and tablets.

Latin American markets are the most active and are shifting from consuming largely global companies’ products towards their local products. For example, in Mexico (growing 7% in electronics shopping and 20% in online services between 2017 and 2018), local shops are taking the leading position in the ranking of purchases orders while global players, such as Amazon and Wish, are relegated to 4th or 5th place. In Brazil, the situation is similar; there are currently 66.4 million eCommerce users, with an additional 28.2 million users expected to be shopping Online by 2021. By 2023 these 94.6 million eCommerce users will spend an average of over $300 yearly online.

Growth rate of e-commerce sales in selected Latin America 2017-2018 (Source: Statistica)

Growth rate of e-commerce sales in selected Latin America

Where will you be in 5 years?

Digital transformation is no longer about if enterprises will transform, but about when. Companies that have not embraced transformation, such as Kodak, Blockbuster or Borders have disappeared, and even technology companies like Nokia, that have failed to change with the times, are now struggling to survive.

The accelerated pace of economic change is compressing the lifecycle of businesses and those that don’t digitally transform will be rendered irrelevant; and it will happen with remarkable speed, and with little warning.

Digital transformation is not just about technology; it’s about redefining your entire business strategy. The degree of difficulty is compounded by the dearth of experienced resources. According to Forrester, in 2017, 74% of companies have a digital transformation strategy, but only 15% have the skills and capabilities to implement it.

The concern for many businesses is that they’ve already fallen behind and may be too late to get started. Digital speed

Companies that are not agile enough or cannot adapt to economic tides may end up stranded in shallow waters. Today’s consumers have countless options so keeping up is the only way to remain relevant, to survive. 

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expectedlatammarket

Digital transformation will enable your company to:

  • Generate additional sources of revenue online
  • Be more agile in pursuit of new markets and opportunities
  • Improve interactions with customers, partners, suppliers and employees
  • Increase efficiency
  • Improve business decision making
  • Implement better governance

To have real impact the transformation must become a part of the fabric of the company and championed by leadership.

A complicating factor is that digital transformation may mean different things to different industries, and a valuable benefit for banking, may not apply to healthcare.

The following is an example of applications for different verticals.

Digital Transformation benefits by Vertical Market

Digital Transformation benefits by Vertical Market

The Tao of Transformation

Digital Transformation is a disruptive process and it will not only “transform” your IT department but also will change all aspects of your business, including; the way you relate with your customers, your partners, and your suppliers.

In this document, we will focus on the intrinsic technological requirements, not the business process aspects of the process.

At its core, Digital transformation drives some key changes:

  • Every key business process of the company and the interactions with every key constituency are implemented in software and are rapidly evolved to maintain competitive advantage online.
  • Data driven applications are deployed on cloud-based infrastructure and every facet of the supply chain is connected through the cloud.
  • Real-time data analytics for notifications and abnormality detection (AIOps).
  • Big Data to optimize system performance in reaction to change.
  • Users now must have a connected device to see the necessary information on cloud.
  • Applications should be able to adapt to different environments (on-premise, Cloud, containers, etc.), detect and inform environmental changes and proactively change their behavior accordingly.

The OmniChannel

The term OmniChannel refers to better introspection of the customer experience by understanding where, when, how, and of course, what he/she wants. It means offering the customers a real-time, on-demand, cloud-based, self-service experience through the convergence of all the channels. With information coming from virtually everywhere (on premise, cloud systems, IoT, mobile applications, etc.) and in real time, it is critical to have applications that can provision these sources of information efficiently, and in real time.

OmniChannel may include:

  • Online browser based applications
  • Mobile applications (owned and 3rd parties)
  • Kiosks
  • Telephone Interactive Voice Response
  • Social media
  • Help desk
  • Physical locations (branches, plants, etc.)

One of the most critical components of the OmniChannel strategy is the backend.

As with any other multi-technology support (IoT, Cloud, on-premise, Mobile, etc.) it needs a myriad of connecting elements and workflows to pull, push and normalize the information flows. The business in turns needs to guarantee that these business flows are working correctly, as they are becoming the bloodline of the digital business.

An OmniChannel approach at a Global Fast Food Restaurant

An OmniChannel approach at a Global Fast Food Restaurant

ERP and digital transformation

ERP systems are in the core of this transformation, as they manage the supply chain and often the order to cash process as well. SAP, the global leader in ERP systems is helping its customers drive Digital Transformation with its own Digital Transformation Platform shown below.

sapdigitaltransformationplatfomr

The industry’s response to the pressures generated by digital transformation

It is an imperative for modern enterprises to compete online and to digitally transform their operations. This places demands upon the scarce resources (people) that can build and operate these digital applications, business services and systems.

The technology industry has responded to the demand to implement business processes in software with a set of innovations. The architecture of applications is being further distributed and simplified around a microservices model. The process of delivering software into production is being automated as much as possible through CI/CD. At each layer of the technology stack new languages, services, and data architectures are being invented to meet new needs. Finally the operation of the environment is now automated.

Innovations and Dynamic Behavior across the Entire Technology Stack

Innovations and Dynamic Behavior across the Entire Technology Stack

An unprecedented situation in the modern enterprise:

  • Enterprises must compete and execute online as software vendors (Revenue, Cost Efficiency, Time to Market, Agility, Quality of Service, End User Experience)
  • An unprecedented pace of innovation in processes and technology to support the business imperative of digitization creates previously unheard of levels of complexity and diversity.
  • Time to market and agility pressures are causing applications to be architected around microservices and released multiple times a day with CI/CD processes leading to more change in production than ever before.
  • The need for continuous availability and performance is driving dynamic behavior in virtualized and cloud based compute, networking and storage services.
  • All of this has to work flawlessly all of the time and is beyond the scope of any single monitoring vendor to monitor

A new set of requirements for making sure it all works all of the time

Many companies still monitor their services using siloed tools. These tools are inefficient, providing a bottom-up view, which fail in modern applications and business services, where multichannel, containers, and multi-cloud environments are the new de-facto service architecture standard. A new concept in monitoring is required; one that can comply with the following conditions:

  • The entire stack must now be monitored in the present (1 Min – 1 Sec) to be able to detect service quality issues in real time.
  • Relationships across the stack must be determined in instantly
    • What talks to what (traces and flows)?
    • What runs on what?
    • What is a component of what?
  • AIOps must be deployed to leverage relationships for automated root cause analysis and remediation.
  • The results of system monitoring must be made relevant to business constituents.

It is not sufficient to monitor the IT infrastructure, application, and business services as separated silos. In real digital transformation, all the services components must be observed, correlated, and presented in a single dimension, and easily understood by both IT and the business, supplemented by predictive behavior analysis.

AIOps platforms at the core of Digital Transformation

Business outcomes cannot be adequately supported and achieved while IT organizations remain in siloed pockets with redundant tools and technologies. For this reason, AIOps Platforms now complement the conventional, siloed IT monitoring systems to cope with the torrent of incoming monitoring data and to discern abnormalities automatically.

 By targeting thousands of components from the infrastructure, application and business layers simultaneously, AIOps can correlate, predictively analyze, and self-repair any irregularity, while presenting pertinent visualizations to both key stakeholders and IT operations personnel to quickly understand business service performance.

 When properly integrated into a broader capability for data assimilation, integrations, and automation, AIOps can align IT with business in a very concrete way.

Gartner’s View of AIOps Platforms

AIOps_Overview

The features that distinguish AIOps platforms from less advanced implementations of machine learning include the following:

  • Assimilation of data from cross-domain sources in high data volumes for cross-domain insights.
  • Access multiple data types, e.g., events, KPIs, logs, flow, configuration data, etc.
  • Capabilities for self-learning to deliver predictive, and/or prescriptive and/or if/then actionable insights.
  • Potential use as a strategic overlay that may assimilate multiple monitoring tools and other investments.
  • Integrations that can help unify stakeholders and bridge the political divides across IT and between IT and business stakeholders.
  • Support for private cloud, public cloud, SAAS, and on-premise, in one platform.
  • The ability to deliver on multiple use cases, such as business service performance and availability management, as well as integrated support for change and change impact awareness, and enabling more successful cloud migrations, resulting in greater optimizing of critical business outcomes.

An Introduction to Centerity

The Centerity AIOps Platform has a proven history in supporting business service outcomes across complex enterprise and managed service environments. Centerity is built on strong operational analytics and data mining, as well as powerful discovery, visualization, and dependency insights. Highlighted features include the following:

  • Deep and Broad Integrations: Centerity integrates with the tools and platforms that you rely upon.
  • Dynamic Service Views: Simple to understand gauges that show the service quality for each critical business service
  • Real-time Analytics:Advanced management & tactical dashboards maintain SLAs for critical processes.
  • In Context: Constant alignment between IT data and business objectives.
  • Consistent User Experience: Detect user experience degradation before your users do.
  • Traffic Analysis:Analyze bandwidth consumption and data flow; filter by application, packets, protocols, etc.
  • AI-driven Anomaly Detection: Machine learning for digital services moves the performance discipline beyond thresholds

The Centerity AIOps Platform

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Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views translate technical metrics and their impact on business services and resultant consequences.Each gauge represents the availability, performance, throughput and error rate of the entire stack of software and hardware supporting each digital business service.

Unified Dynamic Business Service Views

unifieddynamicbusinessserviceviews

When service levels degrade, Centerity provides a bird’s eye view of how the operation of each layer that supports the digital business service is impacting the overall service level.

Drill Down Into Each Layer of a Digital Business Service

Drill Down Into Each Layer of a Digital Business Service

How Centerity can help you with your Digital Transformation

Centerity helps you improve the top line business results (revenue, market share, customer satisfaction) of your digitalization transformation projects, and helps you minimize the number of disruptions and the cost and time to repair those disruptions.  By providing a holistic view of both infrastructure and business through relevant visualizations enterprises can maintain command before, during, and after the transformation.

Before the transformation:

  • Centerity automates the discovery of legacy business communication flows and ascertains application service topologies accurately, saving the time and risk associated with performing this manually.
  • Centerity pinpoints performance bottlenecks and establishes standards before the service transformation so that you can compare before and after situations, ensuring that you are fully prepared to go live successfully.
  • Centerity distinguishes traffic patterns so that you can plan your services migration steps more cost-effectively, minimizing your expense during the migration.

During the transformation:

  • Centerity highlights application behavior anomalies and detects fluctuations in the application performance, compared to history, ensuring exceptional performance from day one, keeping the project on a positive track.
  • Centerity ensures a stress-free transition by monitoring new architectures, such as micro apps, containers, and multi-cloud resources as well as their relationship with legacy architectures, such as the mainframe, distributed storage, or on-premise resources.
  • Centerity’s flexible and intuitive interface will allow your technical resources, to economically adjust legacy interfaces and build fresh ones for the migrated systems. Developing interfaces can often be an unexpected, time consuming, expensive step in the process.

After the transformation:

  • Centerity’s Dynamic Service Views for the migrated services result in IT infrastructure metrics pictured in a way business partners can understand, allowing everyone to work together efficiently in “the new world”.
  • Project costs are considerably reduced, as well as the ongoing cost of ownership thanks to Centerity’s ability to integrate virtually any infrastructure technology and third-party software tools.
  • Proactive analytics reveal valuable insights for all areas of the business, including commercial transactions, purchase tickets, point of sales performance, etc.

Summary:

Centerity should be considered before, during, and after your digital transformation project to insure you achieve your objectives at a suitable cost and effort. Learn more about Centerity at www.centerity.com.

Authors:

The following people at Centerity contributed to this paper:

John Reuben – Director of Strategic Relationships, Americas. JohnR@centerity.com

Mariano Grinfeld – Systems Engineer. MarianoG@centerity.com

Tony Kenney – Systems Engineer. TonyK@centerity.comVIEW OUR PRODUCTS

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Centerity BSM & IT Performance Analytics Platform (Use Case #5 – Creating Transparency & A Common Purpose)

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Best Practices in Performance Analytics for Big Data Environments (SAP HANA, Hadoop, Enterprise Applications)

Use Case #5 – Creating Transparency & A Common Purpose

Synopsis:

  • A Single Truth
  • The Power of Sharing Information and Goals

Use Case Overview

Many organizations are challenged due to technical specialization within its departments. This leads to siloed goals aligned only with the technology layer of immediate concern.

To make organizations more service and application centric, IT needs to share information on organizational goals and service level status. By sharing information across technical and functional domains, people have better insights into performance, availability, and continuity. This inspires employees to think about service and business value and less about their individual domains in isolation. Centerity can be that single point of truth for the entire organization providing one view of the entire stack so everyone is working from the same baseline and towards common goals.

Executive Dashboards and BSM views highlight organizational goals and deliverables that transcend individual technologies and priorities.

Technical Overview

Product Screen 11: Live Visual Layout
Click here for more in information

Lenovo Highlights Performance Analytics for SAPHANA

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Centerity is proud to be Lenovo’s featured software solution at SAPPHIRE 2018, Orlando.

We welcome you to join us at Booth #558 to learn how Lenovo and Centerity can improve service levels (SLA) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) for SAP HANA environments.

The presentation will occur on Tuesday, June 5, at 12:15 PM, and will show how Business Service Management (BSM) has become a reality,

providing real-time performance analytics for specific business processes that cross the entire IT stack (applications, infrastructure, operating systems, Cloud, Big Data, etc.). 

Kamran Amini, GM & VP, Data Center Infrastructure at Lenovo said, “The combination of Centerity and Lenovo solutions enables us to deliver the best experience for SAP HANA customers by providing complete, end-to-end performance analytics for complex IT environments. When combined with Lenovo systems, Centerity’s unique capabilities for monitoring and managing data center landscapes, including SAP HANA environments, helps ensure Lenovo customers experience maximum performance, reliability and return from their investment.”

Centerity will present a performance optimization use case using Lenovo’s SAP HANA Vora-powered Crime Scene Investigation solution.

 

We would be delighted to meet you at SAPPHIRE to discuss best practices for aligning technology and business environments (P&L), while also improving SLA and CSAT.

You can schedule a meeting time here:

Schedule a Meeting with a Centerity Expert

Here is a sneak peek for Centerity’s offer on SAPPIRENOW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOq2XWdaqOM

 

Lenovo Highlights Performance Analytics for SAPHANA

/in /by

Centerity is proud to be Lenovo’s featured software solution at SAPPHIRE 2018, Orlando.

We welcome you to join us at Booth #558 to learn how Lenovo and Centerity can improve service levels (SLA) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) for SAP HANA environments.

The presentation will occur on Tuesday, June 5, at 12:15 PM, and will show how Business Service Management (BSM) has become a reality,

providing real-time performance analytics for specific business processes that cross the entire IT stack (applications, infrastructure, operating systems, Cloud, Big Data, etc.). 

Kamran Amini, GM & VP, Data Center Infrastructure at Lenovo said, “The combination of Centerity and Lenovo solutions enables us to deliver the best experience for SAP HANA customers by providing complete, end-to-end performance analytics for complex IT environments. When combined with Lenovo systems, Centerity’s unique capabilities for monitoring and managing data center landscapes, including SAP HANA environments, helps ensure Lenovo customers experience maximum performance, reliability and return from their investment.”

Centerity will present a performance optimization use case using Lenovo’s SAP HANA Vora-powered Crime Scene Investigation solution.

 

We would be delighted to meet you at SAPPHIRE to discuss best practices for aligning technology and business environments (P&L), while also improving SLA and CSAT.

You can schedule a meeting time here:

Schedule a Meeting with a Centerity Expert

Here is a sneak peek for Centerity’s offer on SAPPIRENOW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOq2XWdaqOM

 

The Top Highlights from IDC CIO SUMMIT 2018, Antalya, Turkey.

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We came, we saw, we conquered. Three days packed with breakout sessions, hands-on training, keynote speakers, networking. With over 250 CIOs, 80 speakers and panelists, 50+ inspiring keynotes and top 500 largest spending companies, there was a lot to see and it’s impossible to be in every place at once but, here’s our rundown of the top four  highlights from IDC CIO Summit ‘18 at Antalya, Turkey:

Customers innovating around the world –  

Amidst the sea of booths in the IDC CIO SUMMIT 2018, some of our top customers were featured in Centerity’s monitoring and Business Service Management round Table. Big-brand banks, insurance companies and retail chains, showed off how their businesses are innovating around the world (with Centerity’s help, of course!) Attendees could engage in Centerity’s unified IT monitoring and performance analytics DEMO and conversations to learn more about how Centerity can help them succeed.

Businesses are innovating around the world
Matan Reiman, VP Sales – EMEA shows how Centerity’s unified IT monitoring and performance analytics helps companies succeed.

We’ve pretty much received a common feedback from CIOs :

“We have developed internally a monitoring tool to monitor our IT environment. We currently use different tools to monitor different layers and cannot receive an end-to-end view. We wish we could have single dashboard with an holistic view to our business and an ability to produce reports”.

IDC observation:

Almost 60% of companies in Turkey have not yet formed a digital transformation (DX) strategy, while the main goal for those that have is to improve automation and efficiency. Main rivers for DX initiatives in companies include the adoption of new technologies used by partners and customers, the emergence of new business models, and — obviously — staying competitive in their market.

Everybody talks about the weather, but Nobody does anything about it” (Mark Twain)

 The future of IT/OT monitoring

The future of IT/OT monitoring and performance analytics is heading toward Business Service Management (BSM). This trend was reinforced in IDC CIO SUMMIT as what most IT decision makers expressed their need to achieve an alignment between IT performance metrics with business objectives.

Salvo Nahmiyas, Senior Alliance Channel Manager EMEA presents Centerity’s BSM value

“We suffer if we do not have dedicated Business Service Management for SAP. As IT environment is getting more complex and IoT usage areas are growing Business Service Management is much more crucial for us”.

The true value of BSM is that companies capture a comprehensive set of IT/OT performance metrics (from the full stack) and access it from a common repository. Furthermore, this performance data can be normalized, weighted and analyzed according to key business processes and correlated against required service levels (SLAs).

A BSM solution provides IT organizations with a distinct competitive advantage to reduce costs (through proactive troubleshooting and predictive maintenance), improve uptime (through faster MTTR and break-fix response), and increase CSAT (through better performance and reliability).

Transformation, Innovation and Digital workplace

Transformation and Digital workplace: digital workplace in a modern enterprise became more and more complex.

The spirit of innovation was embedded throughout the summit but shone brightest during the Transformation, BT Innovation and Digital Workplace panel. After an introduction about the way digital workplace in a modern enterprise became more and more complex, while also increasingly independent of hardware platforms, the panel was underway. Cuneyt Ozdilek, Deputy  General Manager of Operations, KoçSistem Information and Communication Services ;Serhan Ozhan, CIO & CTO, CK Enerji; and Dr. Erdar Kemikli, Head of IT & Innovation, Otokoç Otomotiv were engaged in an emotional conversation about Maintaining Infrastructure vs Scalable Service Oriented IT Support.

The take away: We’ve come a long way! from legacy/traditional monitoring tools, the days of Robust IT and traditional hardware monitoring, to an unified IT monitoring and performance analytics platform with its single-pane-of-glass dashboard, where users have instant access to root cause analysis and failure trends. But, we have a long way to go where almost 60% of companies in the Central and Eastern Europe have not yet formed a digital transformation strategy.

And that’s a wrap for IDC CIO SUMMIT ‘18 – see you next year!

Centerity’s EMEA team is looking forward next years IDC CIO SUMIIT

 

Bridging the Gap Between Promise and Reality: Achieving SLA and the Return of BSM

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“We’ve deployed several solutions to track our technology assets, manage SLA, and align IT with Business, but our efforts went very poorly. We receive very little return for our investment”.

To properly support corporate objectives, IT professionals need to align service levels (SLAs) with business objectives. Although achieving this alignment can be difficult, when properly implemented the resulting solution (called Business Service Management – BSM) is critically important for technology-driven businesses. An effective BSM solution delivers a consolidated view of every technology asset and how each one affects SLA, providing the insights needed to reduce operations costs and improve uptime. Unfortunately, traditional approaches for developing BSM solutions have repeatedly failed, causing Gartner to claim that “BSM Is Dead”. This blog will start the important process of disputing Gartner’s claim because the truth is, BSM is not dead. In fact, only a stand-alone BSM solution can consistently align technology and business objectives. From our perspective it would have been better for Gartner to say, “Traditional BSM is dead but a fresh approach can bring a new BSM generation.”

Traditionally, IT departments and system integrators develop custom BSM solutions based on one of many different technologies: a configuration management database (CMDB); a fault management console; application performance management (APM); data analytics, etc. Using a CMDB (inventory-based) or fault management (alert-based) system as the foundation for BSM is a challenge because neither of these systems is designed to evaluate service levels or optimize business value. Data analytics and APM also struggle to deliver the promise of BSM as they fail to recognize cause-effect and relationships that exist within (and across) business services. Finally, because traditional BSM solutions are tailor-made they tend to be “fragile”, requiring constant attention to support the frequent changes, revisions and updates that occur in a typical IT environment (i.e., new applications, deployments, devices, and configurations that get implemented over time).

A lot of companies that pursue a custom-built BSM solution, find that making/ maintaining integrations across multiple systems (that often change) is only a fraction of the cost. The biggest risk for traditional BSM projects is scope-creep, where different departments suggest additional “required” functionality. Each of these new capabilities has time, cost, and quality implications, and most companies struggle to agree on urgent, important, and nice-to-have features. The result is a never-ending BSM development cycle that fails to deliver the promised business results. This experience has convinced IT departments that building a BSM solution is difficult and costly (in terms of both budget and reputation) and instead they fall back on service desk metrics to approximate SLA measurements.

Building a true BSM solution is challenging because it is difficult to define and model dependencies and relationships across multiple technology layers and business processes, and because it is difficult to maintain a custom-built system over time. The result is that IT departments have largely given up trying to deliver true BSM solutions because they don’t deliver much value to IT (aside from faster troubleshooting and fewer false positives). However, the primary objective of BSM solutions is not to improve IT, it is to improve the overall business while making IT better. Traditional approach solutions (such as Fault Management) fail to deliver value at the service level, struggle to properly correlate events with root causes, and lack comprehensive monitoring and analysis. Because so many companies pursued custom-built solutions they failed to realize the promises of Service Management and have been forced to bridge the gap by throwing more IT analysts and administrators at the problem. If this is the case, what’s the resolution?

With so much noise around IT performance analytics, we will have a future blog that goes deeper into the challenges of delivering a true BSM/SLA solution. Until then I invite you to contact us to learn how Centerity improves the cost, time, and quality of your business operations, including full-stack BSM and performance analytics. We would be happy to share how our customers benefit from a single-pane-of-glass that allows decision makers to measure end-to-end performance and correlate it to SLA, bringing a whole new meaning to the term Business Service Management. Gartner’s obituary was a bit premature because BSM isn’t dead, it’s just getting started.

 

Bridging the Gap Between Promise and Reality: Achieving SLA and the Return of BSM

/in /by

“We’ve deployed several solutions to track our technology assets, manage SLA, and align IT with Business, but our efforts went very poorly. We receive very little return for our investment”.

To properly support corporate objectives, IT professionals need to align service levels (SLAs) with business objectives. Although achieving this alignment can be difficult, when properly implemented the resulting solution (called Business Service Management – BSM) is critically important for technology-driven businesses. An effective BSM solution delivers a consolidated view of every technology asset and how each one affects SLA, providing the insights needed to reduce operations costs and improve uptime. Unfortunately, traditional approaches for developing BSM solutions have repeatedly failed, causing Gartner to claim that “BSM Is Dead”. This blog will start the important process of disputing Gartner’s claim because the truth is, BSM is not dead. In fact, only a stand-alone BSM solution can consistently align technology and business objectives. From our perspective it would have been better for Gartner to say, “Traditional BSM is dead but a fresh approach can bring a new BSM generation.”

Traditionally, IT departments and system integrators develop custom BSM solutions based on one of many different technologies: a configuration management database (CMDB); a fault management console; application performance management (APM); data analytics, etc. Using a CMDB (inventory-based) or fault management (alert-based) system as the foundation for BSM is a challenge because neither of these systems is designed to evaluate service levels or optimize business value. Data analytics and APM also struggle to deliver the promise of BSM as they fail to recognize cause-effect and relationships that exist within (and across) business services. Finally, because traditional BSM solutions are tailor-made they tend to be “fragile”, requiring constant attention to support the frequent changes, revisions and updates that occur in a typical IT environment (i.e., new applications, deployments, devices, and configurations that get implemented over time).

A lot of companies that pursue a custom-built BSM solution, find that making/ maintaining integrations across multiple systems (that often change) is only a fraction of the cost. The biggest risk for traditional BSM projects is scope-creep, where different departments suggest additional “required” functionality. Each of these new capabilities has time, cost, and quality implications, and most companies struggle to agree on urgent, important, and nice-to-have features. The result is a never-ending BSM development cycle that fails to deliver the promised business results. This experience has convinced IT departments that building a BSM solution is difficult and costly (in terms of both budget and reputation) and instead they fall back on service desk metrics to approximate SLA measurements.

Building a true BSM solution is challenging because it is difficult to define and model dependencies and relationships across multiple technology layers and business processes, and because it is difficult to maintain a custom-built system over time. The result is that IT departments have largely given up trying to deliver true BSM solutions because they don’t deliver much value to IT (aside from faster troubleshooting and fewer false positives). However, the primary objective of BSM solutions is not to improve IT, it is to improve the overall business while making IT better. Traditional approach solutions (such as Fault Management) fail to deliver value at the service level, struggle to properly correlate events with root causes, and lack comprehensive monitoring and analysis. Because so many companies pursued custom-built solutions they failed to realize the promises of Service Management and have been forced to bridge the gap by throwing more IT analysts and administrators at the problem. If this is the case, what’s the resolution?

With so much noise around IT performance analytics, we will have a future blog that goes deeper into the challenges of delivering a true BSM/SLA solution. Until then I invite you to contact us to learn how Centerity improves the cost, time, and quality of your business operations, including full-stack BSM and performance analytics. We would be happy to share how our customers benefit from a single-pane-of-glass that allows decision makers to measure end-to-end performance and correlate it to SLA, bringing a whole new meaning to the term Business Service Management. Gartner’s obituary was a bit premature because BSM isn’t dead, it’s just getting started.

 

Hyperconvergence Only Solves Half the Problem// Xperts Tips Series

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Enterprises and service providers constantly worry about loss of time, money and unscheduled downtime and look for new or better ways to overcome the conflicting demands for higher performance with lower costs.

when problems do occur (and they always do), system administrators need to avoid long, drawn-out processes of fault identification and root cause analysis. To increase performance, IT pros need agile solutions that can redirect applications and reallocate storage and computing resources to ensure a reliable, scalable platform. Furthermore, to meet or exceed service level agreements (SLA), IT experts need to deliver real time reports and trend analysis that will enable the IT team to be proactive, identify maintenance requirements, and document the business impact.

A Closer Look

Take for example an IT project we were recently working on with an international manufacturer of defense systems, whose equipment often integrates with high-performance computing platforms. As part of a client contract, their team had been asked to develop and install a Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), a pre-loaded and pre-configured server rack consisting of hardware and software for compute, storage, networking, virtualization, containers, data streaming components and a range of other new technologies. A crucial part of the project included having tools that would ensure consistent performance and reliability over time.

The vendor needed a way to evaluate the entire HCI system (all software applications, networking, and infrastructure components) that would recognize problems in real-time, isolate root causes, identify trends and foresee impending issues before they caused performance degradation and downtime. Furthermore, they needed a solution that displayed the “health status” for each business process so that system administrators could recognize the operational implications of various problems, and assign the right resources to solve the most critical issues.

How to Monitor The Entire IT System and Associate Each Layer of Technology To Individual Business Processes?

Traditional infrastructure and operations (I&O) tools alone lack the comprehensive coverage of these various IT domains – applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, etc. So, while HCI architectures will accelerate implementation by simplifying storage and hardware decisions, by itself an HCI approach lacks the required performance monitoring and analytics of software layers, where 70-80% of performance problems occur.

Without an end-to-end view of the entire IT system, and an understanding of how different technology layers impact one another, administrators must scramble to trace the propagation of problems (cause-and-effect). This leads to poor first-time-fix rates (FTF), more no-trouble-found events (NTF), and longer meantime-to-repair (MTTR).

With the growing complexity of IT environments, especially hybrid computing models (consisting of private Cloud, public Cloud, and on-premise), the need to solve the enterprise-level monitoring and analytics problem has become even greater.

What Can Be Done to Optimize complex IT Environments?

The only way IT experts can manage tech complexity, reduce costs, and get higher performance, is through a unified IT performance monitoring and analytics approach.

Unified IT performance monitoring delivers a consolidated view of overall service levels by evaluating all layers of the technology stack, including applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices.

Unified IT performance analytics provides reports that reveal dependencies, correlations, and trends of operational issues before they happen. This approach essentially provides an early warning system to problems, along with corrective action tools that quickly isolate defects and identify root causes. As a result, organizations can capture a real-time picture of the complete IT stack and ensure that service levels are consistent with contractual agreements.

Keeping this in mind, lets go back to our customer example above. Our defense systems manufacturer IT Operations team had three potential paths worth consideration.

Three Potential Paths to Victory

The first path was a combination of built-in (often packaged with infrastructure devices and software applications) and 3rd party monitoring tools (commercial performance monitoring tools) together with a layer of custom code written on top to integrate the pieces, implement business rules, and provide the high-level dashboard that was required.

A “combo pack solution” like this however would be very time consuming, risky, and expensive for the customer. In addition, it would require an ongoing consulting agreement with the vendor to ensure the custom code continued to perform as expected.

The second path was to implement an integrated monitoring suite from one of the large software vendors. A ‘suite solution’ looked good at first but in the end was too expensive and limiting because each IT layer would require purchasing and managing a separate software module. All too often though critical monitoring features like these were not going to be available until the “next” release.

IT team’s third option was the unified IT and operations performance monitoring and analytics solution from Centerity.

Be on The Right Path

Centerity was considered cost effective because a single platform covered all technology layers (hardware and software), and pricing was not based on separate modules but on the number of metrics (or KPIs) that needed to be monitored.

The technology evaluations also revealed that Centerity’s risk profile was low because the system was up and running within a matter of hours, including monitoring and root cause analysis. Indeed, by the end of a week-long test the entire HCI system was being optimized based on Centerity’s analytics and trend reports.

After implementing Centerity’s end-to-end IT performance monitoring and analytics platform, our client and his customer finally had real-time access to critical information that allowed them to manage and improve service levels and customer satisfaction.

Since implementing Centerity, reports show that the fault isolation and root cause analysis capabilities have reduced MTTR on the HCI system by as much as 80% over previous systems.

Centerity’s unified software appliance was the only solution that could cover the entire IT stack on the Hyperconverged system and let our customer experience the performance and reliability they expected.

For further information or questions about how to improve IT performance via unified IT performance analytics solution, please schedule a demo for how Centerity can help with your IT needs.

Implementing Successful Proactive IT Performance Strategy

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“Enterprise analytics provides speed and accuracy, which means getting the information needed to make a decision in a matter of minutes, not hours. It means being able to fix performance issues before users notice there’s a problem”


How to Implement a successful Proactive IT strategy?
Prerequisite to be proactive is seeing the entire IT environment. There are 3 main guidelines in order to get there:

  1. The user has information when and where he needs it.
  2. The user discovers new insights via easy-to-consume Visualized interface.
  3. The user is part of a complex, extensive and interconnected software landscape (Vs. looking at silos of data).

The only way IT experts can satisfy each prerequisite and have an immediate, clear visibility to their entire IT stack is via Unified Performance Analytics Platform. Such platforms is designed to be flexible and is already geared to Auto Discover what’s going on your entire IT environment, within the very first day, every day. 

This is another way how a Unified IT Performance Analytics solution ensures speed, which is key value for any IT Operation success. How proactive an IT expert can be is an indication of the completeness and the flexibility of the solution they have.

Discover How to improve performance


About Centerity

Centerity’s award winning software provides a unified enterprise-class IT performance analytics platform that improves performance and reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack including, applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.

Overcoming Conflicting Demands for Improved Performance and Reduced Costs in IT Operations

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Enterprise service is not operationally ready until its entire IT stack is analyzed in a comprehensive and accurate way.

The only cost-effective way to do it is through a Unified Performance Analytics Platform. Such methodology is unique as it is built as one piece of a software that goes beyond collecting and organizing data alone. It provides an intuitive visualization and clear context for the information gathered.

Having such platform reduces MTTR and overheads and expands the real time visibility that is brought to your management dashboard, 24X7. Together with it’s inherited Flexibility and easy configuration set up, business units ensure a dramatic and immediate performance improvement together with overall reduced costs.

How well IT experts address contradicting demands is an indication of the completeness of the software solution the have. How quickly IT pros adapt to  change is a matter of the flexibility of their product. How rapidly they identify root causes and generate reports is an indication of the value of their product (reduces MTTR). How fast they to satisfy  business needs is a matter of what Analytics platform they have.

Interested to learn more? here you’ll discover how to implement a successful Proactive IT Strategy?

About Centerity

Centerity’s award winning software provides a unified enterprise-class IT performance analytics platform that improves performance and reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack including, applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.

Discover here how to improve performance