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:

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

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.

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.

 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.

“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

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!

“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.