Listen to the 12:25 podcast below:
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KB: Can you please provide us with a brief overview of your company?
JT: Certainly. Kognitio is a company that focuses on business intelligence and data warehousing. We offer our solution in three different forms. We either sell our WX2 relational database for analytical processing as a piece of software, or as a hardware/software appliance a la Netezza, and Teradata, and companies like that, or we delivery it in a services form. We have what we have call data warehousing-as-a-service and many companies are finding that rather than buying the hardware and software they would prefer to go to the services route.
KB: Today's topic is BI SaaS or BI in the Cloud. So John, tell us about the growth and spread of business intelligence among mid-tier companies.
JT: Absolutely. We have a number of companies that are coming to us and we're finding them through our marketing efforts as well who are saying we really want to understand our business better. We have a number of datasets about our customers, about our products, our web activity, our different channels that we sell into and we would like to bring that information together. The problem that they are facing as mid-tier companies is that they don't have the resources, or the personnel, or the capital budget that you would see in Fortune 500 companies. So they find the data warehousing-as-a-service offering very attractive because there's no upfront cost, they can begin their operations and their data integration very quickly and they can be up and running in some cases as short as 48 hours.
We do work with a number of companies that we put together production systems that take a month or two to build and then they pay for it on a subscription basis so no capital expenditures, no CapEx expense, no hardware or software to purchase and no heavy-duty upfront investment required. They can just get started and Kognitio takes care of all the backend data management, the SLAs, the integration and the maintenance of the hardware and software for them.
KB: How has the emergence of cloud computing and SaaS helped foster that growth?
JT: Cloud computing and SaaS are getting jumbled up in the marketing messages of many firms. I think the term "cloud washing" has been bandied about where people are just adding cloud to all their marketing materials. But there really is a movement in cloud computing that does help mid-tier and Fortune 500 or Tier 1 companies as well. They are finding that they can use highly virtualized environments, or outsourced environments, and SaaS environments in a way that, as I mentioned in my previous answers, cuts down their CapEx expense, their hardware and software expenditures and they can flexibly use those resources.
So if they want to start with a small amount of data and small amount of computing resources they can do so. They can do that via Amazon and a number of other providers out there where they can put it on their personal credit card and expense it and get up and running in just a few days and really find out is this something that we're going to be able to make money with, is this something that we're going to be able to make actionable decisions with. So it's a great environment for experimentation, which has helped the data warehousing and business intelligence field because over the years people have been reticent to jump into it because there's been such as hefty price tag associated with it.
KB: Kognitio pioneered the concept of BI SaaS with its data warehousing-as-a-service. How has its adoption changed the way both you and your clients look as the deployment of data analytics?
JT: It's been surprising. We started providing data warehousing-as-a-service over ten years ago and we have a couple of customers that have been with us for that entire time. What has changed recently with the rise of cloud computing and SaaS, as we just discussed in the previous question, that companies are now experimenting. They're jumping into it with both feet and we have a number of customers coming to us saying I want to buy an appliance. I've heard all the hype, I've read all the materials; I've talked the analyst. I really want to buy an appliance. But to prove the value of that appliance, they want to do a proof of concept or a POC.
We do that POC with our customers and our prospects as a cost to sales; it doesn't cost them anything to do it. And then, when we reach the end of the POC and they say yes, I see the value, I want to engage in this, I want to have this solution. Many of them opt, and have changed their mind, and go and say, I thought I wanted to buy an appliance, but given that it's running in your center as a DaaS service right now in the POC form, why don't we just convert that to a production service. I'll pay for it on a subscription basis and keep rolling forward. So it gets into the form of if it's working, why change it. Just leave it as it is and roll it along and that we have found has been kind of a surprise to us because we always expect to redo the POC, the customers choose a different delivery mechanism and we would go that way. But often, more often than not, people are saying just leave it in a services form and we're happy with it.
KB: The trend towards big data is prevalent these days with larger amounts of data being analyzed faster than ever. Where is this headed and what do you think is the realistic future for data analytics and business intelligence?
JT: There definitely is a trend towards big data Kaitlin, you're absolutely right. We see more and more people bringing not just large sets of singular data like web data or customer data. We see people bringing in six, seven, eight different sources of data and bringing that together and any one of those sources can be big. And when they're integrated together, they're even bigger so there is a trend towards big data and bigger data. And there is also a trend towards more interactive and more sophisticated analytics and that's something that Kognitio and our product WX2, welcome wholeheartedly.
We have always been proponents and supporters of people engaging actively with their data so they can make decisions and understand how their business runs from a realistic data based perspective. So we believe that data will continue to grow in leaps and bounds as we've seen across all industries from online retail, financial services, to insurance, to Telcos, it just goes on and on. And we do believe that there will be a rise of more analytically oriented managers out and away from what we typically and historically have seen where there's a group of people who are analysts.
Now what we think and what we believe will happen if that front line managers will be analysts and they will be empowered to do their analytics for their area and for a broader part of the corporation and they will engage in the data more actively than their predecessors have. So we believe that it'll be more of a dissemination where analytics is just imbued in all the operations of the company and managers who come in and take over those areas will be numerant, and literate, and feel very comfortable in analyzing a broad set of data in a very sophisticated way.
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KB: Can you please provide us with a brief overview of your company?
JF: Sure, I'd be happy to. Agiliance is a leading independent provider of integrated Governance, Risk and Compliance or GRC solutions. GRC has become a requirement for both public and private sector organizations, to comply with external regulations but also their own internal policies, to provide a real time view of risk in their organization. Our Agiliance GRC solution enables these organizations to manage their IT and operational risk much more effectively while reducing the cost to meeting these compliance mandates.
Our customers include Global 2000 companies from leading private sector areas in financial services, healthcare, energy, and high tech organizations as well as major government, both state and local, and federal governments here in the U.S. and in Europe.
KB: Today's topic is Integrated Governance, Risk and Compliance, GRC Solution. So Joe, explain the key challenges organizations face in adopting IT GRC Solutions.
JF: Okay. For IT and integrated GRC Solutions, there's really two challenges that we see in the marketplace. One is the maturity level of the customers. Many leading analysts such as Forrester and Gartner see the same problem and that is the myriad of compliance mandates, internal policies, industry specific regulations these organizations are under makes it difficult for them to understand which ones apply to them. And once you understand that, then they need to understand what policies and what are known as controls, that's sort of the operative word here. What controls can they put in place that limit the risk and put them further into compliance? If you think of it, compliance and risk are opposite ends of the spectrum. The more compliant you are, the less risky and the vice versa.
So the other piece of this is once they understand what controls apply to them, then they need to understand what kind of data feeds are needed from their security systems and other overall IT systems. So they can actually prove to an auditor that they've applied these controls in the right way.
The third piece is they need to be able to understand from people who are part of these controls. There are these people actually behaving as these controls say. That's the real first problems, the maturity level to understand all of that. The second is there have been a number of GRC products that were built under what we call the first generation in the early 2000s that are building block approaches. These building block approaches tend to be very costly, they have a lot of consulting services and customers are gun-shy of sort of implementing such costly, long-term implementations and are looking for second-generation solutions like Agiliance that provide a purpose built platform and a set of appliances that specifically focus on Integrated Governance, Risk and Compliance.
KB: What does today's maturity model look like and why is this commonly accepted?
JF: Okay. So there's sort of three levels to the maturity level. First level is what we call manual GRC. Here, we have sort of a silent approach. One small department in the organization for example, Tame It Credit Industry, which is PCI. Compliance might be one piece that an organization needs to do. They might use some simple documentation using Excel spreadsheets, and SharePoint, other common used tools to document their processes and then manually figure out are the people and are the systems actually doing it, very costly but very silent the one level.
The second is people that actually look at across a number of these compliance mandates. They could be FISMA for government, they could be PCI as I mentioned earlier, it could be IT SoCs, etc., etc. It could be privacy mandates and they try to cobble together a set of workflows that address all of these. Again, but using their own homegrown system and they build these one off and connect them together through data in a connection. They tend not to have a lot of connectivity still to the IT or security systems, which gives what we call a bottom-up correlation against these top-down assessments that are provided to people for a survey. But what's good about this second level anyway, at least its connecting multiple regulations and trying to get those understood in organizations; it's still not automated.
The third level we call automation GRC. So we have manual GRC, process GRC, and now automation GRC. That's where you have a central policies and controls but you have bottom-up data coming from all your systems and you correlating in one [indiscernible] swoop the information you're receiving from employees, the information you're receiving from IT systems and security systems, and coming up with a real time view of risk and that's what we enable these customers, Agiliance enables these customers to do.
KB: What are the problems that companies run into with this adoption model?
JF: Well, from either the manual GRC or the process GRC level, the problems are threefold. One is there's inefficient controls mapping. Control I mentioned multiple times. It could be, for example, how often do you need to change the passwords in your organization. The control could say it needs to be done on a quarterly basis and the sub-control could be that it needs to be ten digits, some capitals, some letters, etc. And how do you map that then to your PCI, or IP SoC, or some other compliance. That's not automated; that's a problem.
The second is inaccurate assessments. Without data coming directly from the IT systems or security systems, you really don't know what's happening. You can only have your ear to the ground as many companies say and they believe that the process is correctly done but they don't know what's actually happening in their system.
The third is insurmountable cost overrun. By having an inefficient controls mapping and these inaccurate assessments because there's no automation to data in your system, you then start to do a lot of manual work to prove to the auditor, prove to your board that you actually have these systems in place so that's what's inefficient and its problems that occur with the non-mature adoption models.
KB: What kind of maturity model would be more suitable for this type of technology and how would it work?
JF: Well, as we propose to the industry as a leading independent player, we believe that an Agiliance model has to allow for both top-down which we call process based GRC and bottom-up which we call automation based GRC in one combined framework so that allows you to test a thin slice of any piece of your organization against not one risk or one compliance initiative but against any. But you can get started with that kind of an application to do one piece and then add as you go so it allows people to get started, prove the value of these systems and then move across their entire organization, across all the compliance mandates, across all the risk policies that they need to address in a complete application. The other thing we think is really critical is that companies need to be able to deploy this not only on-premise but also in the cloud. Many companies have people who are far flung operations, some of their systems are already in the cloud and so Agiliance offers both cloud and on-premise deployment or a mixed deployment such that wherever your data is, wherever your people are, we can get at that information to provide you a view in real time to your risk and compliance.
KB: What are some of the advantages of the BUTD model?
JF: The BUTD is bottom-up/top-down model. Well, we see three advantages. One, it allows these thin slices or minimal use cases to validate how Governance, Risk and Compliance should be used inside a corporation. Much of the immaturity is that not that IT, and security, and operational folks don't understand the need but the business people who need to be involved need to see what's going on. They need to give their view into this risk because only they have certain aspects for that knowledge and they're being tested and that's part of the auditor requirement to ask the business people, in a business unit, in an operation like that as to what's going on. So its allowing you to get started with a singular compliance initiative that goes from the systems but also goes out to the people in one combined system is very important.
Secondly, it minimizes what we call change management. A lot of people are worried about change management because they're using spreadsheets today very manual but they know that at least people accept the process. By doing a thin slice with a system that's [indiscernible] still, like Agiliance, you're able to prove the case and have minimal disruption to the business and then add more and more initiatives for risk compliance as you go.
The third is that it validates the kind of technology that people want to invest in. They want to invest in an Agiliance kind of system but it validates the system so that people at the top levels of the organization, the CIO, sees what is actually being spent on in their organization, what needs more spending and then what needs less spending, that's the view that they don't have today. And the other advantage to the CFO, they know when they're spending in a certain area, they have some governance over that area and they know what the report looks like to the board and to the auditor, which they're responsible for.
KB: Once deployed properly, how can these automated GRC technologies benefit enterprises?
JF: Well, we see the benefit across a number of areas. One is standard frameworks. You may have heard of the International Standards Organization, that is an example of a framework that is now pretty worldwide accepted and Agiliance has the International Standards Organization or ISO standards built into our system so it gives people a way to provide frameworks that are accepted by your auditors and by the industry in a common application or a common platform like Agiliance GRC.
Second is it gives organizations continuous compliance. That's a [indiscernible] idea. They think its compliance as, well, I need to pass the compliance with the auditor that happens once a year, or maybe once a quarter, sometimes once a month and it's in different areas so most of these organizations are under audit fatigue because they think of compliance as a one-time event. With Agiliance, you have continuous compliance across all different compliance initiatives, that's a very different benefit and very new concept many people don't even believe it's possible.
And the third is Agiliance provides a business risk view into IT and operations. Many business people look at IT and operations and say, what are you doing. Why is this important? And we give the business user a view into why compliance and risk management of their IT and operational areas helps the business in fact be more profitable, make their numbers and succeed. These are the factors that we think are the benefits and automated GRC solutions such as Agiliance.
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KB: Can you please provide us with a brief overview of your company?
MO: Sure. Vordel is a vendor in the area of cloud and SOA. What we do is we provide product, our Vordel Gateway and the Vordel Cloud Service Broker, which help our customers deploy cloud and SOA. What we do is we provide the performance, security, and interoperability for customers who are using cloud and SOA and they want to take advantage of them in their businesses.
KB: Today's topic is Cloud Security and the Ongoing Problems with API Keys and How Vordel Can Help. So Mark, what security issues do IT managers face regarding cloud computing?
MO: There are a number of security issues which IT managers must face if they want to take advantage of cloud computing. One issue is around audit trails. Many of the cloud providers such as Google will provide a refund if you can prove that there is an issue with their service. In order to do that, you need an audit trail of your own so it's not just a case of your word against the cloud provider's word. So an independent audit trail ideally digitally signed is important for this as one of the security considerations around making use of the cloud.
Another issue is around the fact that API keys are used to manage access to the cloud. What an API key is, for listeners who aren't aware of the term, is simply is a string of data that's used to identify the customer to the cloud provider. So for example, keys are used to access accounts and services with Amazon Web Services, with Google, Google Apps, Force.com, and others. These keys are ultimately linked to credit cards often and to the accounts of the users so the keys must be protected.
What we're seeing is a certain amount of carelessness in terms of managing these keys and not yet, a realization on the part of CISOs and other IT managers, that these keys must protected. So here at Vordel, we recommend the use of brokers such as our own Vordel Cloud Service Broker to manage these keys and put the same of amount of control on the keys as you would with credit card numbers that have been sent on the wire or private keys that are being used for SSL or for authentication.
KB: What can enterprises to do to protect the API keys?
MO: So API keys that I just mentioned, these can be protected, for example, with hardware, with hardware security modules where the keys themselves are protected within hardware so the only way that an attacker could get them would be by physically getting ahold of the device itself. This is proven technology that's existed before for protecting SSL keys.
Another approach is to encrypt the keys and to make sure they cannot be decrypted without knowledge of a pass phrase and then to protect access to that pass phrase. We also recommend that if an organization is making use of a cloud service provider such as the Amazon Web Services, for things like storage-as-a-service, that the keys that are used are not going to be sitting on the hard drives of the application that's connecting to Amazon but instead are being managed by a piece of infrastructure such as broker so that the developer is making use of the cloud services. It doesn't need to be the same person who is managing the keys. So the developer isn't keeping the keys on their hard drive, or the hard drive with the application server. Instead, it's the IT infrastructure manager who's managing the keys as part of a broker.
KB: Are there any standards for cloud computing?
MO: At the moment, there are more industry standards than open standards. What I mean by industry standards is that the various different players in the cloud area, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Force.com, they all have different ways in which they have clients authenticating to them. These are all different ways of doing authentication, so different ways of presenting identity up to them. The fact that these are different means that there isn't any one standard right now. So if an organization wished to make use of cloud computing, they must navigate this world in which there are different standards for identifying yourself to the cloud providers.
And on the question of cloud standards, we see that if an organization was to wait for standards for authentication to cloud providers, they may be waiting a long time and there's an opportunity cost to that. It makes more sense to strike now to make use of the cloud services notwithstanding the fact that there isn't any one open standard for connecting to them. So the requirement then is for mediation for, again, a broker to provide the ability to broker the connection and deal with the fact that you're using different ways to authenticate to different providers and the broker then can smooth across those until such time as there is a standard.
KB: What is the future of cloud computing?
MO: We see a very exciting future where there can be a kind of marketplace between the cloud providers. For example with storage-as-as service, we see a future where an organization which, wishes to store data can choose between providers who can effectively bid on prices for the data. In this case, the first mover is Amazon where they have their spot pricing. So with Amazon's Web Services, they now have a service whereby they provide you a spot price, which is the current price for using infrastructure which Amazon provides as part of its cloud offering. At different times during the day, different days during the week, this price goes up and down.
Amazon is the first mover in this area but we see a future, the organizations to make use of the cloud service in the market environment whereby they can place bids and they can choose based on the cost. Bids also links to the use of a broker where the broker can broker the usage of a cloud service and choose between them based on the cost. It makes sense in terms of cloud storage-as-a-service and also just raw computing power as well and allows a kind of marketplace and then a cloud economy to develop as part of that.
KB: What industries are adopting cloud computing?
MO: Here at Vordel, we're seeing a number of our customers being early adopters in the area of cloud computing in certain industries. So just very recently, I was with a pharmaceutical company, which is a Vordel customer, and their requirement is to spin up large amounts of computing infrastructure quickly to work through large datasets for clinical trials. And then once the datasets have been computed, they no longer need that infrastructure so they can spin it down in terminate it. In the past, this would've meant a lot of capital expenditure in terms of buying the infrastructure and then perhaps not using it afterwards. Now this can be part of operational expenditure. When they need to do a clinical trial, they can instead process the data based on infrastructure that they effectively are renting. So in this case, it's no longer a situation where it's coming from operational expenditure, from company expenditure but instead it comes from operational expenditure.
We're also seeing other use cases in the area of government where government departments don't want to have to share data amongst other departments or other organizations but still they want to make use of cloud computing. So in this case, it makes sense for them to create so called community clouds where multiple government organizations can come together to reduce the cost by themselves making use of a community cloud solution but also making sure that confidential and sensitive data which is social security numbers in the US are not shared. So pharmaceuticals and government are big early adopters of cloud computing which we've seen in the Vordel customer base.
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KB: Can you please provide us with a brief overview of your company?
CP: I'll be happy to. Well, Algebraix Data Corporation was started to develop data management software around a new means of modeling data mathematically. The math we're using is a collection of algebras that was developed based on the idea that information is best represented by binary pairs of information not single values. And that the ability to manipulate the structure of the data is just as important as the ability to manipulate the values when it comes to designing and building systems that are efficient, easy to use, and can deliver a high value to our customers.
The concept actually goes back to the 1960s and it's the same basic concept that the relational data model was based on but our approach is for more mathematically rigorous and sound than the approach that was originally taken by Ted Codd back when he was doing his original work on the relational data model. By applying the mathematics, we've been able to develop a new technology for storing and manipulating data and we call the technology Algebraix Company, Algebraix Data Corporation because it's based on this collection of algebras we've created here at ADC.
The math itself has been very useful in solving a lot of problems that we've seen in the relational implementations that exist today. For example, the software itself is capable of self-managing, and self-organizing, and self-optimizing based on an application of the mathematics we've developed. What that does for our users is they no longer need to worry about deciding on data structures, indexes, partitioning, and how to allocate storage for specific types of databases or for how information should be served up to the users. All of this is automated through the application of the mathematics we have.
KB: Today's topic is The Challenges Organizations Face on Trying to Implement Analytics on Massive Volumes of Data. So Chris, your company has created a very different way of managing data. What's wrong with the relational model and why do you think people need something else?
CP: Well first off, it's not that there's really anything wrong with the relational data model. During the 70's and 80's, the relational model was popularized because it solved some problems. It allowed for standardization, it provided a means of organizing typical business information and business data in such a way that could be easily stored, and retrieved, and integrated with applications. As you know today, the relational database is the standard for information management and it's a multi-billion dollar market at this point but it's not suited to all applications. The internet, the power of computer today and plethora of new applications that do things other than manage tabular business data has caused creation of new data structures and new means of using information that's more diverse and the relational data model wasn't designed to handle that kind of thing.
This can include hierarchal databases, graphs, audio, video, even business documents today are far more complexed than what you can easily model with a row and column type of store. To store this information relationally, all this new information, is difficult. You got to go through all kinds of unusual and unnatural acts to get the information into these relational data structures. Once you've done that, then the SQL Language and other techniques used to access the information are difficult for the users, they're complicated, they're hard to maintain, all of this just creates a lot of manual work that has to be overcome through efforts and considerable amount of time and money.
It can be very inefficient in its execution as well. Systems can become very slow and very unresponsive when they have to deal with these complex non-relational type structures within the relational databases. Our approach is different. Rather than require the DBAs to design and tune these relational data models, our software automates the process. While the software is running, it analyses the data, the queries that the users are presenting and then automatically creates new structures and new access methods to accelerate the performance and streamline the users experience accessing the information through their business applications.
Because of this, a vast majority of the work that people have to do to bring up a database design the logical system and the physical data model, build indexes, decide on partitions, decide how the information will be spread across various disks and various systems. They're all automated, all eliminated by our software and automated. The advantage of course is the reduction in cost and time to bring up a database resulting in what we hope to be a 10:1 cost performance advantage.
KB: You mentioned the relational model first became popular in the 70s and 80s. Was the relational model always broken? If it worked back then but doesn't now, what's changed?
CP: Well, as I said earlier, it's not that it was broken but simply insufficient for today's data needs. The overall concept that Ted Codd proposed is a great model for tabular business data for transactional information but it only goes so far to specify a logical model. It doesn't specify how you should implement the storage of this and the retrieval and the access methods used to get at this information. It's a way of thinking about data and describing how to manipulate it logically. I guess that's the point I want to make. The physical implementation and how the data is physically managed is really the key to providing efficiency and high availability of information.
The real problem isn't the relational model's broken; it's the implementations that are in need of some help. In general, every relational database company has some techniques, some trick, some way of doing things that's unique to them that allows them to claim some superiority in some application. The best example of course is Oracle who's transactions processing technology clearly has been the industry leader for some time. But in the 80s, other companies like Teradata, for example, sprung up to address the problem of doing analytics. Their solution was to use very specific hardware and access techniques to accelerate performance for analytic work but they couldn't do the transactional work the Oracle did.
In almost all of these cases, the solution is created by creating custom structures and access methods designed for a particular purpose. Really, there's no such thing as a general purpose relational database. As I said to make things worse, things have changed a lot since this work was done in the 70s and 80s. In the 90s, the internet came along, computers got more powerful, we were able to store a lot more information. The network connectivity allowed us to move all that information around or access information at remote locations. XML came along, audio, video, all of these things and none of this existed when the relational data model was conceived. None of these existed when the first implementations of the relational data model were built.
So it wasn't designed for these things and that's one of the reasons the relational model today is not capable of serving all of the business needs of your typical enterprise company today.
KB: This format of rows, columns, and tables is now incorporated into the very foundation of almost every single database in the world. Will people ever be able to change it?
CP: Well of course, eventually things will change, they always do. It's not so much of a question of do we need to change it or will it change. But as we moved away from less efficient ways of doing things in the past to better ways of doings that will happen as well as new systems come along. The traditional row and column relational database will always have its place but when it comes to managing new types of information and new types of data structures, a different technology and a different approach is required.
Integrating all this information is key too and that's where we think one our strength is going to be. With our mathematical model, we're capable of modeling in the relational database model, hierarchal models, XML, many other ways of organizing information into a single unified database. And I do think it's that ability to do that's going to make our technology unique and valuable in the future to be able to co-exist with all the existing legacy applications to provide the kind of data services and integration necessary to pull all this stuff together and truly provide a universal, integrated model is what ADC is all about.
KB: Let's talk about some examples. What kinds of things aren't possible today and why do they need to be?
CP: Well, there's a lot of things where the relational data model in its implementations fall short today. It can be as simple as having two different applications that want to do two different things accessing the same database. Perhaps maybe a customer service application and some type of order fulfillment system for example might want to get access to the same data to run these applications. The challenge always is that the nature of the application dictates how the information should be stored and structured. And the way its organized and structured for one application may not be beneficial for the other so it's entirely possible that you get an implementation that's optimized for neither or that has been optimized for one application and not the other.
This is a problem and this problem exists because of the nature of how these systems are done today. You are only allowed one physical model for the logical model that you are exposing. In our technology, its different. You can actually have multiple physical models. Each automated and managed by our software such that both of these applications will see the same information but will access it through entirely different access methods and get at different data structures to provide the kind of efficiency and performance that they need.
Other types of issues that come up are just the sheer amount of data. If you look back at databases in the 70s and 80s, managing megabytes of data was what was going on. Today, most companies are dealing with gigabytes if not terabytes of information. These systems weren't designed for those things. The nature of that type of processing is very different. And once again, new technology is required.
Finally the internet, the fact that information is distributed. Networks per say didn't exist back when the relational implementations were created. There wasn't the idea that information could be spread across a computer network within a building much less around the world. Databases that have the ability to deal with information distributed in that way and allow users to pose queries, answer questions where the information is not local or perhaps not even all in the same place is what's going to be necessary for the databases of the future. Once again, we here at ADC and the technologies we're developing will be able to address those problems.
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KB: Can you please provide us with a brief overview of your company?
CR: Certainly. My firm is Nastel Technologies. We're located in Long Island, New York and we're a software provider of application performance monitoring solutions that do business transaction management and that are for the mid-to-large enterprises. We are installed in a lot of large financial service firms, also in retail, state government, and healthcare.
KB: Today's topic is the role BTP plays in proactive IT management and the importance of putting a transaction monitoring solution in place in order to detect and fix abnormal activities that has the potential to cause cascading high impact failures within the IT system. So Charley, do most enterprises have the visibility they need to rapidly determine exactly where a problem occurred, what to fix, and do it all with minimal business impact?
CR: That's a great question Kaitlin. A lot of firms would answer quite quickly, oh, of course we do; we have lots of tools. What's interesting to note is that is true. Many of them have many tools that overlap. In fact, some of the problem is they have so many and you start to wonder, well, why do they have so many. Well, because they never really address the problem fully so they keep buying more and that ends up being pretty expensive especially not getting the results you want. A lot of the tools are specialist tools for the web farm, app servers, things people use in development. What folks really have not fully implemented and deployed are things that monitor applications and their performance and transactions.
We talk about BTP, business transaction performance, how do I measure that? A lot of the existing tools that firms have from the large systems management vendors, etc. not necessarily integrate it and are very often monitoring the network, servers, virtualization, all important things but very often they leave out one of the key ones and that is how do I measure the performance of my business transactions. How do measure the availability of my applications? So I would say they don't have that visibility they need because they're not getting an end-to-end view that shows what's going in flight, what occurred, and exactly what the state of each application and transaction is.
KB: What does it means to discover transactions and monitor them and what are the challenges?
CR: It's a difficult thing to do. It isn't as if transactions are this thing that are described and it's very clear and all vendors adhere to this; it's more of a concept. Transactions are logical units of work and the way they're implemented are very different for Java, or .NET, or Middleware Messaging, which is WMQ. What the challenges are is in first, is in discovering the applications because transactions are what comprise an application, finding them, finding the transactions, and then observing them without changing them, and looking at the different transitions as they go through Java methods, as they invoke JMS, or create a message, connect up with CICS, etc.
Following those transactions as they transition, if you will, through the different tiers and different parts of your infrastructure is very, very challenging. And then, the important thing is stitching them together because that's how you build a map of transaction topology so you have a view that explains what really happened in your enterprise. A lot of firms build an app, do some testing, it gets out in production and then they discover it doesn't exactly do what we thought it did. And that's an issue that's often quite surprising and not always uncovered in user acceptance testing.
So discovering these logical units of work across different platforms, stitching them together into a meaningful display is what's very, very important. But you have to go a step further because now you've got this understanding of Java, and .NET, and messages, and CICS and all this. But you may not be able to necessarily answer the question when a customer calls and says where's my trade because none of things have anything or say anything to do with a particular trade or trade ID, TID. So you have to go a step further and put a business context around those IT transactions so that you can relate this Java method to a customer's saying where's Trade 0011432, otherwise, you would have a support issue. So the challenges are finding them, stitching them, and then putting them into a context that can be usable and searchable so that you can support your customers when they have issues around those transactions.
KB: Is transaction monitoring enough?
CR: No, it might be provocative because business transaction management is very popular in the web, and the blogs, and a lot of vendors talk about that and it's not enough. It's an important part of the puzzle. The Gardner Group defines transaction profiling as one of the components in application performance monitoring. But if all you're doing is monitoring transaction, then you're seeing at high level what happened but it's really the tip of the iceberg. The real communication that goes on between applications happens at the middleware layer. This could be something like WMQ, WBI, TIPCO, Message Brokers, all those sorts of things.
If you're up just at the Java and .NET level, you miss most of what's going on so your representation of what happened is very much incomplete. Now why does that matter? Well, that visibility you get, this approach here, is used to explain what happened to support an app, to deal with a logic error, to help improve performance, etc. If you're missing most of what happened, then you don't have the visibility what's necessary. You end up as if part of your application went into a black hole. What's going on in the middleware? So I would go so far as to say that without deep middleware introspection, it's impossible to do business transaction management and that has to be beyond the basics.
Folks talk about JMS. Well, that's good but that's just showing you what's going in and going out. If you really want to understand your middleware topology or levels of queues that talk to other queues, etc., you can't see that with JMS. So you really have to go deep native in terms of middleware introspection and then correlate what's going on even within the message package themselves with what's going on at the transaction layer. That will provide what's enough to deliver the visibility to really achieve BTP, business transaction performance.
KB: Can high impact problems be predicted or even prevented?
CR: Yes, they can. And why is that important? Well, it's really important because the longer a problem persists the more it costs, the bigger disruption there is to your business processes, your customers, and the risk you have of a cascading failure. Now, an approach we use at Nastel with our AutoPilot product is to use complex event processing. Complex Event Processing searches for patterns so you can find the early warning. Think of it as an early warning system. You can find the symptoms that show up that a problem's going to occur. Now there may not be a ticket open at the service desk, their users may not be impacted yet, but the symptoms are starting to arrive and this is telling you that you're beginning to veer from business normal to business abnormal.
So what's a good example for that? A good example is with in flight transactions because nothing's failed yet so you have no red lights on. And example might be in a payment system. Its 4:00 p.m., its Friday, you have 40 payments of transactions in flight that have an average duration of ten minutes. Nothing's wrong but you're not going to be able to reconcile the Federal Reserve and that's a big, big issue that has to be done every day. Your company, your bank's in big trouble yet nothing's gone wrong yet so complex event processing as we use it in AutoPilot is searching for those patterns and very often they're with in flight transactions.
So what it does is it understands what normal is for you, something that's constantly changing, how that differs from expectation, and then how that differs from what's actually occurring in flight and this can alert you to deal with an issue before any of the normal alarms have gone off and hopefully avoid a catastrophic issue. So yes, it can be done.
]]>Listen to my 8:08 podcast below:
KB: Can you please provide us with a brief overview of your company?
BS: Sure. Adaptive Planning is in the corporate performance management space and so that budgeting and planning, financial reporting, operational metrics and dashboards. We are a software service company so that means that we deliver our solution on-demand for customers. And the problem that we solve is that most companies today do all of their budgeting and planning and financial reporting in Excel and at some point their business becomes too complex to rely on a series of spreadsheets and they're looking for more of an enterprise class solution.
We typically target a mid-market size company so 100 employees to 2,500 employees. Typically, companies of that size cannot afford a big upfront license fee, and can't afford many months of implementations, and typically don't have a lot of IT resources around to support the solution. So Adaptive Planning is really a solution soft [indiscernible] for mid-market companies who want to get up and running quickly, want to pay as they go, get immediate value for the solution they put into production.
KB: Today's topic is Business Performance Management. How has the economy over the past 18 months impacted companies planning and reporting requirements?
BS: Well, we've really seen a "C" change I think in terms of the culture of organizations. If you go back to let's say the summer of 2008, typically, most companies when they're doing budgeting and planning think of that as annual exercise so they do their plan once. If they're not automated, it takes them two to three months to get that plan finalized in their organization. They lock it down and then maybe six months later they do a mid-year update and for many companies they view that as sufficient. Sure, they'd like to do it more often. They'd like to be more on top of the game but the organization wasn't able to support more ongoing forecasting and updating activities.
Well, then the economy crashed and all of a sudden the stakes were a lot higher. What we seen is a number of organizations that have moved into much more frequent reforecasting, in fact, doing that multiple times within a quarter. The reason they're doing that is that many cases they're very concerned about cash, their availability of cash, if their top customers are paying on time, how quickly can they convert a new piece of business into cash into their accounts. The bank may have cut their line of credit last year so they was liquidity crunch. So they're doing a lot of reforecasting and really understanding the impact of different external events on their business and really trying to stay much more on top of their game and to manage more day-to-day as opposed to quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year.
KB: What are some of the benefits of SaaS and cloud based applications like Adaptive planning in the business performance management space?
BS: Well, I think building on top of the last point in terms of companies needing to move more quickly and do more rapid reforecasting and what if scenarios and so on. The reality is that companies need to take advantage of these solutions very quickly. They need the answer now. They have to make decisions quickly, the situation is changing rapidly, there's a lot of uncertainty out there. And so, the advantage of a SaaS solution like Adaptive Planning is that we get our customers up and running anywhere from two to three weeks. And so a customer buys and three weeks later, they're in production already getting the value of our solution.
The on-premise alternatives that are out there from some of our high-end competitors take many months to implement and so it could be a long time before the company can take advantage of that. So I think time-to-value is a number one benefit. Number two, its pay-as-you-go so you can buy as many seats as you need. It's a subscription pricing models so you pay per seat per year. You only buy what you need. At the end of a year you don't think that we're providing value, you don't need to renew. The alternative, on-premise, big upfront license fee and so you've made a huge commitment upfront, a big outlay of cash at a time when you maybe don't have a lot of cash, and the relatively high risk in terms of whether you're going to see real value from that solution or not.
Three, no IT required. And so many organizations, particularly mid-market companies don't have a lot of IT resources, maybe even less this year than last. And so, a solution like ours can be deployed rapidly and not require any IT involvement. So I think the last key advantage of SaaS in our company's case, you can try before you buy so we have a 30-day trial of our enterprise version. You can go in, check out the application, see if it provides value, you know exactly what you're getting before you make a purchase decision.
KB: In what industry is Adaptive Planning achieving the greatest traction and interest?
BS: Well, I think the great thing about Adaptive Planning is that our solution itself is horizontal by the way that our solution includes Excel like experience, web based. You go in and you have the ability to set up your expenses for departmental level perspective. If you're the VP, you can setup your entire organization. Sales Ops can setup all of their quoted sales reps from the year, understand bookings from a quarter-to-quarter basis, week-to-week and so on. If you're the CFO, you see a consolidated view of the entire organization, income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, capital budget, headcount plan. All of these things tied together. Make a change once and have it be automatically updated across the organization so everybody that's a key stakeholder can see it.
That solution is easily adaptable to a lot of different industries. So we have today over 700 customers across a number of different industries, over 100 software companies, almost as many manufacturing companies, a number of national retail organizations, insurance companies, nonprofits, healthcare. So what you see is our application working in a lot of different vertical markets so we're I think pretty fortunate to have a very diversified customer base.
KB: How does Adaptive Planning technology benefit an organization's bottom line?
BS: Well, I think first and foremost, by getting all of your key stakeholders aligned around a common set of assumptions, a common plan, ongoing forecasting updates, really understanding how events are impacting your business. From a financial standpoint, using our reporting systems to bring in actual from your accounting system and compare that to your plan, understand what variances are there, be able to drill down and understand why you are ahead of plan or behind plan. All of these tools give businesses the ability to manage their business much more efficiently, to identify savings on the expense side, to understand the impact of hiring additional people, to understand the cash flows of within their business and what factors are going to impact cash flow going forward. So all of those I think have a very significant impact on business.
But in addition to that, if you're comparing our solution against some of the on-premise alternatives, we have a significant total cost of ownership advantage. We recently had a third party consulting organization do a study and compared our solution against a lot of our mid-market competitors and found that we were anywhere from a quarter to a third of the cost over time of the on-premise alternatives. And so not only do we provide great benefit through our solution, but when compared to against other competitors in the space, also, dramatic cost savings over time.
KB: What recommendations would you have for companies that are interested in learning more about performance management solutions?
BS: Well, I think there are number of great solutions out there, some very well know. And I think that we would encourage customers to look carefully at each of the solutions. Our approach I think is to be very transparent. We would expect the other companies out there to be as well. And so can you go in and try all the products first and make sure that it meets your requirements. Are you able to easily understand pricing? Is the pricing posted on the website? If it's a hosted solution, do you know what the uptime is on a monthly and annualized basis?
Are you able to get access to online training so you can see exactly how hard it is or easy it is to use the solution? Is the contract readable? Are you able to pay-as-you-go to buy only what you need? Are you able to cancel if you don't like what you get? I think all of those are critical and of course customer references. Are your customers happy when they go out and look at the analysts who do customer sat rankings for the segment? Who are the ones that are delivering the best solutions with the happiest customers? Do your homework to make sure that you understand the benefits of the different solutions and also what the risks are.
]]>Listen to my 4:40 podcast below:
KB: Can you please provide us the brief overview of your company?
JT: Yes. Embarcadero Technologies specializes in heterogeneous database and application development tools. And really, we target application developers, database developers, DBAs, and data architects, and really try to maximize their productive with the systems that they're managing.
KB: Today's topic is Data Modeling for MDM. The popularity of MDM has prompted a new series of questions around data modeling. So Jason, to what do you attribute all the recent interest in data modeling for MDM?
JT: Well, there are a lot of moving parts with master data management. You're integrating a lot of data from a lot of different sources. And anytime you're doing that, you need to have your models in place so that you basically have the blueprints or the roadmap of what the systems look like, what the data looks like, and you're going to be a lot more effective, save a lot of time when implementing or beginning on a master data management project.
KB: What are the risks of not having a data model before launching an MDM initiative?
JT: Well, I think it's mainly comes down to cost and time. You're going to waste a lot of cycles if you don't have the proper documentation. If people don't understand exactly how the sources of data that have the data spread out all over the place are integrated into the master data hub, then there's going to be a lot of wasted time finding the people and the knowledge of the system to be able to integrate the data between those two things. So really, you're going to be wasting a lot of money and a lot of time. And rather than relying on tribal knowledge and going to individuals that might have information about the sources, it makes sense to have models in place so that everybody's on the same page.
KB: How are data models different for MDM and is the value any different?
JT: They're not necessarily different. But really again, you're dealing with a lot of data movement when you're talking about master data management and a lot of scrubbing of the information for master data management so you really need to have the data models of the sources. But then when you're aggregating that stuff together, have a kind of master copy of a model that takes into account all those different sources and comes up with a kind of common denominator of what they look like and that's a big reason why a lot of our customers have leveraged the universal data models that we resale. They're built by Len Silverston and a big application of those data models is for master data management because they can give you a standard of customer data, of product data, order information, HR data, whatever it might be, they give you a nice even kind of playing field for what all the different sources might have.
KB: Is it possible to use the existing data models for MDM and if not, can we tweak the ones we have to work?
JT: Absolutely, I think you're going to have to some tweaking and there's going to be some sharing that's going to occur across those different data models and its really -- the sharing might even be at the [indiscernible] level in coming up with a common set of domains that you can share across the models so that you can ensure that if you're integrating customer data, for example, that all the address information is defined the same way, or if it's not defined the same way that you come up with a common standard for that address data.
And what you're also going to be doing with existing data models is a lot of data lineage and mappings between the source target and mappings and that's very important. A lot of times I see a lot of customers managing those mappings externally from the data model and doing it in Excel, or Access, or some home grown repository where that really requires a lot more work because if the model changes then those mapping files change as well. If you can get those into the model, then you're going to be a lot more effective, save a lot of time, and maybe drive the communication from the data model and the reporting that you can do off the data model rather than having to manage an external source of that mapping information.
]]>Listen to my 7:23 podcast below:
KB: Hello ebizQ listeners, this is Kaitlin Brunsden, Associate Editor at ebizQ. Today, I am speaking with Steve Workman, Vice President of LANDesk Software. Steve thank you for joining me today.
SW: Thanks for having me Kaitlin.
KB: Can you please provide us with a brief overview of your company?
SW: Sure. So Kaitlin as you mentioned, my name is Steve Workman and I'm Vice President of Product Management here at LANDesk and I've been with LANDesk about nine years. LANDesk Software as a company has been in business about 20 years and we provide solutions around systems management, end point security management, and IT service management with a focus on providing a rapid ROI for IT operations in mid and large enterprise organizations.
KB: Today's topic is Application Virtualization and Its Impact on Asset Management. So Steve, as more companies are moving towards virtualization, what are some of the virtualization issues you see the market running into?
SW: Well first of all, we do see that application virtualization is being highly adopted. Traditionally, it's been viewed as a way to provide to application capability with other applications but we're seeing it being used as the preferred way of packaging applications along with MSI alternative. We know some of the challenges from talking with customers that all applications can't be virtualized so that kind of necessitates the need for having both a MSI packaging solution as well as application virtualization. Now application virtualization also provides some flexibility with application delivery to end customers. But with that flexibility comes some complications.
So as we go out and talk to customers, we find that those customers that are using virtualization to package up their applications are running into some challenges around accountability and software management in whole. So when we go out and talk to customers, we see that as they move to application virtualization, we see that it's complicating the liability, accountability of software management. In fact, some other customer trends that we see, is customers need help in proving ownership of software licenses and most of these customers rely on the vendor themselves for that data. So we find that they don't have a real good process or managing virtualized applications when it comes to accountability and software asset management.
KB: How many organizations do you see have a process for software license management?
SW: Again, as we go out and talk to customers, it's surprising but very few have a formalized process for software asset management in their environment. We kind of map this against the maturity model and we see that a lot of customers are kind of at the early stages of this maturity model. Most customers struggle to understand what's in their environment but they tend to focus on that first step of discovery and inventory of what's actually in their environment then they look for ways to kind of move up that maturity model to become less reactive and move proactive in their environment.
KB: What's preventing IT organizations from implementing a process?
SW: Well there's a couple of challenges around implementing an effective process for software asset management. And the first one is really around kind of a cultural change; it's a shift in the way they think about their IT operations in general. They need to move from kind of the reactive thought process that they just want to survive an audit but rather prepare for one and be proactive about understanding what's in their environment. Part of that is accessing where they're at on the maturity model and then looking for the next right step to kind of grow and become more proactive and more in control of their organization and their software asset management initiatives.
So one of the things that they need to focus on is identifying the right solution that can grow with them up this maturity model. They're going to have some times where they need a point product for immediate needs to understand exactly what's in their environment but then they need a suite of products to be able to work seamlessly together to be able to understand what they should have in their environment, what applications are effectively being used, and which applications can be targeted for reclamation and be able to pull the cost back out of their organization.
KB: Can you provide some customer antidotes on what LANDesk is seeing as far as a gaining a return on instituting a license management system?
SW: Sure. We have a lot of customers that are moving up that maturity model as I discussed. And in fact, we have one customer that we recently spoke with out of the Chicago area that was telling us that they have to respond to an audit about once a month. And so, in order to prepare for that, in the past what they did was they were overbuying software as much as 40% to hedge against an audit but now they can see that that's impacting their IT budget. In fact, 20% of enterprises IT budget is spent on software license and maintenance. So it's important for them to understand what they're exposure is and what kind of cost savings that they could identify to pull out of their organization.
We had another customer that gave us some feedback that they had packaged up a suite of software applications and accidently distributed that to all of their end points in their organization. They were then audited by that vendor and had to actually true-up for each one of those applications. But then when they used our solution and when back in and better understood what the usage was for each of those applications, they found that several of those applications were not being used by each end point or individual and thus was a good target to be able to pull that software and reclaim that license. And in fact, that activity alone paid for the LANDesk solution in about 45 days.
KB: How can LANDesk help and what is different about LANDesk solutions from other products available?
SW: LANDesk can help in three distinct ways. The value proposition that we provide is first, we can help reduce cost. We can identify unused licenses and then help pull those licenses back and help realize those cost savings. The second thing we can do is help reduce risk and that comes from really the audit process. Being able to enable the customers to proactively prepare for an audit rather than just survive an audit. And then third, help our customers increase their productivity by taking advantage of the benefits of application virtualization and other technologies to provide application availability, and getting the right application to the end users so that it can be productive.
Other ways that LANDesk can help is we can counsel with the customer to help access where they're at on that maturity level and then put a plan in place to help them move up one step at a time, and ultimately help them turn the corner from being reactive to proactive and have more control in their environment. And then finally, understand that it's a cultural shift change to be able to adopt process and realize the benefit of moving from the lower levels of discovery and inventory up through understanding what the entitlements are, what the usage is, and what applications could be targeted for reclamation to realize the true cost savings.
]]>Here are the latest tweets from the analysts we follow:
Tony Baer tweeted: IBM+Sterling = IBM one step closer to the apps business. Back door into supply chain mgmt.
Judith Hurwitz tweeted: Combination of sterling/IBM strength in business networks with analytics, business rules, BPM, governance. Compelling.
ebizQ's Prakash Kannoth tweeted: IBM focuses on vertical markets with sterling commerce acquisition.
Tony Baer comments on the acquisition in his blog.
With the recent onslaught of major acquisitions, who's next?
]]>Listen to or download the 7:35 podcast below:
OpTier related news.
KB: Hello ebizQ listeners, this is Kaitlin Brunsden, Associate Editor at ebizQ. Today, I am speaking with Colin Rowland, Senior Vice President of Operations at OpTier. Colin thank you for joining me today.
CR: Pleasure.
KB: Today we will be discussing Decluttering IT through the Growing Complexity of the IT Departments. Colin will offer guidance on what businesses need for their IT departments to be able to access quickly where problems are and how to avoid them. So Colin, I'm just going to dive right in. What are the big challenges facing IT departments today?
CR: Well, that's a big question but cost is the obvious answer. I think everybody's seen the continuous need to tighten the belt against a backdrop of needing to deliver new and improved services there's no doubt about that, of course, driven by mostly by the economy. But another great challenge we see is agility. But let's step back and think about what IT is in its purest form and I'll explain why agility is an issue.
So if we think about what IT delivers, its responsible for delivering automated business processes. These business processes are built on applications, which underpin everything the business does, it could be trading, customer interaction, online retailing, accounting. In fact, all the areas the business have, have an IT function to support it. So the business needs to be agile, they need grow, they need to innovate, they need to take new services to market to continue to be competitive or even just to improve the way they operate. IT's in the critical path and therefore needs to be agile to keep up with the pace. An example here would be a bank or a Telco looking to bring new products to market. The faster they bring them to market the more valuable they are and thus the need for agility within IT.
KB: Why is agility such an issue for IT?
CR: Simply because IT has been built up over the years with layers upon layer of technology. They've never had really the chance to completely have a green field and start all over again. The technology that they have in place has been built up over years is as deep as it is wide. There's a depth in technology, for example, your networking, mainframes, servers, middleware, applications, security. On top of all this, there's a plethora of management tools through all the silos mentioned. Because these silos are so deep and so technical, organizations have been structured in a way to support them making the organizations themselves very siloed in their nature. This causes immense problems when things fail and organizations need to find where the issues are.
If they have this siloed approach, they don't see things across the organizations and what happens is all (indiscernible) are a regular occurrence in IT organizations. People from multiple silos meet. They'll dial-into a number to try and isolate where a problem is and all these people are is concerned with their own domain and quite often, it's a blame game of trying to determine where the problem is. All (indiscernible) are a regular occurrence in IT organizations. People from multiple silos meet or dial-in to isolate issues to a particular domain and this is a very expensive process. I speak to many organizations who have no visibility of how a transaction, which in effect is the customer experience travels through their organization. Many of these organizations have stitched multiple applications together thus compounding the problem.
KB: How can IT departments cut through the clutter and resolve problems more effectively? Is there another approach to this siloed approach you discussed?
CR: Absolutely there is. So by monitoring all transactions across all tiers all the time, organizations can now understand the real performance of their business applications. This is the only way to breakdown the silos is to follow the path of the transaction. It's the transaction that crosses all of these silos and gives a real picture of the customer experience down to detail of what's actually happening. In doing so, they have a much better understanding of the systems, the architecture, the application, how its deployed and thus, that helps them to be more agile by having a true understanding. I've been to customers before now who have tried to look at how they've got their end-to-end visibility and I've seen organizations putting Post-Its on walls, posting it together, showing pictures of how they think it hangs together.
And of course, if they do that, a couple of weeks later when changes are made is all out-of-date so they've never really had this ongoing ability to see end-to-end transaction performance. Of course, using this technology will also allow them to avoid outages because you're able to see issues before they actually happen. Then of course, remove this expensive process that we talked about before with all (indiscernible). And of course, have the ability to improve the ongoing performance, which is very critical. This type of technology will also breathe new life into SLAs. I think every company has had SLAs in the past and if you know most of them if they were honest would say we wrote up the SLAs and then they went in the drawer never to come out again. Why is that? Because generally, the SLAs was to have good intentions and some of them have numbers on them, for example, 99.99% availability.
But those availability numbers are based on meaningless metrics to the business so it might be that it's based on the network (indiscernible) given in the information and that doesn't give them the real performance of their application experience. So the business is interested in transactions, IT is interested in transactions, so now SLAs can be made about transaction performance. For example, how long should it take for a customer to login to account? How long will it take to move money from A to B? These are real business metrics that IT needs to deliver so business transaction in effect is bringing features that deliver real business benefit.
KB: Can you please tell us a little bit about OpTier?
CR: Of course, I'd be delighted to. So OpTier is a fast growing software company delivering business transaction management solutions that allow IT application owners to take control over service availability. We do this manage in every step of every transaction along the way. This gives organizations insight that they've never had before. It's a big statement to say but many of our customers deploy business transactions. Outages are a thing of the past so this all hands (indiscernible) are a thing of the past. We're able to really help them improve these service levels.
Our customers continue to tell us that the visibility and control they have with OpTier BTM is unparalleled to anything they've seen before and boy, do I like hearing that. Expanding on that, well, we've recently introduced a market entry solution for BTM. We're calling the EM-Plus meaning end user management plus some extra capability. Let me tell you a little more about that. With the EM-Plus, in a matter of days IT organizations can gain the visibility of end user experience in this first stage (indiscernible) into the data center. Really, I mean, just in days you can get the picture of the experience of the end user and what's happening and what's going on.
Benefits is obviously an early warning of issues. You want to hear about these issues before the customers are calling you tell you that there are issues. And in doing that, you're getting an understanding of the overall application behavior. So in summary, business transaction management is the way forward to assist in IT agility and service delivery.
KB: Well, I think that sounds like a very useful product and I would like to thank Colin Rowland, Senior Vice President of Operations at OpTier for today's podcast. Thank you Colin.
CR: Oh, you're very welcome; it's been a pleasure.
KB: And thank you ebizQ listeners for joining us.
]]>In this podcast, Chiu sounds off on the following topics:
Listen to or download the 13:56 podcast below:
]]>Hear Keziere and Zisk's opinions on the following:
Listen to or download the 10:04 podcast below:
]]>Auker briefed me on Sybase's new analytics announcement, a new hosted business intelligence solution for messaging traffic, and then answered the following questions for me:
Listen to or download the 8:18 podcast below:
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