November 02, 2007, 1:21 PM — Listen to the column Netuitive 2.0, or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
Can you define Business Services Management without looking at the
latest vendor advertising? Not looking at vendor information, I call it
managing the systems your customers use to verify they are receiving the
service you designed the system to deliver. Above all else, customers
must be satisfied or they become ex-customers.
That's the goal of Netuitive's Service Analyzer 2.0 that just hit the
streets. The software analyzes your systems, no matter how large, and
tracks the performance indicators until it learns the normal pattern of
activity. Then it sends alerts and fixes whatever piece of the system
varies from defined business rules.
Yes, that sounds easy, doesn't it? Let's ask Nicola Senna, president and
CEO of Netuitive (.com) about one of their big customers.
"We collect 77,000 metrics every minute at Orbitz," said Senna. "The
only way to make sense of that much data is in real time, because you
can't put the data into a database and analyze it. We have to notice
trends and get ahead of them."
Tracking customer satisfaction based on performance parameters may look
tough at first glance, but dig a little deeper. Wall Street firms, for
instance, know their clients care most about the speed of execution on
stock transactions. When those are slow, clients lose money. When those
transactions execute in a blink, customers may still lose money, but
they can't blame the trading firm.
This level of system self-analysis and self-awareness is new. Netuitive
CEO Senna says they have about 200 customers (when we talked), but big
names like Orbitz, Kroger, and AT&T's iPhone activation division
dominate the list. While their VMware solution sells for around $5,000,
their average selling price for a full system is about a half million
dollars.
Yet systems are getting more, not less, complicated. Watching hundreds
of servers handling your e-commerce manually means you'll miss far more
than you'll catch. The only way to accurately watch automated systems is
with another automated system.
Trusting systems monitoring systems may be tough, but that's your best
choice. If so, a system that's self-learning and continuously adaptive
will be necessary, and that sounds like Netuitive.
Even better, Service Analyzer 2.0 includes color graphs and dashboards.
Now your management will have something pretty to watch while you do the
hard work. Just like always.
