May 23, 2011
Challenging Business Landscape Signals Renewed Network Focus
I am continually asked by various members of the financial community for my perspective on the current business climate, given the soaring worldwide oil prices and the rather sluggish recovery of financial markets virtually everywhere. While we do see some changes in decision and procurement behavior, I'm pleased to report that overall, our business has not been affected, and in fact continues to grow by double-digit percentages year over year. We're also seeing interest shift to different aspects of the EYE suite, reflecting changing business priorities.
The Current Climate Drives a Focus on Efficiency and Cost (and Cost Savings)
The first change I've seen in our engagements with soon-to-be customers is an escalation of the purchasing decision - where an IT director used to have the spending authority to make a decision, now that same decision must be made one or two levels higher. The result is that more financial business value must be demonstrated by the company and product. This requirement is well-served by the InSight Center perspectives included in the product, as well as the dashboard and reporting solutions we've developed in the last couple years, and will continue to develop. Reports demonstrating service level delivery and infrastructure status must be attractive and informative for non-networking experts, such as senior level management. The Branch Office Perspective and Green IT Perspective are two of our more popular examples. They show senior executives high level status of value delivery against corporate objectives and initiatives, not 'bits and bytes'.
I'm also noticing a renewed focus on usability of the technology. Since staff costs can be an order of magnitude larger in the budget than the software (and maintenance) itself, the ease of installation and configuration, ongoing usability, and level of automation is receiving more attention than previously. This is where EYE has always had an advantage over the large, cumbersome frameworks, where our faster time to value and lower TCO has been repeatedly proven. With EYE, staff that had previously been occupied with mundane, repetitive network administration and monitoring tasks (manually generating reports, for example) can now be re-deployed to implement new and more important corporate initiatives.
The Current Climate Changes Primary Use of the Product
Users are also now shifting their attention to the inventory and utilization side of the product. As a management suite providing fault, performance, and inventory management (not just one or two of them), EYE has always provided different value to different users, and at different times. When bandwidth was very expensive back in the late 90's and early 00's, the performance side of EYE was the most popular. When bandwidth became cheap, performance took a back seat to fault and event management. When network equipment got 'stable enough', the focus turned to CMDB initiatives, whether tied to ITIL or not, and EYE's deep, detailed inventory took the fore for users.
Now we're seeing a different interest for EYE's inventory, more geared to cost savings. EYE's continual, automated, re-discovery of the network means that the EYE inventory is the most up-to-date, accurate record of the network. Customers have used this in at least two ways in the recent past to realize significant savings:
- One customer saved $750,000 in network equipment purchases, simply by running EYE’s Spare Ports Report, and discovering they had a huge number of unused ports. This helped eliminate a large purchase they had planned.
- Another customer recovered €30,000 annually when they ran a network inventory report and discovered the network hardware maintenance contract that was up for renewal contained dozens of devices that had been decommissioned over a year ago!
Perhaps even more alarming in the second case was that two key routers were found NOT to be currently on maintenance.
Tied to inventory is an increased reliance on topology. Obviously, detailed accurate topology is necessary to provide root cause analysis on complex networks. With the huge interest in virtualization and cloud computing, however, 'topology' now includes virtual switches and servers, in addition to the physical ones. Having a management system to monitor the physical infrastructure and a separate management system to manage the virtual infrastructure would be like having a tool to manage Cisco gear on your network and another one to manage Avaya, for example. There'd be no 'holistic' view of the estate. This is why EYE incorporates virtual switches and servers in our topology and displays it in our map. In deploying clouds, the biggest challenge is not the purely physical, or the purely virtual, it is the boundary where the two meet. EYE does particularly well in this area. Where detailing virtual inventory addresses "VM Sprawl", physical/virtual topology addresses availability and performance of the overall system.
Finally, I also believe that network managers have come to expect more from an enterprise management suite than before. It used to be that you got elemental performance management from one vendor and application flow management from a different vendor (and hoped that they had partners to do some level of integration). Likewise, with configuration management. In the last two to three years, the flow and configuration management vendors either failed or were acquired by the big framework companies. The level of integration to the frameworks is still questionable (or not!). This new expectation is why we've added "Integrated Flow Analysis" and "Integrated Configuration Management" to the EYE suite. Being able to move seamlessly between inventory, event, elemental AND flow performance and configuration monitoring in a single product helps save time and effort by not having to use disparate products that may not be able to readily share information. And better decisions can be made with more complete, linked data.
We fully appreciate our customers', and the general marketplace's, desire for products that are well integrated. We always have. We've responded with our ongoing commitment to "open" data, and integration into other platforms that can benefit from the wealth of detailed, accurate information that EYE provides as a foundation on which more intelligent decisions can be made.
Agree? Disagree? Send me your thoughts - I’d love to hear them.
Michael Jannery
President and CEO, Entuity
michael.jannery@entuity.com