EMS: The Heat and Light of Service Management
Posted by Rick Pandolfi on Fri, Mar 04, 2011 @ 11:57 AM
The Heat and Light of Service Management
During this, the week of IBM’s Pulse gathering I’ve had the great fortune of speaking with some of the great thinkers in the space of Service Management. Last night was no exception; I had the pleasure of sharing a meal with two of the leading thinkers in the space who have requested to remain nameless for the purpose of this post.
Last night the point was made that for Service Management software vendors, including the big 4 (IBM, HP, CA, BMC) and the insurgents (Monolith, ScienceLogic, Nimsoft) there are three potential markets to sell into:
- Operations: NOC Ops: real-time fault, availability management;
- Engineering: Ensuring emerging/expanding products (SP’s: DSL, Fiber to the home, IPTV, etc.; Enterprise: trading applications, customer portals, etc.) are planned for, tested, hardened through capacity management, dynamic provisioning, etc;
- Customer Experience Management: Real time, end-to-end and vertical visibility into Layers 2-7 focused on customer application service experience.
The consensus is that the Operations Market is saturated beyond anyone’s tolerance level to revisit. Perhaps that is an over statement, but the insurgents are well aware that their superior technology and “point” value proposition will more often than not be thwarted or overwhelmed by the big 4’s ability to make seemingly interesting economic cases through ELA’s and other compensatory accommodations.
The Engineering Market holds some interest for the ISV’s as they see the opportunity to distinguish themselves across a complex and diverse set of business processes including Inventory, Provisioning, Billing, et al., where customers will truly put a premium on openness, flexibility and scalability.
But the cherry of these markets for the ISV’s is the Customer Experience Management market and they are innovating to stake their claim to it. The two characteristics of this market that they find intriguing:
- LOB centric: the ability to perform and achieve in the Customer Experience domain has a straight-line translation into important and obvious KPI’s like customer conversion, customer churn, customer upsell/cross sell rates, etc. There’s gold in these hills, and;
- Innovation Sensitive: unlike with Operations, and to a lesser degree, engineering the intellectual property required to pull this off is neither trivial nor ubiquitous, and the ISV's believe that customers will respond when they recognize the payoff of innovations in this area.
To perform in the Customer Experience Management domain requires:
- The ability to acquire and transform “legacy” types of data: availability, bandwidth thresholding, disk capacity/availability/usage so that they present a holistic, coherent representation of real world experience such that they could immediately answer questions like, “How is our online claims processing application performing?”
- They get at “new” types of data. For example providing full information on end-to-end VoIP performance such that the links between Handset=>RJ45Connector=>Switch=>Router=>MPLS=>VoIPApplicationSvr=>Termination are monitored for link performance, packet loss, etc.
The sense is that there is real heat and light in the Customer Experience Management domain because of the potential for significant business impact and the advances that it will drive in the technology. For what it’s worth, we’re keeping our eye on Monolith Software. We believe their unified approach, which organically brings together Historical Event data, IPSLA data, Transaction data, et al into a single database will allow customers to readily transform, consume and present this vast and varied data landscape into meaningful and impactful Customer Experience data that will drive improvements and business performance for the SP’s, ASP’s, MSP’s and Enterprises willing to get out front.
Rick Pandolfi