CERN Delivers People-Centric Service Management Using Service-now.com

CERN, being one of the world’s most respected centres for scientific research, and now also a Service-now.com success story represents the essence of what we see Service-now.com as being.  A solution that drives people-centric service management through improved efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

As with our own implementation, CERN are benefiting from the hugely beneficial service-culture that a Service-now.com solution is able to create.

Read the full press release here…

The direct benefits

So the technology is great and the concepts are fresh, but what are the direct benefits to our customers if they use our services/solutions?

Here’s a concise list of real benefits:

Benefit No 1:    Simplification, simplification, simplification…..

This is perhaps a bit of an abused cliche, but with our solutions – your life as a CIO or CTO, IT director, IT manager, IT Engineer, service desk administrator or operator or even just an IT user – becomes simpler, more efficient and easier on a daily basis.  The typical IT environment has become so complex and all the systems needed to monitor and manage the infrastructure and associated services associated – along with the governing processes (i.e. ITIL) have resulted in a huge jumble of integrated point solutions and complex software models and architectures.
We’ve taken a fresh approach that has enabled us to essentially replace the entire management layer (Enterprise Systems Management + IT Service Management) with a simple integration of two of the most innovative and practical solutions to enter the IT management space in decades.  (Service-now.com for ITSM and Monolith Software for ESM).   Add to the fresh technical approach the fact that these solutions are offered as a service, and a huge amount of effort and skills required for [essentially] non-core services are taken off your shoulders.

Benefit No 2:   Cost savings…

(I might as well say cliche no 2.)  As a direct result of the simplification explained above – huge cost savings can be had.  First of all, ALL of the solutions that we offer as Marutech fall into the category of:  “On Demand” or “Software as a Service” or “Cloud Computing” or “Managed Service” or “Subscriptions” or “Off Balance Sheet”  – choose your buzz-word (carefully, as there’s often strong internal resistance to over-used buzz-words in the market), but we do not sell you software licenses and hardware that you need to worry about.   Everything we do is focused on zero capital expenditure (CAPEX) while drastically optimizing your long-term operational costs (or OPEX).   But besides that, there’s the direct cost savings achieved due to lower operational overhead, fewer complexities, increased productivity and performance, lower maintenance costs, fewer contractors and specialist skills, etc…   These result in real cost savings…

Benefit No 3:  Improved Customer Service, Performance, Morale, Productivity, etc.
Quite incredibly – the customers that have migrated from their legacy systems to Service-now.com and/or Monolith-Software are experiencing such elation and enthusiasm with their decisions that the only people we see moaning and groaning about these technologies are the (non-customer) late adopters and bigots that can’t let go of the empires they’ve built using the legacy solutions…  Virtually every customer I know of that has made the move, have re-energized teams, staff and particular managers and of course improved customer service and productivity levels. They all seem to be in jovial moods with huge weights being lifted from their shoulders since ditching the legacy systems.   Every single one of them seems to be eager to share the great success stories…

I could ramble on and get into a lot of detail, but at a high level – these 3 benefits really stand out as the primary impacting benefits on customers that have adopted either of our 2 core solutions.

Mistakes made by cloud vendors… (insight #3)

David Linthicum wrote a great article on Infoworld’s Cloud Computing blog entitled “The top 5 mistakes cloud vendors make – and what you should watch for“.  It’s a long title, agreed, but its a great read – and not too long at that.

For the impatient and execs that don’t have 10 minutes to spare, here are the 5 points summarized:

1. Not focusing on API’s:  API’s are critical for adoption in the enterprise and shouldn’t be an afterthought.
2. No integration strategy:  Don’t treat integration as a bad word to be dealt with by the consultancy team.  Have a strategy that will enable customers to do it themselves.
3. Outage defensiveness:  As a service provider, don’t be naive and think you won’t ever have downtime.  And don’t go on the defensive when you do.
4. Confusing SLAs:  Lawyers tend to set these up – make sure they can talk English.
5. Spinning standards:  Don’t just talk and write about standards – make sure they’re implemented.

Looking at these points objectively, I think that David got it right.   In the same way that traditional software vendors out there are rushing to put forward their cloud computing alternatives (generally cloud-washed implementations of exactly the same stuff they sold before), both traditional software vendors and ‘pure’ cloud vendors that are making these mistakes seem to be all over the place.  The ones not making these mistakes are making huge strides into the enterprise market.

That being said – it’s easy to talk and criticize – but we’re also selling cloud computing solutions – and I have to admit that we don’t always get it right either.  But what I can say, is that when our solutions have shortcomings, we feel it our obligation to highlight these, as our integrity is more important to us than the deals we may lose by being honest.

Eassy goes live!!

Finally, the next big step forward in SA’s internet age is happening.   The East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is set to go live today, upping our international bandwidth capacity by another 1.4Tbps!

Read more here…

ITWeb – Eassy goes live today

TechCentral.com  – Seacom rival Eassy set to go live

Yeah!

Past views on network management…

I almost forgot.  Another very interesting thing I read this week was a 2008 ComputerWorld article which asked the question “What ever happened to network management?“.   Sometimes its great to look at opinions and identified trends from a few years ago and compare them to today.  I found a lot of points to be on the mark while others not so much (the same goes for comments btw), but some of the trends noted back in 2008 became like fulfilled prophesies by 2010.

I also found a conspicuous lack of cloud or SaaS terms in the article.  It’s a different story today with virtually every big and small player making a play for cloud models, but I’m not convinced that 50% of these vendors aren’t confused about what it is they’re competing for.  

Confusion in the cloud business model (Insights #2)

I find it quite interesting to see how this landscape is constantly changing…  the winds of change seem to be blowing more violently now than ever before, and there are a lot of people out there that are getting quite confused – and with good reason.

I received two news-type emails today with views that tell very different stories…   The first email from ITWeb referred to a Business World article stating that “EMC Philippines has unveiled a technology for ‘advanced virtual storage’”.   The very next email was from InfoWorld with the main article titled “Why some vendors regret becoming cloud providers“ , which talks about EMC’s regrets and why they are shutting down their Atmos  Online cloud storage service.

So who’s confused?   Everybody?

My personal opinion is that its everyone. EMC in my opinion is missing the point to an extent or don’t understand ‘the cloud’.  Sure the business model is tough and it might not make sense for a hardware vendor (or any vendor) to lose traditional business to its new cloud service offerings.  We’re face with exactly the same when our existing licensed solftware clients want to convert to SaaS solutions.

Here are a few points to consider if they don’t offer the service:

• Someone else will.  In my book, that’s lost opportunity.
• It doesn’t mean that existing customers will continue buying hardware forever (from EMC).  They may just consider alternatives at some point.
• They missing the potential parallel (backup) revenue stream – there are a lot of cloud adopters out there, and adoption is growing – fast.
• They shouldn’t be selling the same volumes ‘as a service’.  In other words: don’t sell the same volume – sell the same value!
• Cloud services may not generate the same revenue per customer in year 1, 2, 3 or 4, but by year 5 the scales start tipping.

That being said – I just need to emphasize that I don’t really understand the storage space – or the EMC Atmos model for that matter.  I’m merely commenting on the general premise of these articles that I find them both interesting and amusing that I should get these emails within 20 minutes of each other.  What these articles did do however is leave me wondering who’s not getting it – the vendors, reporters or me?

That being said – I think we might finally be coming out of the Gartner hype-cycle peak with regards to cloud computing.  People are starting to understand the value proposition as well as the long term cost implications.   Some of the vendors are starting to hit the stumbling blocks (alla EMC articles) and these are going to expose those that jumped on the bandwagon without a full understanding of what it’s all about….   Infoworld posted another worthy read that points to some of the potential shortfalls and realities of cloud computing and SaaS titled “Is the SaaS experiment finally over?”

Well, I hope you got some value from my ramblings…

Happy reading.

Cloud Pros and Cons (Insights #1)

I suspect that anyone reading this blog has a need for information of sorts. Whether it be about SaaS, cloud computing, Marutech or even perhaps Cornastone.  It also means that you spend a fair amount of time prowling the web for useful bits of information that can be consumed in a fairly short amount of time while adding significant insight to what you’re trying to learn about.

These “Insight” posts are me sharing what I consider to be [mostly] useful information.  Essentially quotes or articles that broaden my knowledge on the subject of cloud computing, but keeping to the essentials.  Hopefully this series will be of use to you…

Today’s useful reads:

> Cloud Computing Pros and Cons – A Network World article.  Objectivity is required as some of the cons (and pros for that matter) are bias towards certain applications of cloud computing only, so keep in mind what example influenced the perspective and don’t think that the pro/con applies to all cloud offerings.

> “With virtually every vendor on the planet jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon, sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether a service is really cloud or simply a pre-existing offering that has the cloud label slapped on it.“  – the opening line in a Network World article.  This quote so epitomizes the current market condition where one [legacy] vendor after the next has been caught with pants down and now have marketing teams scrambling to package what looks competitive.   The article is actually about how Iron Mountain reduces backup costs through a storage service.  It is perhaps a worthy read if you’re interested in backup or file archiving SaaS options.

> Cloud Washing 101 – The cloud marketing playbook – Taking the previous (slightly cynical) viewpoint of vendors jumping on the bandwagon a bit further, this post is a great read and even a better laugh!   But take a read – I think it accurately (with some exaggeration) describes what these non-innovative vendors are doing to ensure their marketing teams can still slap on the SaaS logo.

Happy reading…
Bruce