Delivering Self-Learning Performance Management with Netuitive

In today’s competitive market place it is becoming essential to make critical decisions, which are informed, current and appropriate, at an ever-increasing rate. Much of what we call Business Intelligence or Management Information, is neither very intelligent, nor able to meet the demands of management. It is too little, too late and invariably the key facts are hidden in too much unnecessary detail. Data presented without context makes it difficult to interpret and action. We deploy masses of technology in the hope of enhancing our competitive position, but we deploy very crude tools to manage that deployment.

What is required is a tool capable of capturing a vast array of data, from a large number of diverse sources, in real time, to bring it together in an integrated coherent fashion and to analyse it and present the key facts as visually as possible as close to real time as possible. We would then have a system that would meet the demands of management and could be called a Real-Time Performance Management solution. It is a goal that a lot of people talk about but few can come near to realising. Netuitive appear to be nearer to making it a reality than most, and with Release 2 of their Service Analyser they have a solution that demands attention.

Netuitive has, at its core, a solid data engine so that it can capture data from across the enterprise and the solution will scale. Furthermore, the engine is capable of operating in real time. Allied to that they have a self-learning engine, so that the data is analysed and rules can be continually evolved. This is all achieved without the need for complex scripts, the creation of manual business rules, or the other barriers to adaptability that typifies most of the solutions in the market at present. Finally the results are made available in a dashboard to enable the data to be readily assessed and analysed.

With a solution like Netuitive, all who trade or serve with large communities requiring excellent service and rapid response times, there is a means to monitor and assess what is going on and adjust things in real time. Investments in IT infrastructure can now be aligned to business goals, even when those business goals are subject to constant ongoing development due to the fast changing nature of the business world. It is fast becoming clear that maximising the customer experience is one of the keys to on-going success, and without a tool like Netuitive it becomes very difficult to proactively manage the complex nature of technical resources being deployed in so much business today, be that supply chains, communications, electronic trading or customer service. Without a tool capable of careful monitoring, resource utilisation is a haphazard activity, customer satisfaction can suffer, it is difficult to ensure that compliance requirements are being met, and ultimately profits can be eroded, so this is a business issue and not a technical problem limited to the IT department.

The keys to success in this space are to get out of thinking that rules have to be manually generated by capturing the knowledge of experts, to recognise that real time is a critical requirement, and to use visualisation as much as possible. The old way of defining business rules from the knowledge of experts is too slow, too resource intensive and results in too little adaptability in a rapidly changing business world. Machine learning using statistical techniques enables all of the data to be analyzed many times faster than can otherwise be achieved, so that rules are based on all of the current data all of the time. Real time is essential because things change so rapidly that unless you monitor closely and currently things will have changed before you have a chance to react. Visualisation is key because we can absorb vastly more data and pick up on far more subtle changes when prompted visually than is ever the case with tabular reports. So Netuitive, with all of these technologies at its core, is able to offer a really viable solution. Furthermore, it also offer features such as a BSM topology view to enable the relationship between service components to be readily seen by the business, and alarm prioritisation to ensure that real management by exception is achieved.

Netuitive are already finding success with organisatons such as the big banks where real time trading is key, Government, where scale and complexity introduces unwanted cost, Telcos, where real time and volume are by words of good service, and, obviously, eCommerce. But it is a solution that demands to be viewed broadly as a potentially critical component, offering the possibility of very real and very significant business benefit. There is no other offer that I am aware of that offers quite such an advanced solution, so that it demands to be examined by all who are serious about ensuring that their technology resources are delivering the best business outcome.