At the annual HP Software Universe show, HP announced that they were bundling AlarmPoint with HP Operations Manager for Unix version 9. HP Operations Manager customers will receive a shipped software package containing a free copy of AlarmPoint Express and AlarmPoint Mobile Gateway. 

Not only does this mean that you'll be able to receive actionable alerts from our Alert Management platform, you may also have instant access to the Operations Manager event viewer and menu structure from your iPhone, Blackberry or any other Smartphone.  Take a look at AlarmPoint's Express and Mobile Gateway pages to learn more. 

Look for a formal announcement of the bundle soon!

Everyone has been all atwitter (no pun intended) about the latest iPhone software update (OS 3.0). It includes a lot of requested features, with search and copy/paste at the top of most people’s wishlists come to life.

As with all iPhone releases, this one is having scalability issues for the horde waiting to hit the update button the second it's available. I will admit to being a member of anticipatory horde and have found myself among a smaller group as well – those with a bricked iPhone waiting for an iTunes Store availability issue to get resolved. I have little doubt that before the night is done, order will be restored to the Apple world and my iPhone will once again take its place, surgically attached to my side.

In the meantime, I keep picturing an Alert Management platform at iTunes Operations working overtime notifying support staff of the next place to plug a leak, deploy additional capacity, or reach out to CDN partners, while their IT management team automatically gets updates on the latest status of all incidents, and marketing & CSR types get real-time updates on what they should be saying to annoyed customers. And of course, being operations types, Tim Cook  and an always involved Steve Jobs want to know what's up. Let’s not forget customers, fanboys, techblogs, press, and media who are automatically receiving briefs to keep all iPhone mentions focused on the positives and the release of the iPhone 3GS today.

The reality is probably closer to most IT shops (although with cooler work environments, I imagine) where email blasts, manual callouts, and frustrated calls for updates on all sides are taking place. I’d love the opportunity to discuss the established process and post-mortem analysis of one of these events with the Apple team that's responsible for the rollout. Consider it an open offer. Call me, but wait till tomorrow, when hopefully my iPhone is back up and running.

A couple weeks ago AlarmPoint held an extremely successful Customer Forum webinar. Over 150 customers joined in to hear about new AlarmPoint features and to listen to Les Buettner of Wells Fargo talk about his experiences using the platform.

If you didn't get a chance to attend, I highly recommend you contact our Marketing department, who will send you a free copy of the webinar.

One of my favorite parts is hearing Les talk about why his organization needed an Alert Management platform. Les is an Enterprise Management Architect and Engineer for Wells Fargo and is primarily charged with optimizing website operations. Any outage on WellsFargo.com affects not only the hundreds of thousands of people using the site for online banking, but also impacts sales and marketing done online.

To keep business-affecting outages to a minimum, Les needed a system that helped him nip problems in the bud before they reached customers. He needed to fix issues proactively. AlarmPoint was Wells Fargo's solution.

To hear Les go deeper into how he's using the AlarmPoint platform, I hope you'll join us at HP Software Universe next week. Les is speaking June 17, 4pm Session 1469 and will go into more detail about his needs for application availability and immediate response to critical incidents.

In addition, Mike Ross of MITRE - a national technology resource - will be speaking at HP Software Universe about AlarmPoint. He'll appear June 17, 1pm Session 1165 to explain how his organization is using AlarmPoint to cut costs while improving operational efficiency.

 I hope to see you there!

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials featuring Tim Gunn, the steely-haired fashion guru generally beloved by my wife and reality-TV addicts across the globe.  I’ll be honest, I don’t follow his guidance, as anyone who follows me can attest. 

However, he’s come to my attention as the spokesman for Tide’s “Total Care” brand of detergents, a line of more expensive products that promises to keep your clothes looking newer longer.

I’ve noticed this marketing trend showing up everywhere: times are tough, money’s scarce, so instead of buying brand new stuff, spend a few extra dollars to take care of what you already own to make it better.

Sales of Tide are proving that the idea appeals to economizing families. The snowballing reduction in IT spending shows the idea has also occurred to businesses. Companies are concentrating on finding ways to make the most of the software they’ve got – attempting to make existing IT processes respond faster, cost less or provide agility to the business. 

That makes projects that accelerate and streamline existing systems particularly attractive. For example, instead of tearing out your existing help desk and change systems, use an Alert Management platform to make them faster. Instead of struggling to staff extensive monitoring systems, allow Alert Management’s Mobile Gateway aspect to mobilize your workforce. In a time when you’re probably stuck with the system you’ve got, anything that makes it function better should be looked into. As Tim Gunn would say, “make it work.”
 

Dear concerned Executives,
 
In the latest secret CXO newsletter and coupon book, many of you shared your fears about staying afloat in these trying times. I understand how you feel – the world can be a scary place when everyone starts hoarding their cash and snarling when you suggest you might like some of it.
 
More and more, it seems like the question of “will you give me a large sum of money for my product?” will be met with an unequivocal “no” and possibly some hysterical laughter.  I’m here to tell you that that’s a complete misconception.

The key to selling in this climate is to help enterprises become more agile and competitive by delivering real value to their business.  Isn’t that our job anyway?  Ah, a return to the renaissance of providing value.  Your customers, especially if you’re doing any business-to-business work, are looking to cut costs and probably reallocate staff.  When times are tough, they want to be tougher, leaner and faster. They’ll buy your product if you can understand their business and provide a real return on the investment of resources and risk.

The products I’m working on can do that: they make an organization more efficient and intentional.  Alert Management is often the missing link for businesses that want to do more with less. So to be successful in this economy, do what I do: find the place in your customer’s business that’s struggling and help them shore it up.  If someone finds a way to do that for my organization, I’ll buy their product in a heartbeat – it’s worth it to me to keep my business strong and efficient in the long run.

So that’s my advice, everyone.  Good luck, we’ll be stronger for it! 

Sincerely,
Troy

The winners aren’t always the first, but in this case I have to say we’re proud to have been the first to really add credibility around Alert Management, Actionable Information Delivery and the ability to perform well as a Software Platform or a hosted OnDemand solution for both ITSM and BCP.  Ok, enough resting on our laurels; let’s talk turkey.

In trying times, picking the right providers of technology services is a difference maker.  We’re seeing more and more companies offering to meet the complex business process requirements of the ITSM, BCP and Alert Management fields. 

While some companies have claimed to be the first to offer Alert Management for IT Service Management as a hosted SaaS solution, AlarmPoint has been offering an OnDemand product for some time. AlarmPoint OnDemand has the same code base as our Software products and provides a Cloud solution that goes beyond typical mass-notification functionalities SaaS has been used for in emergencies and disaster recovery.

It’s not about sending data out fast.  It’s about getting meaningful information into the hands of the person that needs it.  It’s about accelerating their response capability and it’s about making sure each person has the information relevant to them.  Sending the same message for the masses is no longer effective. 

We’ve now gone beyond software and SaaS by introducing the AlarmPoint cloud. The Cloud allows enterprises to size their services and never be “stuck” in a technology they have to migrate from.  The Cloud means choice.

AlarmPoint’s product suite is continually expanding and growing, and is already helping businesses take control of their notifications through SaaS and Cloud technology.
 

People are still getting paid to sit in a room and watch a screen. And not a screen with anything good on it, either – no movies, no iPod, no IM.  Any work is good work these days, but this job contributes nothing to the success or agility of the business. It’s simply a necessary evil. Someone has to keep an eye on the status of various system and applications. All around is buzzing modern technology that keeps banks, retail chains and vast telecommunications companies running, and yet people are still sitting at a console, waiting for the light to go red.
 
This would be an unfortunate way to spend your time in 1990, an alarming use of resources in 2000, and borders on criminally inefficient in 2009. Efficiency is the name of the game in a harsh economic climate, and it simply makes no sense to give a trained IT professional a console and tell him or her to stare at it to make sure nothing goes wrong.

Keeping employees watching for problems 24/7 is also extremely expensive. By reallocating one rotation team of 12 from their 24/7 monitoring team, a major European energy provider saved $750,000 annually.  This was an easy, welcomed change to the operation.  It just required that their notification system catch up to the rest of their technology.

Automation is key: if a red light comes up on a screen, automatically send the right person information about the problem so they can fix it. Have their contact, role and scheduling information in the system already. Then let them take responsibility for that alert from their mobile phone and, better yet, use a web portal to let them enter internal systems and take action to resolve the event. Even if it wakes a user up in the middle of the night, it’s still better than staring at a blinking screen that may – horror of horrors – not even have internet access.

To learn more about the kind of cost savings increased efficiency can create, check out my latest whitepaper, 5 Ways to Increase Operational Effectiveness and Reduce Costs Through Alert Management.

President Obama’s economic stimulus plan is currently pouring billions into local and state governments. A lot is going toward construction – highways, bridges, and your usual slew of New Deal infrastructure projects. I, however, think some of that money should go in a different direction: innovation, investment in increasing the agility of the American business and, of course, software.
 
Initially, buying new software doesn’t seem like the kind of job-making initiative the President had in mind; not a lot of shovels involved. But it would be an investment in our future: not in physical roads, but instead in technical infrastructure. Let’s take this sudden windfall and invest in the technology behind public services like schools, hospitals and social programs to help them work better, faster and cheaper.

Implementing Alert Management software would allow public sector organizations like local governments to automatically call or email residents to warn of anything from a terror attack to an overdue water bill. Schools could automatically send students SMS messages about emergencies or changes in schedule and parents could be notified in real-time of important announcements. Hospitals could send out thousands of emails to a blood donor registry in seconds and allow doctors to answer health questions and concerns from patients over their mobile phones.

The increased efficiency would mean millions in savings every year, and unlike other automation initiatives, it would not result in layoffs. All these organizations are struggling to hire enough people. Wasting precious employee time on manual, repetitive tasks helps no-one, and eliminating those tasks would allow staff to move to more productive projects.

Obviously, if government and public services start buying software, the IT industry would benefit, too.  As the CEO of a software company, I certainly can’t say this didn’t occur to me. But with IT spending declining at 9% annually and technology companies slashing jobs at an alarming rate, a combined push for buying new software and revolutionizing social services seems like it would be right up Mr. Obama’s alley.
 

It’s occurred to me lately that many businesses are treating IT as a burden. "All those systems! All those strange, pale people manning all those fancy machines! Just think of the cost of pizza and coffee for that department alone! It’s time to slash funding before all the money we put into IT drags the whole business down."

When it comes to IT, I often want to shake business leaders and say, “It’s your competitive advantage, don’t you see?!” Instead of treating IT as a money pit, companies should consider the fact that a fast, efficient IT organization is the foundation of an agile business. Cutting spending across the board for IT is like shooting yourself in the foot. Current economic conditions demand intelligent investments in systems capable of supporting a changing business.

In this market, new ideas cannot get bogged down in IT. The technology and reaction-time of a company have to keep up with the decisions being issued at the top and the technical problems that result from them. Change Management has to be swift. Incident Management has to resolve events before business impact. Service Management can’t get overwhelmed.

Investing wisely in IT – making it cheaper and more efficient without making it less functional – is how businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors. It’s how you can be faster than everyone else. And that, surely, is worth the cost of pizza and coffee.

To learn more about how AlarmPoint’s Alert Management platform supports the business, take a look at my article in BMC’s latest thought leadership book: Viewpoint, Focus on: Business Service Management (BSM).
 

I am a BlackBerry man. Brace yourself, but I use a PC too.  I know, I know – the iPhone is very sexy if we get past the face print issue, but I’ll stick with my BlackBerry, thankyouverymuch. Now, I’m not knocking Apple – I like Apple just as much as the next guy, especially if the next guy also has a BlackBerry.  No, this is to discuss an iPhone innovation: the application.

iPhone (and soon BlackBerry) apps range from the very handy to the, well, to the very dumb.  There are so many, in fact, that while IT staffers aren’t thinking up the next big app or idly popping bubble wrap, they may pause to wonder why there’s no application to let them access and control IT systems from their smartphones.
 
In fact, there are companies that make software for that – though they’re certainly not available at the Apple Store. The problem with software you have to install on your phone is that every time there’s an upgrade to, say, BMC Remedy, your phone must be updated to maintain access. Then there’s the fact that the modern IT environment is complex.  When working through an incident or change you may need to access more than just Remedy.  What if you need mobile access to the service model in another system like BMC Service Impact Manager?  Whoops.  You’ll have to go all the way back to your console, effectively eliminating whatever time savings you could have created.

The best way to solve this problem is not with an app at all.  Sure, use the app as a backup if you’re in a 1950’s bomb shelter with terrible reception, but use it only when you have to.   IT systems need to be accessible with a mobile web-based interface that enables immediate, cross application access.

No installation needed – just a secure password – and you can access all the systems you need to resolve events anywhere, anytime. And, best of all, you can do it on your precious iPhone or, more importantly, your BlackBerry.