The trading system is down.  It’s up.  Is it up?  What happened?  Who fixed it?  Who didn’t?

The necessity for real-time visibility (who is working issues) and historic visibility (audit trail) in IT is often touted and just as often overlooked.  Each system and application within IT uses its own reporting tools, leaving no clear way to track everything that has taken place to resolve an incident. The Operations Center will make call outs and send notifications.  Seemingly doing the right thing.  But how do we know who touched an event, what they did and when it was restored?

The engineer will take an action in HP OMU, then another in BMC Remedy, then move on to another system, all to address a single problem.  Everything makes sense at the time, but looking back it’s nearly impossible to understand who did what when.

Lacking a comprehensive audit trail and real-time visibility into the process can cause other problems, as well.  For example, one customer I work with is among the largest grocery chains in the United States, with over 3,500 stores nationwide.  Whenever a product recall occurred, each store had to be manually contacted to remove the defective product from its shelves.  This manual process was agonizingly slow, but more importantly, it left no audit trail.  If the company was sued because someone purchased dangerous food, they would have no way to prove that they had been in the process of removing the tainted products.  Bad yogurt is a big deal.  It’s an incident and it has to be efficiently managed.  Our customer was able to save $8 million by automating this process. 

Also, don’t forget to register for next week’s webinar: Four Best Practices to Increase the Relevance of IT Across the Business.  In today’s market, IT organizations are struggling with how to automate repeatable tasks, measure and optimize processes, enable accountability and increase their contribution to the overall business. In this webinar, you'll find out how to implement four best practices to enable your IT organization to be viewed as a key contributor to the success of the core business as well as your customer's customer.
Wednesday, February 24th, 8:00am PDT:  Register Now
 

AlarmPoint was featured in a recent publication, IT Today, talking about best practices and 5 logical steps to effective Alert Management – below is a quick excerpt as well as a link to the full article:

Five Ways to Increase Operational Efficiency with Alert Management

The current state of IT systems management across the enterprise is a combination of automated and manual processes. Companies are doing their best with this arrangement, but they realize that they could be doing better. When events occur that can impact the business, many companies rely on manual procedures and mass notifications to identify and notify employees who can resolve the issues.  If the appropriate employee is found but isn't on site, he or she needs the systems and tools to work effectively from a remote location. Without them, time is lost, critical events may remain unresolved, and companies risk failing to fulfill their service-level agreements, including the provision of satisfactory service back to the business. There is a way to improve IT systems management without disrupting existing processes.
An alert management platform empowers companies to target actionable information from IT applications and systems automatically to the employee who can resolve the issue - escalating as necessary. Effective alert management provides the tools to access internal systems and address events from a mobile workbench as well as resolve issues from any web-enabled mobile device such as the BlackBerry or iPhone. Process acceleration and service improvements can help resolve incidents an average of 40 percent faster, saving up to millions of dollars annually.
There are five ways that implementing alert management can immediately increase operational effectiveness across the enterprise, including process and efficiency improvements in incident, service, and change management, while significantly reducing costs…

Check out the rest of the IT Today article for more information on filling the gap in how organizations pass information and communicate with their customers at http://www.ittoday.info/Articles/Alert_Management.htm
 

The latest AlarmPoint integration to Microsoft SCOM enables the appropriate technician to be notified directly via voice, email, pager, BlackBerry, or other device to resolve an issue. Released in December and available now, the integration to Microsoft SCOM allows users to receive detailed information about a failure and allows the recipient to select a response on their remote device. AlarmPoint then updates the Microsoft SCOM alert in real-time.

The integration to Microsoft SCOM allows the user to benefit immediately through automation. The user will find a significant acceleration in the time required for staff to notice the failures or malfunctions, determine who is on call, and notify the right person. In addition, the ability to take simple actions on the event from any device gives the user a quick way to deal with many issues and communicate to other team members the current status of the event.

During the process, every notification, response, and action is logged in AlarmPoint, and AlarmPoint automatically annotates the Microsoft SCOM alert with process information. The AlarmPoint product also features a self-service web user interface to allow accurate assignment of responsible personnel for each job.

In addition to Microsoft SCOM, AlarmPoint has out of the box integrations to BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager, IBM Tivoli, HP Operations Manager and many more. http://www.alarmpoint.com/resourcecenter/.

To read more about the new AlarmPoint integration for Microsoft SCOM, download the datasheet here.

Today we held a free webinar titled How to Improve Incident Response Times by 85%, discussing how an Alert Management platform can improve incident management processes by eliminating manual tasks.

Doug Peete, AlarmPoint's Director of Technical Presales, did a great job showing how AlarmPoint has helped a US Research Organization reduce the number of business impacting events and reallocate headcount to work on more value added tasks. While showing the AlarmPoint solution in action, Doug also gave attendees a sneak peek at some exciting new features coming available next quarter in AlarmPoint version 4.1.

If you missed the webinar or just loved it so much that you want to listen again, the recording is now available.

Thanks to those of you that attended. If you have any questions, feel free to contact sales@alarmpoint.com.

IT is increasingly more reliant on automated processes in environments where fewer resources are available. Many organizations struggle with eliminating manual ticket assignment, call outs and incident management methods.

Register for  this informative webinar to learn how an Alert Management platform can improve your incident management processes by eliminating manual tasks.

Date: Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Time: 10:00 am PST
 

REGISTER NOW

Don't miss AlarmPoint sponsoring and presenting at the upcoming BMC Technology Day in San Jose.

Date: Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009

Time: 9 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Location: Hotel Valencia Santana Row, 355 Santana Row, San Jose, CA 95128

Register Now!

 Join BMC Software for a diverse day of learning targeted to all levels within IT. At this all-day event, you can network with partners, peers, and customers, gather tips and tricks, and even learn how dynamic solutions and products can help you better manage IT.

 There is no fee to attend, but you must register. View the agenda and reserve your seat today.

 Highlights of this diverse agenda:

• Learn how to simplify and automate with Business Service Management: Paul Avenant, VP, ESM Products & Strategy, BMC Software
• Get best practices for service resource planning
• Learn how to achieve continuous compliance
• Virtualization: Lifecycle management, Cloud computing, capacity planning
• Join afternoon breakout sessions with IT experts

 For more information, please contact Colleen Murphy. Colleen_murphy@bmc.com

Sprint Nextel Case Study

So here’s one interesting thing coming out of the recent downturn – rapid consolidation, mergers and takeovers. We all know the headline stories, Bank of America nabs Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase grabs Bear Stearns and WaMu, Wells Fargo eats up Wachovia, Barclays picks up Lehman Brothers, the list goes on. 

The usual “redundancies” you hear about after these kinds of mergers are generally driven by reductions in personnel or facilities.  However, in addition to the flood of extra people and sites, there are usually hundreds of surplus systems and technologies in a newly merged organization that need to be combined or eliminated as well. As these companies attempt to digest the changes, the challenge becomes cutting the bloat and meeting the market’s expectations for efficiencies. 

Consolidation of technology usually becomes the focus. The initial cost savings from consolidating redundant systems are obvious: when you get rid of software, you stop paying for the maintenance, upkeep, training and upgrade costs associated with it. The secondary costs of maintaining extra systems are more insidious. Take the example of Sprint Nextel, one of our telecommunication customers.

Sprint Nextel had acquired numerous companies over the years – most obviously in the merger of Sprint and Nextel. In all, the company had bought and inherited 56 different IT notification systems.  As you can imagine, it was practically impossible to manage 56 notification systems, each firing off hundreds of alerts at once. When an IT incident occurred, it’s possible that dozens of systems could be alerting and flooding staffers with data:  all slightly different, none particularly helpful.  Personnel did what you would do, they ignored the alerts! Not for lack of attention, but because of sheer quantity. They couldn’t possibly keep up, let alone comb out the important or critical alerts that needed immediate attention. 

The result is that the IT team wasn’t able to act proactively in response to early alerts, because those alerts were being lost in white noise. Sprint Nextel was only confronting IT issues after they escalated to the point that they were affecting end users. The manual call-out process from the NOC for critical issues couldn’t be managed efficiently and failed automation attempts simply resulted in further jerry-rigged manual processes. Delayed resolution of major incidents was costing the company millions.

The initial solution was clear: consolidation. Sprint Nextel had an older version of AlarmPoint that had been previously installed to manage notification for a small part of the business.  By upgrading and expanding their old system into the new AlarmPoint Alert Management platform, they could get rid of 55 extra notification systems. The cost savings implicit in dumping that much hardware and IT notification software is impressive – the company was able to save $350,000 immediately by reallocating personnel who had previously managed the multiple notification systems.

More important, however, are the millions that Sprint Nextel expects to save in the coming months from faster incident resolution. Those are the hard cost savings and efficiency improvements that can really impact the success of a merger. This intelligent consolidation has helped Sprint Nextel experience better operational effectiveness as a whole than the individual companies Sprint and Nextel could have achieved alone. To learn more, please read our Sprint Nextel case study.  
 

AlarmPoint is extremely pleased to announce that free copies of AlarmPoint Express and AlarmPoint Mobile Gateway are now being included in packages of HP Service Manager  7.11 (HPSM). With two successful bundles already out (read about the HP NNMi bundle and the HP Operations Manager for Unix bundle here), HP and AlarmPoint have decided to provide AlarmPoint software to  Service Manager customers in order to better manage notifications coming from HPSM. This $2500 value is completely free.

AlarmPoint’s out-of-the-box integration will function in much the same way as previous software bundles. AlarmPoint Express includes the basic functionality of an Alert Management platform, which ensures that events coming from Service Manager aren’t sent out to everyone in the department. Instead, AlarmPoint Express automatically routes each alert to the correct group or individual, and initiates two-way communication until that individual owns the event. Express will also automatically escalate if a person doesn’t respond to the alert. This reduces the number of people involved in each event by about 80%.

With the addition of the AlarmPoint Mobile Gateway, HPSM users get unique access to Service Manager from their mobile devices. Users are able to view, edit, annotate, research, trouble shoot and take remote actions on all events coming from HP Service Manager. Much like our previous OMU bundle, this one gives mobile personnel using BlackBerrys, iPhones, or any other Smartphone a single secure, authenticated and audited access point for not only HPSM, but any other service delivery and service support applications sending out notifications. This is also a boon for Change Management, as managers can approve, deny or get more information about changes while stuck in meetings.

According the HP’s Service Management Center senior product manager, Fred Mougayar, this bundle will do more than just better manage alerts – it’ll make your IT department faster, more cost-effective, and better equipped to deliver the standards the business demands.

“Customers can reduce operations costs, meet increasing business requirements, and deliver a higher level of service to their end users by combining service management and alert management capabilities,” Mougayar said. “The combination of AlarmPoint with HP enables mobile users to access HP Service Manager from any location, which provides targeted incident and change information to the person who can resolve the problem.”

Learn more at express.alarmpoint.com.

I was recently working with a customer and was a bit astonished by their pain-point, especially because it was still hurting them in 2009. They were spending $20/month on a pager subscription for each of their 25,000 staff.  Ah, well that’s only $20 right?  Not when you consider that $20 x 25,000 employees is $500,000 per month.  That’s $6,000,000 a year. 

I repeat, $6,000,000 a year.  So what were the pagers for, you ask?  Personnel relied on them for IT event information.  Whenever an IT event occurred, the company would send out a mass page with some quick info and a directive for users to get back to their computers to resolve the problem. People got paged, sprinted back to their desks if they could or ignored the page if they were unable to leave whatever they were doing. The system was slow and inefficient, but, worse yet, it was costing millions to maintain.

While this is obviously a very large company, supporting an army of pagers was making a serious dent in their budget.  Adding to the growing frustration was that in addition to their pagers, employees already maintained far superior communication devices in the form of iPhones and BlackBerries and other Smartphones.  These phones are able to do far more than pagers and yet were completely underutilized for IT purposes. Our suggestion was to use them to their full potential.

Pagers are reliable, yes, and traditionally used in IT. But that's where the positives end. There’s no reason to employ a one-way technology that’s exclusively used to tell you to get back to your computer. Smartphone users already have a computer in their hands or on their belts. Taking pagers out of the equation and switching directly to Smartphones cuts out the middleman, and all the valuable time the middleman used to eat up.

Our solution for the company was to implement AlarmPoint’s Alert Management platform coupled with our Mobile Gateway so the user could acknowledge events and view help desk application on their Smartphone.  Our customer saved $6,000,000 in operating expenses in their first 12 months with AlarmPoint. And more importantly, IT users suddenly had the freedom to stray from their consoles, deal with issues rapidly and not spend time on non-value-added tasks.  That’s like going from 1987 to 2009 in one upgrade.  No DeLorean necessary. Marty McFly would be proud.

The suspicion is that we're bottoming out. The economy is still tough, of course, but it might not get more terrible. Then again, Warren Buffet says we're all doomed.  I have to use my entrepreneur’s sense of never-ending optimism and say I know better than Buffet, but even with my reassurance, the message most businesses and families are getting is this: we’re still in frugal mode. For families, sadly, my only advice is fewer $4 cups of Joe.  For businesses, I have a few more ideas about how to make the most of a tight operating spend.

The obvious one is automation. Automating manual processes takes errors, wait-time and non-value-added tasks out of the equation and, in so doing, makes things run faster and at lower cost. One area of the enterprise that many people overlook for automation is communication and notification, particularly when things go wrong.

Who gets called when a server fails, a service goes out, or a disaster occurs? The people who can fix the problem, of course, but also the micromanaging CEO to let her know you've identified the issue and begun work. Then there are the customers and business users who should be warned before they call in to complain.

But even the first step of that process – finding the right person to fix the problem – is completely manual in most companies. A panicked admin leafs through a stack of excel documents or an outdated help desk list, calls them, gets to voice-mail, moves on to the next guy on the list, calls him, finds out that he's on vacation. This process continues for minutes or hours until someone finally fixes the problem. 

Why not automate?  Deliver relevent information immediately into the hands of the person who can fix the problem or instantly escalate to the next available user if necessary.  The issue gets fixed faster.  Simple.  One of our customers took up automation and saved $1.8 million in service support costs per year.  This is a company with 2,000 employees.  $1.8 million a year out of an operating budget is big bucks.

An automated Alert Management system also logs every action and will inform affected business personnel about the impact so they don’t call and harass the help desk.  The value is rapid and meaningful and that micromanaging CEO has full visibility to the issue and the restoration so she can go micromanage someone else ;-).  Automation changes everything: problems are solved, service is available, harmony breaks out.