Guest Post by Desi DosSantos
VP of Product Strategy at AlarmPoint

AlarmPoint has just released FREE AlarmPoint Express and Mobile Gateway for HP NNMi 8.13. Much like our other integrations, AlarmPoint Express will work to streamline notifications coming from NNMi in order to direct each IT event to an individual who can take immediate action, rather than a whole department. So, you might ask, what’s new about this HP NNMi Integration? Well, one of the key new features is the Mobile Gateway integration. What’s cool about it is that if you have a browser-based device, like an iPhone, Blackberry, Treo, Palm, Droid or Windows Mobile device, you now have a remote control to work with NNMi. And there is no software installed on the device at all! Yes, just like the remote control for your TV or DVR, except this remote can be anywhere in the world as long as you have a cell signal.

So let’s walk through a typical scenario. You are walking through the grocery store, minding your own business, and your Blackberry starts buzzing. When you look at the screen, it’s AlarmPoint sending you a text message or an email. So you look at the message, and it’s a critical event on a system forwarded from HP NNMi. You have a set of typical responses that will allow you to stop further notifications, so you acknowledge the incident. AlarmPoint then marks the incident on the NNMi console as “In Progress”, and annotates that you have taken ownership.

So what do you do next? Well, you need to fix the problem. However you’re curious what other incidents are going on in NNMi. On your BlackBerry, you utilize the AlarmPoint Mobile Gateway in order to view all of the color-coded incidents on the HP NNMi console.  Yes, you are still standing in the grocery store, and you are now looking at the console as if you were standing in the computer room.

So what can you do now? Well, what would you like to do?

• Change the priority on the incident
• Change the Lifecycle state
• Assign the incident
• View all of the Source Node or Source Object information
• Read or add annotations in the Notes field for an incident
• Query for other incidents and view/modify them
• View Service Impact incidents
• iew your assigned incidents and more.

So, how much does AlarmPoint Express for HP NNMi 8.13 cost? Absolutely nothing. Through a special arrangement between AlarmPoint and HP, customers with NNMi 8.13 can go to the following URL, register, download, and install AlarmPoint Express for free. Express will handle up to 10 users for notifications, and 2 users for the Mobile Gateway.

www.alarmpoint.com/freeexpress

AlarmPoint has just released Mobile Gateway integrations for BMC Remedy 7.5 for both Incident and Change Management. That means you can access the most recent releases of Remedy from a mobile workbench using AlarmPoint’s Mobile Gateway. 

The Mobile Gateway mirrors all the tabs and functionalities of Remedy by using a secure web browser, accessible from any Smartphone. Real-time two-way interaction from the phone to Remedy allows you to not only own an incident or change, but to take action.

For Change Managers, Mobile Gateway gives you the power to view new changes, get more information, accept or deny changes, or add notes right from a web-enabled mobile device. So even if you can’t get to your computer, you have full access to all the information you need to get critical changes through in a timely manner. Often a few individuals stuck in meetings become a bottleneck in Change Management. The Mobile Gateway can eliminate that problem.

AlarmPoint’s Mobile Gateway works in a similar way for Incident Management. The Alert Management platform will assign you an incident, and  you can own it immediately or get more information about it on your BlackBerry, iPhone, Treo or any other Smartphone. Once you own an incident, you have exactly the same range of options as you’d have at your computer: change the impact, create a note, resolve the incident by entering resolution text and looking up reason codes. Beyond that, you can create new incidents, query existing incidents, or create lists of incidents that you may need to take action on, like those that have a high priority.

To see an example of what this looks like in Remedy 7, watch this 5 minute video. If you’re a current AlarmPoint customer or thinking of becoming one, find out more about these integrations at our community site, AlarmPoint Connect.

AlarmPoint is also going to be pushing out new releases for other versions of Remedy in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out.

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.

I’ve seen firsthand the complicated, cranky monsters most companies have built to manage IT. And no, I’m not referring to the guys hiding among the servers who’ll kick you in the shins if you try to take away their green screen pagers. I’m talking about the dozens of different systems produced by multiple vendors all working together and making no two shops identical. I’m not saying this kind of infrastructure is bad, just a bit terrifying for anyone who has to manage it.  I believe that’s why our combined Alert Management and mobility solutions must always integrate across all major products including HP, BMC, IBM and any combination thereof. 

AlarmPoint Mobile Gateway’s ability to span integrations across any system is particularly exciting, as it enables mobile infrastructure management throughout an organization. It gives personnel the same range of actions in accessing, creating, approving, modifying and resolving IT events or incidents as they would have from their console. Users can browse system health, respond to an alert, walk through a work flow and take action to resolve events from their BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Treo or any other Smartphone. 

Read that again.  Any combination of service assurance system and service support system available on your Smartphone.  That includes our out-of-the-box partner products like BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager, HP Operations Manager and IBM Tivoli Netcool.

Rapid return of value today is important.  Integrations for all major software suites help our customers achieve accelerated resolution times ranging from 20-40% on every incident.  Those are big numbers.  AlarmPoint products do a lot to tame the beast of complicated IT infrastructure, and no, again, I’m not talking about Ted, the cranky engineer who only appears when someone leaves unlabeled sandwiches in the fridge.

To learn more about how AlarmPoint integrates with different software and how Mobile Gateway can positively impact your mobile workforce, take a look at our latest press release, or read about our integrations for BES, HP, IBM, and BMC.

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.

The other day Google released Latitude, software that allows cell phone users to share their location with others. You can now simply flip open your phone to see what restaurant your friends are at. Or, if you’re a manager trying to corral a mobile workforce, you can flip open your phone to make sure your team isn’t off enjoying a caramel Macchiato.  Ok, so most IT professionals will not be registering their whereabouts in the name of greater efficiency, making this particular app more effective for getting drinks than getting paid. But the concept has some merit – current Alert Management platforms do something similar.

By entering static or dynamic location and contact information into an Alert Management platform, you are participating in “Information Request Management” which is the first tenant of successful Alert Management.  This capability says “if something happens that I need to know about, find me.”  To be effective, an Alert Management platform should be able to get pretty granular: what events you are responsible for or interested in, what level of information granularity you require, your location and availability, when you’re at the office, on vacation or going for a $4.00 Cup-a-Joe. 

There are no pretty icons or smiling faces, but other than that, Alert Management can be like Latitude for the workplace – all in the name of greater efficiency and a really fancy coffee.

In my last post I described why Alert Management is essential for mobile employees. I also wrote about waffles. I recommend ample use of both for a happy workplace, but allowing employees to respond quickly and accurately to a problem using their mobile devices may be even more important than judicious use of syrup.

With more and more staff going mobile, finding and contacting them is only the first part of the efficiency equation. The second half is letting them resolve the incident without having to return to their console. This process is called Remote Action Enablement.

The time savings implicit in targeted notification is quickly chipped away when a mobile employee cannot solve a problem where they are and must either switch devices or move to a different location. To make real strides in efficiency, there needs to be solid two-way communication by which an engineer can be alerted to a problem, view all the necessary information, and then have access to the systems and applications required to solve it – all from their mobile device.

Of course, if there’s a potential dark side to the convenience of Remote Action Enablement, it’s security. Nobody wants to have that much information and access crammed onto a small, easily lost device. For that reason I recommend an enterprise keep this service online and password protected: accessible by BlackBerry, but not located on it.

A safe, secure Alert Management system is just as important as a flexible one. After all, depending on mobile devices is the way of the future, but no matter how advanced our technology becomes, there’s still a chance someone will leave their prized iPhone on the Metro, Tube or the football field … crunch.