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.

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.