In a partnership with Altosoft that enables new levels of real-time process automation analytics, Opalis software had delivered an industry first with its business centric IT initiative.
Opalis Software Inc., the independent market leader in IT process automation software, today announced a next generation of process automation analytics that will enable enterprise IT organizations to achieve shared visibility into IT process performance, systems and services with their business partners. Enterprise customers will benefit with new levels of transparency between lines of business and IT and improved business agility through increased IT responsiveness.
The Business Process Centric IT (BPC IT) initiative links business process metrics and KPIs with IT process automation. The result is the industry’s first solution to enable customers to understand and analyze the impact of the IT environment on business process performance.
Available December 1, 2008, from Opalis, the Business Process Centric (BPC) IT Dashboard features Opalis IT Process Automation solutions combined with advanced, process-aware business intelligence (BI) technology from Opalis’ OEM partner, Altosoft.
The BPC IT Dashboard empowers executives, business users and IT staff by linking operational IT and business process metrics into a single view where organizations can track and monitor process performance across IT systems and services, visualize real-time activity across heterogeneous systems and vendors, and ensure compliance with business process KPIs, SLAs and IT policies.
Enterprises can monitor key processes in real time, be alerted when a process starts to fail, drill down to evaluate the cause of the problem and take action to remediate the problem, all in either a fully automated or semi-automated manner. The solution provides the ability to do offline analysis of process performance bottlenecks allowing business and IT to synchronize the changes necessary to improve future performance.
For example:
- Provisioning a new customer is a business process that depends on an IT service. In the real-time operations environment, if that process stalls for lack of IT resources, the Opalis BPC IT Dashboard would highlight the business process problem, the business impact, the associated IT services causing the problem, and where possible, automate the response to mitigate the resources bottleneck.
- Within this example, offline review of the analytic data suggests that this business process tends to fail every Saturday morning when over capacity utilization of a particular server occurs. Not surprisingly, the business analytic data shows that there is a spike in new customer provisioning traffic on Saturday mornings.
- Using Opalis automation, a corrective action is put in place to expand server capacity every Saturday morning by provisioning an additional virtual machine
through an ITIL workflow, allocated to new customer provisioning, for the duration of the day. At the end of the day on Saturday, the virtual machine is automatically decommissioned by the Opalis process and resources are returned to the free pool. Business needs and IT become synchronized to deliver business agility.
Leading companies worldwide are choosing to improve their business agility by enabling IT to deliver critical services faster, and with fewer errors. With Opalis, this can be achieved through solutions that automate processes so skilled IT staff can be reallocated to strategic business initiatives, resulting in reduced management cost and increased productivity.
According to a May 2008 report published by independent research firm Forrester1 titled Tech Horizons: The IT Management Software Market In 2013 the evolution of IT management software is advancing to a process centric view as the most mature state over the next 5 years with automation and dashboards, end-to-end management, analytics and decision support all critical elements in this evolution.
“Pressure from the business to improve service quality while reducing costs is forcing IT organizations to act as service providers: they must structure themselves as business units, using best practices, process streamlining and automation,” wrote Jean-Pierre Garbani, Vice President, Principal Analyst at Forrester in the report.
“IT services must align closely with business processes…More and more enterprises are using business process management (BPM) to architect their business processes. Inputs from IT services into BPM tools will pinpoint the necessary IT changes and BPM will directly drive application and IT service design,” continued Garbani. Forrester estimates the size of this market at $18.5Bn by 2013.
“Our customers and their business partners are looking for end to end visibility of their critical processes, coupled with actionable intelligence. Traditional big IT management vendors focusing on Data Center Automation (DCA), Business Service Management (BSM) and Business Service Automation (BSA) can’t be trusted to deliver this end-to-end process view because their focus is limited to their stack of software and all large enterprise companies use multiple vendors for their systems management tools and infrastructure.” said Charles Crouchman, chief technology officer for Opalis Software.
“What makes the Opalis approach unique is that it does not rely on heavy BPM tools or require a suite of IT management software to produce high value results. Opalis will pull information from the tools that already exist in the environment, including BPM and systems management tools from all vendors, protecting the enterprise investment in these tools. We selected Altosoft because their technology was uniquely well suited to enable the heterogeneous, open approach that we had envisioned between IT process and business process” continued Crouchman.
For organizations that are interested in expanding visibility and analysis capabilities beyond the Opalis system, Opalis and Altosoft offer a seamless upgrade path to the full Altosoft Insight business intelligence solution, enabling full analysis of other IT-related data sources in-line with Opalis.
“Opalis’ leading IT process automation technology has empowered organizations to significantly improve performance, reliability and efficiency of information technology and business services delivery,” said Scott Opitz, chief executive officer, Altosoft. “Our alliance with Opalis makes perfect sense because both organizations are helping customers achieve business goals through process excellence. By integrating Altosoft’s unique, process-aware BI platform, Opalis creates a compelling competitive advantage for its product and delivers the superior data visualization and analysis experience that IT executives and operational managers are looking for.”
1 Forrester “Tech Horizons: The IT Management Software Market in 2013”, Jean-Pierre Garbani and Thomas Mendel, PHD, May 2, 2008, updated July 1, 2008.
For more information visit the Opalis Software web site.
Rebekah_M says
At last week’s Gartner conference, there was a rumor circulating of CA’s acquisition of Optinuity’s technology, a rumor supported by a re-skinned version of Optinuity’s product being demo’d in CA’s booth. It will be interesting to see how Opalis spins this, as CA had previously selected Opalis as an OEM. Also, will this set off a consolidation spree? Vendors like Opalis (RBA only), Stratavia (Database automation, server automation and RBA), Network Automation (mid market RBA), etc will surely benefit if so.