If You Are Looking to Invest in Advanced Analytics for IT, Exactly What Should You Be Shopping For? Part 1: Cost Advantage
September 29, 2017

Dennis Drogseth
EMA

Share this

This is the fourth in my series of blogs inspired by EMA's AIA buyer's guide — directed at helping IT invest in Advanced IT Analytics (AIA), what the industry more commonly calls "Operational Analytics." The goal was to create a "Consumer's Report" approach. And to do that we took it one step further. We created what we called "Shopping Cart Criteria" based on our prior research on AIA adoptions over the past three years.

We divided the sixteen shopping cart criteria into three parts:

■ Cost advantage

■ Environments

■ Scenarios

I will address each of these criteria separately in the next three blogs. In this blog, I'm going to address cost advantage.

Cost, overhead, and time to value are often key challenges in adopting AIA solutions. In the past, these factors have often been especially onerous. But we saw strong levels of improvement among many vendors, and surprising areas of innovation among others. For instance, four of the vendors in our buyer's guide were primarily SaaS. And three had SaaS options as well as on-premise.

For cost, we provided pricing models and maintenance fee percentages. Then we dove into three critical areas:

■ Time to Value

■ Administration and Support

■ Toolset Consolidation

Time to Value

"Time to value" is defined differently by different vendors, which we captured based on the data we were provided as well as phone interviews. We documented factors relevant to ease of deployment, time to learn unique environments, and proof points from deployment interviews, with special weight to documented times for achieving critical strategic results. In our research, we saw valid assessments ranging from meaningful value delivered within a single day, and in fact in two cases within several hours, to more conservative estimates in terms of weeks and months.

Administration and Support

Here we looked at design and upgrade requirements, as well as insights into administrative overhead from deployments, as well as maintenance options and costs. We gave serious weight to the breadth and depth of professional services offered — querying vendors on a list of options ranging from "planning and deployment" (which was provided by all but one vendor) to support for "business activity management" (supported only by two).

Toolset Consolidation

One of the most compelling reasons for investing in AIA is toolset consolidation — which can bring both OpEx and CapEx cost savings. For this criterion, we considered breadth and ease of integrations, breadth of effective stakeholder support, and proof points from commentaries in deployments. The number of fully supported integrations we saw across our thirteen vendors ranged from 10 to more than 100 out-of-the-box. We also noticed a growing trend not only to assimilate data from monitoring and other sources, but also to promote data outward to third-party tools and dashboards, as well as IT service management solutions for workflow, trouble ticketing, and in some cases CMDB/CMS updates.

Read Part 2: Enivornments

Dennis Drogseth is VP at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Share this

The Latest

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...

March 14, 2024

The integration and maintenance of AI-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as pivotal points in enterprise AI implementation strategies, offering both significant challenges and promising benefits. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI's potential impact, the reality of its implementation presents hurdles. Currently, over 90% of enterprises are grappling with limitations in integrating AI into their tech stack ...

March 13, 2024

In the intricate landscape of IT infrastructure, one critical component often relegated to the back burner is Active Directory (AD) forest recovery — an oversight with costly consequences ...

March 12, 2024

eBPF is a technology that allows users to run custom programs inside the Linux kernel, which changes the behavior of the kernel and makes execution up to 10x faster(link is external) and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, networking and security ...

March 11, 2024

Data mesh, an increasingly important decentralized approach to data architecture and organizational design, focuses on treating data as a product, emphasizing domain-oriented data ownership, self-service tools and federated governance. The 2024 State of the Data Lakehouse report from Dremio presents evidence of the growing adoption of data mesh architectures in enterprises ... The report highlights that the drive towards data mesh is increasingly becoming a business strategy to enhance agility and speed in problem-solving and innovation ...

March 07, 2024
In this digital era, consumers prefer a seamless user experience, and here, the significance of performance testing cannot be overstated. Application performance testing is essential in ensuring that your software products, websites, or other related systems operate seamlessly under varying conditions. However, the cost of poor performance extends beyond technical glitches and slow load times; it can directly affect customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Understand the tangible and intangible consequences of poor application performance and how it can affect your business ...
March 06, 2024

Too much traffic can crash a website ... That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack ... These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night ...

March 05, 2024

Today, applications serve as the backbone of businesses, and therefore, ensuring optimal performance has never been more critical. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) emerges as an indispensable tool, empowering organizations to safeguard their applications proactively, match user expectations, and drive growth. But APM is not without its challenges. Choosing to implement APM is a path that's not easily realized, even if it offers great benefits. This blog deals with the potential hurdles that may manifest when you actualize your APM strategy in your IT application environment ...