White Papers

In 2012, 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data were created every day, and as Big Data architectures gain adoption the rate of data growth in the enterprise will only increase. Clearly, enterprises don't have a problem generating data, but getting the most out of this data has been a consistent problem. The challenge is not just in reliably accessing much of this data, but integrating multiple sources of unstructured data, achieving real-time visibility and automated analysis for trends, patterns and anomalies. The implications are wide spread; operational agility is inhibited, business decisions are based on insufficient or stale data, and blind spots in technology performance that lead to repeated incidents and outages. This white paper explores the challenges of 3 FireScope customers, and how FireScope enabled them to easily aggregate this data to achieve new insights into the relationships between technology performance and customer experiences.

Technology can no longer be relegated to cost-center status within the modern Enterprise. Increasingly, organizations are identifying that the majority of their customers are interacting with their technology than with their people, making your technology your most important brand ambassador. As a result, the performance of your technology has become a critical factor in the success of your business. But there's an even more important reason. Technology innovation, when integrated into your larger go to market strategy, can unlock new possibilities for business growth. This white paper describes 10 vital questions every business owner should be asking IT to help foster a frank and constructive discussion to improve alignment between IT and the business.

Considering that American businesses suffer from 1,661,321 hours of downtime a year with an average financial hit of $181,770/hr due to lost revenue and productivity, clearly there is value to the business if this can be significantly reduced. The key is proving the value in a way that C-suite officers can relate to.

In the first quarter of 2011, online banking volumes across the top 10 banks grew to more than 65 Million liquid deposit account (LDA) customers, double the number from 2004 and growing fast. In addition to checking their account balances, nearly two-thirds of these customers are using online bill pay, and other online services are seeing growing adoption rates while traffic at traditional bank outlets is dropping considerably. While this certainly improves customer flexibility, such as being able to conduct business with your organization from across the globe at any hour, and reduces costs for the bank, it introduces a major new issue that must be addressed - specifically how to measure and manage customer perception when technology is the new customer service representative.

When discussing cloud architectures, one might note that most people refer to the end product in the singular - The Cloud. This is regardless of whether the discussion centers around a private, public or hybrid strategy. Converged architectures such as vBlock, Flexpod and others similarly point toward this evolution in thinking about technology, from a disparate collection of hardware and software toward a single entity. Yet, once discussions move from theoretical to practical, it quickly breaks down into individual silos such as storage, networking and applications. This is a fundamental hurdle to effectively executing a cloud strategy; if we want to talk in terms of a singular cloud, organizations need the means to manage it holistically.

According to a May 2012 ComScore survey "Online Shopping Customer Experience Study," approximately 75 million people buy goods online over the course of a business quarter, spending over $43 Billion in just the 2nd quarter of 2012. However, these users have high expectations. Forty percent of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds for a page to begin loading before they abandon a website. Additionally, while less than 2% of customers who experience an issue with completing a transaction will report it to your organization, an estimated 17% will post a comment on their preferred social media platform. In an era where technology is the new customer service representative, and where customers can communicate their dissatisfaction to an audience of millions in mere seconds, online retailers must rethink how they are managing their technology.

The average enterprise suffers 2.3 outages per year, each lasting 1 hour and requiring an additional 2 hours to restore services to 90% of normal operation. Each outage costs the business between $90,000 per hour in the media sector to about $6.48 million per hour for large online brokerages. In 74% of these cases, IT was unaware of these issues until users called the helpdesk. These compelling numbers highlight that there is indeed room for improvement in the way organizations manage their technology environments. And it must be done soon. The costs of an outage have grown considerably from similar studies performed in 2009 and 2010 as businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on technology to support business growth. This technical white paper takes a deep dive into FireScope's Top-Down approach to service management, which begins at the business outcome and user experience and works down through the underlying technology to provide more meaningful analysis of performance, is just the type of new thinking that the industry needs.

Point of sale systems and other customer-facing technology are essential elements in the enterprise's ability to generate revenue and to manage operations efficiently. Despite their importance, most IT enterprise monitoring systems provide little to no insight into the performance of assets at dispersed locations, such as branch offices and retail locations. Without measurable data on dispersed assets, IT organizations employing a Business Service Management (BSM) approach cannot fully evaluate their impact on revenue and costs. FireScope Sentinel offers a breakthrough that enables even limited IT staffs to extend their view into virtually an unlimited number of assets located anywhere around the globe.

This white paper provides a high-level overview of what Business Service Management is, the value it delivers to business, as well as a summary of the biggest hurdles businesses face when trying to achieve BSM.