AIOps for Enhanced Business Performance · foundation that distinguishes truly unifying AIOps...

IT AND DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH | INDUSTRY ANALYSIS | CONSULTING

An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White PaperWritten By Dennis DrogsethApril 2019

Prepared for Centerity

AIOps for Enhanced Business Performance: What’s Needed to Make it Real?

Table of Contents

©2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

MANAGING NETWORKS IN A MULTI-CLOUD ERA: ARE YOUR TOOLS READY?


Executive Introduction.....................................................................................................................................................................1

A Look at the Changing IT-to-Business Landscape .......................................................................................................................1

AIOps Understood ..........................................................................................................................................................................2

Integrated Automation .............................................................................................................................................................3

The AIOps-to-Business Handshake ...............................................................................................................................................3

Business Metrics and Outcomes Supported ...........................................................................................................................5

An Introduction to Centerity ............................................................................................................................................................6

EMA Perspective .............................................................................................................................................................................7

About Centerity ..............................................................................................................................................................................7

http://www.enterprisemanagement.com

1 ©2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.comIT AND DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH | INDUSTRY ANALYSIS | CONSULTING


EXECUTIVE INTRODUCTIONIT organizations often struggle to make critical technology investments given the ongoing influx of marketing hype and industry confusion over terms. “AIOps” is a case in point, especially when it’s viewed as a technology in isolation without a clear map to use cases and value.

This paper will delineate critical requirements for AIOps in the context of both IT and business performance, with a focus on how AIOps can deliver true business value. It will then introduce Centerity as a unique AIOps platform designed with the proven breadth of functionality required to optimize business value across the complex and changing interdependencies of the full IT application infrastructure.

A LOOK AT THE CHANGING IT-TO-BUSINESS LANDSCAPEIn an era of digital transformation, stakeholders like business planners and executives find themselves increasingly dependent on IT services not only for routine business operations, but also for evolving their business models to become more competitive and more customer-aware. At the same time, IT executives and innovators find themselves increasingly pressured to show value and accelerate service delivery while minimizing costs and eliminating IT inefficiencies. This combination echoes Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in its mixture of innovative opportunity with outstanding pressures to perform faster and more effectively without breakage or loss.

EMA research data shows that digital transformation is underway and aligned with more successful IT performance, as well as more progressive business outcomes. More specifically, EMA data showed that in 63% of respondent’s IT organizations, digital transformation had become a top priority for IT and the business for one year or more. Another 31% said that digital transformation is a high priority—we are well underway with digital transformation.

However, such an evolution comes with ongoing challenges as well as benefits. Among these, the most outstanding were:

• Organizational and political issues

• Poor communication across IT

• Inaccurate or incomplete data

• Warring or siloed tools

The combination of cultural, organizational, and communication issues, along with technology issues, is telling. The takeaway here is that both technology and human factors contribute to the broader story in complementary ways, and focusing only on one dimension, while excluding any of the others, will promote an opportunity for failure.

EMA research data shows that digital transformation is

underway and aligned with more successful

IT performance, as well as more progressive business outcomes.




Additional challenges to moving forward with digital transformation-related expectations reside in IT’s rapidly changing landscape as hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and cloud migrations becoming more and more prevalent. Accelerating pressure to move toward a DevOps/agile model is also changing how operations and development teams are interacting in both their tools and processes—sometimes increasing the chances for broken handoffs and toolset fragmentation. Along with these trends comes a growing need to bring security and performance concerns together to elevate efficiencies in assuring business service performance across the full application lifecycle.

AIOPS UNDERSTOODOne of the most valuable approaches for enabling IT and business stakeholders to work together more effectively is an investment in business-aware AIOps, or as EMA calls it, “advanced IT analytics.” AIOps, when properly integrated into a broader capability for data assimilation, integrations, and automation, can indeed be a unifying factor not only across IT, but between IT and business stakeholders with strong values in improving business outcomes and business performance.

Based on extensive EMA research and more than 100 deployment conversations, the technical foundation that distinguishes truly unifying AIOps platform investments from more niche experiments in machine learning should include the following:

• Assimilation of data from cross-domain sources in high data volumes for cross-domain insights

• Access multiple data types, e.g., events, KPIs, logs, flow, configuration data, etc.

• Capabilities for self-learning to deliver predictive, and/or prescriptive and/or if/then actionable insights

• Potential use as a strategic overlay that may assimilate multiple monitoring and other investments

• Integrations that can help unify stakeholders and bridge political divides across IT and between IT and business stakeholders

• Support for private cloud and public cloud

• The ability to deliver on multiple use cases, such as business service performance and availability management, integrated support for change and change impact awareness, value in promoting more successful cloud migrations, and optimizing critical business outcomes

One of the most valuable approaches for enabling IT and

business stakeholders to work together

more effectively is an investment in business-aware

AIOps, or as EMA calls it, “advanced

IT analytics.”




Integrated Automation Automation is a core requirement for optimizing AIOps investments. While machine learning and proactive/predictive insights can in themselves add a lot of value, that value can actually become transformative through integrations with automation. Some of the more prevalent priorities for analytics/automation integrations include:

• IT process automation (runbook)

• Workflow of various kinds (sometimes combined with social IT)

• Configuration and change management-related automation

• Alert-driven notification when major incidents occur

• Automation in support of inventory and discovery

• Robotic process automation

• Workload automation and job scheduling

THE AIOPS-TO-BUSINESS HANDSHAKESelecting an AIOps platform for effective business transformation should best be approached from two key perspectives: roles served, and business metrics and outcomes supported.

From the perspective of roles served, it’s important to look at both business stakeholder roles and the diversity of IT roles engaged. The reason is that business outcomes cannot be effectively supported and achieved while IT organizations remain fragmented in siloed pockets with warring tools and technologies—a critical obstacle to digital transformation as highlighted by business as well as IT stakeholders.

In recent EMA research, respondents on average indicated that they hoped for 19 different roles to be supported, including domain-specific roles, cross-domain roles, and business stakeholder roles. These role categories could actually include hundreds of different stakeholders in large enterprises.

Among the more prevalent domain-specific roles supported were:

• Cloud management

• Database management

• Applications/management/support

• Systems management

• Network management

• Security/compliance

When it came to cross-domain roles, the top five most prevalent were:

• IT operations/cross-domain (tied with) executive IT

• ITSM (beyond the service desk)

• Data analyst/data scientist

• Infrastructure management

• Line of business IT (not central IT)




Figure 1 highlights the business roles that respondents looked to support through their AIOps investments. Significantly, only 2% of respondents had no expectation of business stakeholders benefiting from their AIOps deployments. On average, respondents indicated that they hoped their AIOps investments would reach out to more than four (4.47) types of business consumers. Broader categories, such as business operations and business development/planning, tended to be in the lead, but customer experience management is an area of growing importance, and critical to business outcomes and business success.

Figure 1: While business operations, business development/planning, and customer experience management led in business role priorities, the main message from EMA’s research was that all business roles show a significant level of importance.

Which of the following non-IT-related roles does your organization expect to support as an extension of its IT analytics?

51%

49%

49%

48%

45%

45%

42%

41%

39%

38%

2%

0%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

Business operations

Business development/planning

Customer experience management

Executive non-IT

Online operations

Supply chain management

Marketing

Line of business

Partner management

Sales

None - we don't expect our analytics investment to support non-ITstakeholders

Other non-IT (Please specify)




Business Metrics and Outcomes Supported While the term “AIOps” naturally implies an IT operational focus, the truth is that more advanced levels of AIOps investments bridge many different roles beyond operations, as previously described. One striking factor from EMA’s research is that when evaluating what IT and business stakeholders view as important in terms of twenty-two desired business outcomes, the difference between the top two priorities (revenue through IT services and business activity metrics) at 33% and the twenty-second priority (social media feedback) at 23% was only a ten percentage point difference.

The top fifteen business metrics and outcomes in EMA’s research were the following:

• Revenue (through IT services)

• Business activity metrics

• Improved business efficiencies due to reduced downtime

• Business process efficiency/impacts

• Industry compliance-related metrics

• Internal service-level agreement (SLA) requirements

• Cost of service delivery (internal)

• Cost of service delivery (external service provider)

• Cost-related external SLAs (with service providers including cloud)

• Service desk OpEx cost savings

• Operations OpEx cost savings due to reduction in mean time to repair

• Cost and overhead savings from capacity optimization

• Metrics to show application usage for cost (chargeback) and/or relevance

• Time to create, develop, deliver, or update new business services

• Brand-related impacts

The diversity of these metrics also suggests the use case diversity inherent in more business-ready AIOps platforms. It resonates with the fact that once the right data is brought together, meaningfully assimilated, and analyzed, many different values and benefits can be achieved. Performance informs on capacity and ultimately cost. Brand loyalty is informed by downtime, transactional performance, and even IT operational efficiencies. Business processes are enhanced, understood, and improved when traceable to effective interactions with well-delivered IT services. Managing all business-related SLAs associated with IT services proactively helps promote ongoing business efficiencies, and can also provide a useful auditing trail for supporting continuous improvement in business operations.




AN INTRODUCTION TO CENTERITYCenterity brings AIOps into a platform with a proven history in supporting business service outcomes across complex enterprise and MSP environments. These are built on strong operational analytics and data mining, as well as powerful discovery, visualization, and dependency insights. EMA highlighted features to include the following:

• Fast time to value: Centerity’s solution is fully integrated into a single software appliance with strong and fast time to value. In many vendor-documented deployments, it can collect metrics and deliver analytics within hours.

• Visibility across the full business application-infrastructure stack: Out of the box, Centerity can discover and manage network, application, database, and cloud-related components and interdependencies. This visibility is also extended via fully-supported integrations, such as those with Splunk, ServiceNow, and BMC Remedy, as well as an enhanced, RESTful API with proven outreach assimilating a wide range of application performance management and other monitoring tools.

• IoT discovery engine: Centerity offers end-to-end coverage of IoT operational chains, connecting endpoints such as sensors, facilities instrumentation, and medical devices to connect with its management and analytic capabilities. These can become a critical way of extending business value by helping to optimize business, as well as IT resources.

• Integrated support for automation: Centerity can drive a wide range of proactive actions that help set the stage for more effective business performance by ensuring that IT and business infrastructure components are performing and available based on SLAs and other service delivery requirements.

Centerity’s Business Service Views derive their strengths from these and other capabilities to normalize key performance metrics relevant to business performance and business outcomes. Each view contains service-level views with real-time currency for immediate reference, as well as for auditing and historical analysis. Business process views can be “nested” so that sub-processes can be brought together into larger, more holistic outcomes—e.g., “credential validation” as a subset for “loan processing.” Non-technical users can also create their own custom business process views, and multiple views can be consolidated into executive dashboards. Custom dashboards can, moreover, be shared internally across departments and externally with outside customers in a manner that’s business-relevant and secure. In this way, the Business Service View can deliver on both the requirements for breadth of stakeholder support and on the diversity of business metrics needed to support more effective business outcomes.




EMA PERSPECTIVEWhile most AIOps products have evolved either as one option within a larger suite, or as a standalone product with a more focused set of values, Centerity distinctly combines a versatile platform directed at a wide range of business service management requirements with well-integrated AIOps’ machine learning. This makes it a natural fit for both business and IT organizations seeking a robust and proven foundation for improving business outcomes and processes as affiliated with IT services.

EMA believes that the broader AIOps market, as defined by the industry today, will grow into multiple markets, each with its unique focus based on use case and breadth of full-stack application/infrastructure support. Additionally, as the AIOps market evolves, it will also favor those solutions with faster time to value and more well-defined, persona-aware analytics and visualization. Given this evolution, Centerity is ideally positioned to assume a leadership position for business and IT leaders seeking to improve business performance through a unifying platform of shared insights across the full breadth of today’s diverse business service interdependencies.

ABOUT CENTERITY Centerity is an AIOps platform that provides Dynamic Service Views (DSV) into the critical, technology-enabled business services that result from digital transformation initiatives at enterprises globally. Centerity uniquely gives these stakeholders real-time, full-stack visibility into the availability, performance, throughput and business process state of these business services. Centerity measures the service level of each critical business service and provides root cause analysis when issues arise in the underlying software and hardware infrastructure. As a result, stakeholders experience fewer impacts to revenue, superior end-user experience, improved customer retention, improved market share and reduced times to resolve issues (MTTR).


About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help EMA’s clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals, and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or blog.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. “EMA” and “Enterprise Management Associates” are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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