Remote control
It seems like we are in the middle of a ‘perfect strom’ of IT advances and developments. Cloud, virtualisation and mobility have all added layers of complexity to the IT estate. While this widespread evolution is widely acknowledged its impact on IT management is perhaps less understood. Christian Nagele, managing director at CentraStage, says this is where remote management can come into its own.
Virtualisation – at server and desktop level, xx wireless and 3G networks, cloud computing, tablets and smartphones…as with much of the IT industry device management, the management and monitoring of IT assets, is currently undergoing rapid and significant transformation. While this evolution is widely acknowledged its impact on IT management is perhaps less well understood.
As mainstream business applications become more sophisticated and easier to install, update and manage, and devices themselves become more robust and reliable, there is a steadily decreasing requirement for overly complex and feature-rich IT management solutions. IT service providers and corporate IT departments are increasingly looking at their core requirements and finding that many tools are, in essence, excess to requirements.
The must-haves
In a financially constrained environment the buyer is looking to address their ‘must-haves’ and looking at cost not only in terms of money, but also in terms of the human resource, and costs of set-up, deployment and on-going management.
This is where the web-based remote monitoring and management technologies come in. The core concept plays on both the advantages offered by the cloud and the focus on streamlining customer requirements when it comes to IT management.
The benefits of the cloud in this sense mean:
Speed of set up: the back-end management engine is hosted in the cloud, so there is no installation or set-up of management software.
Ease of deployment: being domain and network agnostic, the technology is built to deploy and run over the Internet.
Ease of management: modern, intuitive UIs mean that ‘time to value’ (ie, the time in which a company starts to see value from a new technology) is very short, and the training overhead for users is minimal.
Cost: cost of customer fulfilment is dramatically reduced with the back-end system, and the benefits of this scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure hosted in the cloud can be passed on to customers in a lower end user cost.
The middle market
In the remote monitoring and management space, perhaps unusually, we see the SME market driving the adoption of these new technologies. Enterprise organisations, often seen as the early adopters of new technology in order to gain competitive advantage, are still largely wedded to the established high-end IT management tools that are tortuous to deploy, hugely complex to manage and very expensive, in fact the very antithesis of the web 2.0 IT management technologies.
The proliferation of mobile working, greatly accelerated by the explosion in smartphones and tablets as business tools, however, is forcing the enterprise to look beyond the traditional IT management products, to the new breed of web-based technologies that will give them centralised visibility and control of their IT assets, regardless of location, network, OS type or user.
The SME IT sector meanwhile is perfectly positioned to take advantage of cloud-based IT management technologies due to the widespread adoption of outsourced IT contracts – small businesses outsourcing their IT to other small businesses. There are estimated to be over 15,000 IT service providers in the UK, the large proportion of which fall into this category. For these small, often owner-managed businesses, adoption of IT management technology has previously been prohibitive from both a cost and time perspective; however new breed remote monitoring and management tools removes both the technical and commercial barriers to entry. They can simply sign-up, deploy and they are up-and-running, with the benefits to their business almost immediate.
With no minimum contracts, no minimum commitments, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model so favoured by SaaS providers, the cost of the technology is commensurate with customer revenues.
The challenges for the majority of remote monitoring and management providers are not insignificant, but many are running on pre-cloud architecture and therefore need to re-engineer their technology for the cloud. Often packed full of ‘nice to have’ features and underpinned by expensive licensing models, most are battling to keep pace with the need to integrate into a multitude of other technologies.
Simplicity, choice and integration
I feel the future lies in three key principles – simplicity, choice and integration:
Simplicity: the provision of a core IT management platform that contains the key requirements:
•Audit – so you know what’s out there;
•Monitoring – so you know what’s gone wrong, or is about to go wrong;
•Deployment and configuration – so you can automate your routine IT tasks;
•Remote support – so you can provide one-to-one device management when the need arises;
•Reporting – giving you complete visibility of your environment.
Choice: this lies in the ability of IT service providers to overlay core IT management frameworks with the functions that they need. For example, CentraStage’s Comstore allows IT admins to browse through a range of additional functionalities, which are then imported into their systems. This means they only have and only pay for the functionality they need. Think of it as the Apstore for IT management.
Integration: the holy grail of IT management is a single technology that ‘does everything’. We’ve yet to see it, and so have built our technology around a framework that will integrate easily with other IT management and monitoring tools. It’s a model that has served Salesforce well.
Remote possibilities
Fundamentally, adoption of IT management technology amongst SMEs will be driven by wider economic market conditions – growing businesses looking to take on more clients, or grow their IT estate, without throwing additional headcount at their IT support function, or struggling businesses looking for efficiency savings. That said, by removing the two key inhibitors to adoption – cost and complexity – tools like CentraStage can dramatically accelerate market penetration of remote monitoring and management tools.
On the enterprise side, it will be the adoption of tablets and smartphones that drives IT departments to look outside of the established technologies, and to consider some of the new pretenders and we believe they will be pleasantly surprised by what they see – well-featured, robust, cost-effective and flexible IT management technology that delivers an eye-watering ROI and a ground-breaking simplicity.
