As I mentioned in my last post, what’s needed is a new approach to IT Operations – one that is simpler, real-time in nature, event agnostic, and can easily leverage the existing tools and monitoring technology feeds. With millions of IT events raised on a daily basis in an environment that is increasingly chattier, it becomes paramount to deliver to Command/Service Center operators only the meaningful alerts and notifications through real-time consolidation, correlation and processing.

By capturing all incoming events at high throughput, and filtering them through sophisticated alarm processing mechanisms that retain both the granularity and scalability – real-time event consolidation systems can fulfill what has eluded existing mid-market tools to date. In addition, these systems must dynamically enrich alarms with the right contextual information so that they are easily prioritized and acted upon by operators.

Service providers differentiate from their competitors based on the quality of service and visibility they offer their end customers. To build this differentiation and yet ensure that they get immediate value from management tool investments – these systems must offer the right balance of out-of-the-box capabilities, and flexibility through configuration and integration abilities.

New real-time IT operations systems must also be modular and open throughout so that innovation can blossom outside the confines of the vendor’s development resources, benefiting from the contributions and inputs of a larger community of practitioners.

And finally and perhaps most importantly, such system must be outright simple and affordable to achieve mainstream adoption by mid-sized service providers.

These thoughts do not come from us but from the scores of service providers and practitioners we talk to everyday. We are convinced that mid size service providers are ready for a new approach based on real time event consolidation, simplification and intelligent alarm processing.

Whether you agree or disagree we invite you to comment on our blog or give us a call. We would be delighted to have this conversation.