In our new White Paper we discuss the IT Operations Management challenges for mid-size Enterprises and MSP’s. In many ways their environment is starting to look like that of the larger enterprise – only scaled down in size. They have also moved to any-to-any IP networks, VoiP phone systems, Virtualized datacenters and SOA based application architectures just like their larger counterparts. In fact the gap in requirements for operations management tools required by mid-size businesses and larger ones is rapidly closing.

In this scenario, small and mid-size enterprises (SME’s) need to make the leap to the next-tier of IT management sophistication. What has been a huge barrier until now is the high cost and complexity of Enterprise-class operations management tools. Not any more – as a new breed of tools including RiverMuse Core and Pro is bridging the gap of cost, simplicity, functionality and business models to enable SME’s make the move.

As we discuss in the WhitePaper some of the key IT Operations Management challenges that mid-size enterprise and MSP organizations face today include -

i) Rise in the Volume and Complexity of Events  – more applications, dynamic infrastructures, rapid changes, distributed components – are all contributing to an explosion in the number of operations events and faults that IT has to contend with.

ii) Moving from Infrastructure Operations to Service-Centric Operations - it is no longer enough to just manage a component of the network or the datacenter – the IT manager in the mid-size enterprise has to be able to define, monitor and assure end-to-end services.

iii) Swivel Chair management of multiple monitoring Systems – specialized components with their own management mechanisms have a created a veritable zoo of management consoles. The result? No complete view of the service and silo-based operations that slow down operational response.

iv) Lack of Centralized, Enterprise Wide Operations Management – with event and performance data sitting in different databases and reporting systems – any kind of intelligent correlation is left to the skill of the operator. And as the volumes of event scale up – this process is well but broken. 

v) The Demand for Scalable, Real-time Operations – most of the new application services demand near real-time operational response. Think VoiP, video conferencing, social media based collaboration and so on. The issue is mid-size monitoring tools weren’t built for high volume, scalable event processing and hence critical insight into the infrastructure is lost as they filter out most events – even critical ones.

Do you agree with the set of challenges described above? Do you think there are other problem areas with regards to IT Operations management that we miss here? Let us know.

This is our January RiverMuse poll.

The poll results archive will be stored within the RiverMuse Community pages.

Network World have posted a slide-show of their Top 10 IT Management Start Up’s to Watch.  You can see it here.

We are delighted that NetworkWorld have named RiverMuse as one of their top 10 IT management start up’s to watch in their annual review announced today.

You can read the full article here.

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