Conjunto de ferramentas para gestores de activos de TI

[0:01] Lynn: Welcome to the ITAM podcast. It’s a vehicle for ITAM provider members to introduce their products and services to the ITAM membership community. My name is Lynn Weiss, I’m from ITAM and I have with me today Tanya Kristiansen, communications consultant for Open iT. This podcast from ITAM has four questions that we ask each provider member regarding their support of IT asset management. Tanya has elected to include those within the presentation itself so to get things moving I’m going to turn the presentation over to Tanya.

[0:42] Tanya: Hello, welcome to the Open iT company and products presentation. So as you heard my name is Tanya Kristiansen and I’ve worked with marketing communication for Open iT for several years. My presentation will provide you with an overview of our tool set for IT asset managers followed by some customer success stories and we’ll cover the basics of Open iT software. I’ll show you our enterprise version with its dashboard, some sample reports, and show how Open iT can optimize your business results and by so doing boost your career.

[1:20] Open iT started with a group of IT consultants in 1992 who recognized that the system management problems they were addressing with large utility clients would be characteristic of almost any large IT reliant company regardless of industry focus. With that the consulting group changed its focus from consulting to software and was reborn as a software company in 1999. Open iT has built up a strong customer base and is growing and profitable. Our software meters usage of software applications and licenses with globally deployed dynamic use models including concurrent licensing and pay-per-use agreements and it meters hardware usage to support optimization and usage based chargeback models.

[2:10] Open iT’s core competence is enabling our customers to optimize their information technology assets through data analysis. This is done by metering how resources are used, providing a tool for analyzing usage, and finally providing the expertise for resource optimization. Metering and automatic analysis is facilitated by the tool and optimization requires knowledge of your business. Why optimize IT resources. It’s too expensive not to. Typical returns on investments for Open iT customers is more than 10 times the cost of the software.

[2:57] So what are some of the processes you need to have in place in IT today. Now we’ll look at the key business drivers. Financial: IT must be able to demonstrate value to the business, it must be able to improve the organization’s awareness of costs, IT needs to be able to reduce costs and create scalability in a responsible ethical way, and document compliance. IT needs to be able to evaluate investments and see if they contribute towards the future of your business. Our usage metering tools will help you enable your success.

[3:48] Perhaps IT managers have been most concerned about compliance but why not take stewardship of IT resources to another level to proactively find ways to get more out of them. Balancing between effectively managing IT resources and delivering expected IT services all while keeping within a budget is always difficult. An IT department may be viewed only as a cost center and not as a strategic business strength. The key to success is in developing a strong partner relationship between the two functions and having effective processes, technologies, and governance support change in business strategies. Open iT software and reports provide for better communication and collaboration between departments.

[4:44] How can you make better choices about the assets you steward. Harvest low-hanging fruit. This is always important, even more important now in the economic climate we’re currently in. There’s fruit to be had out there, go and get it. Where do I look. Not just by focusing on cutting costs, you want to focus on IT optimization. How can you do that. By tracking usage and by evaluating how you use your resources every single day or week. So step one, track as much as possible, don’t expect to optimize what you’re not metering. Step two and three, analyze, communicate, and then optimize. Harvest the return on your investment, reinvest. You’ll find candidates for savings or improvements in user or asset efficiency everywhere.

[5:36] Why Open iT. We have three key strengths. The completeness of solution, you can get an enterprise overview to seeing very fine grain details such as one user using one feature of some software. We’re platform independent both with respect to the sources of usage data and in regard to browsers used to generate and view reports. Our software is essential for companies running a heterogeneous environment with Unix, Linux, and Windows to get a truly enterprise wide view that comprehends all resources. Security, robustness, and speed. We have digitally signed data, it’s unalterable for pay-per-use agreements and we’re a trusted third party between vendors and end-users. We have speedy reporting.

[6:50] And since Open iT is a trusted third party you can use LicenseAnalyzer™ reports to simulate which license agreements would be best without any adaptation needed. So you can use License Optimizer to recycle inactive software and automatically free up unused software licenses to save on these and on maintenance and support agreements as well. Do you want to hit your targets in IT asset management. The Open iT quiver of tools will help you focus on the most important tasks ahead of you so you can hit the bullseye for each target you set. Open iT’s customers within these industries use our tools strategically to increase productivity while cutting costs. In a moment we’ll look at IT leaders who reap rewards by using our tools to benefit the companies they work for.

[7:58] So why these industries. Modeling software for natural resource exploration can cost fifty thousand dollars per license and even more. So these companies have expensive application licenses and they run license managers, FlexNet, IBM LUM, Sentinel, Reprise, LMX, but we basically can support any kind of license manager or not. They have a mixed environment, heterogeneous, a grid type environment, shared complete compute clusters, workload management tools, Sun Grid, PBS Pro, and LSF load balancing software, compute intensive tasks, high-end storage, and large data management groups like EMC, and again multiple sites often international. These multinational companies that are spread around the world with different infrastructure and platforms have very complex systems to manage. So you need enterprise tools in order to see the big picture of how your IT resources are used or more often not being used.

[9:11] So who can benefit from using our software. Not just giant companies but also any company having a hundred or more employees using licensed software and an IT network can benefit from our tools and services, and those wanting to have support for access agreements, companies that have been through a merger and acquisition or are in downsizing or consolidating, IT managers interested in accountability for service levels and budget allocations, and those who are preparing for an audit.

[9:52] I’ll give you a picture of Open iT’s product architecture. The data is collected by an Open iT client. The kind of data collected depends on what module is installed and what you want to meter. You may have a client on every system or laptop or just on the servers depending on what you want to achieve. If you want to monitor a local program only you’d need a client installed on every PC. For Oracle on the other hand you might only have a few clients for the entire network. Note that the client can work offline as well as online, if it’s working offline it’ll transfer the data to the server once it gets online. The server structures the data in a way that you don’t have to search through billions of records to get a big picture. From your favorite browser you can access various reports and make an enterprise dashboard. So let’s look at some examples of the web interface and the reports in the next section of this presentation. All of these modules that we have have a common data store, data warehouse, and a web based GUI but they differ depending on the type of data you want to meter, analyze, and optimize.

[11:08] Here’s the standard web interface for the Open iT product portal. From here you can choose the reporting or admin tool. In this screenshot you see one of the LicenseAnalyzer™ license monitor reporting features which is easily configurable on the left-hand side here. New developments we’re doing currently are to improve our products over the next 12 months and that would be by making more report templates, improving the usability of our GUI, and making reporting even easier for managers. Excel dashboards can be created by exporting a report from the analysis web page.

[11:55] The new base Enterprise Edition uses the industry standard multi-dimensional database which integrates with other business systems such as Active Directory. Through a connection to this database users can access usage data from a global hub directly using their favorite reporting tool or they can build their own Excel dashboards. The live data connection allows for rapid report prototyping and nearly instant ad-hoc query. Saved reports can simply be refreshed to automatically load recent data without the need for re-export. Company stakeholders can use pivot charts and drag-and-drop capabilities to easily organize and analyze your usage data.

[12:47] So how can you know when you don’t know. IT application spending can be broken down and represented in many ways to provide for multiple views of the business. These breakdowns are typically snapshots in time however this should be the basis for costs running. For example budget by business unit or location. ITSM managers should be able to communicate how much of the IT budget is dedicated to supporting a particular business unit or location. That doesn’t mean that every organization should go to the extreme of allocating every last cost to a particular part of the business. Shared resources that support applications that everyone uses can be represented in a corporate or enterprise category. However IT spending that’s dedicated to a particular part of the business such as business unit specific projects or functional applications and the dedicated infrastructure to support them such as servers, storage, or databases should be tracked and represented.

[13:52] Budget by application or application suites. Understanding the overall spending with portfolios of projects is critical for the application planning process. You can budget by users or user groups to help clarify what’s really going on in the IT organization. Budget by fixed versus variable costs, you want to track those add-on licenses that you’re leasing or have as a pay-per-use agreement with your vendors. You can budget by vendor, with group applications you can group your applications or products together to give an overall picture of usage from a vendor. Your budget top projects, organizations need to be able to communicate overall project spending and the allocation of money across top projects, which can be a little tricky because not all projects start or end at the same time, they have to have radically different mixes of capital investments versus expenses. Sometimes the key is to highlight the big picture and note the additional details.

[15:11] No one likes any part of their budget to be spent on something that’s not really being used. How does that happen in organizations. Because of business changes, technology innovation, mergers and acquisitions, a project gets initial funding but few funds for maintenance and support, minimum investment in training and consulting, product champions change their positions. You have decentralized or centralized purchasing but do you know how much of your hardware and software investment and maintenance and support you’re wasting. The following customers found out. Let me share some success stories.

[15:56] On this page there are companies who use Open iT’s usage data to support decisions for cost optimization, user efficiency, and better management. They’ve cut costs where it didn’t hurt users by focusing on documenting shortages, avoiding denials, and focusing training where it has the greatest effect. One of our customers at Murphy Oil said I saved $1.35 million after one year of using Open iT. The director of upstream IT business systems at Murphy Oil Corporation made the savings public in his presentation at a data management conference. Another customer said I saved $250,000 when I generated my first report. Avio aerospace saved 47 percent per year on their expense of engineering software by using Open iT LicenseAnalyzer™ and License Optimizer. Yet another customer, Nissan, said after five years with Open iT as a global hub for our application usage data we saved $10 million. Now these case studies can be read about on our website at www.openit.com.

[17:20] Another energy customer of ours saved $5 million on software costs in two years with a 36 percent reduction the first year and an additional 19 percent the second year. In addition they improved their mix of software to better support the business and measured the business value to be 20 times higher than the cost savings.

[17:44] Let me tell you a simple customer story. This manager knew what they’d bought. The green capacity line shows you that 300 concurrent user licenses of Magic Earth, the blue line shows how many licenses had been checked out, and the red line shows how many licenses were actively in use after having been checked out. This was a hosted environment. This customer saved $5.75 million in license costs on 115 expensive software licenses cut without compromising the availability of licenses to users needing them.

[18:33] And we can use License Optimizer for automatic reclaiming of inactive licenses. Here we had a customer in one location who started to free up checked out yet unused software licenses. The weekly success rate was between 20 to 30 license sessions but after implementing our software full-scale the success rate climbed to over 300 license sessions every week until the holidays came. You can see the drop-off in usage over on the right hand side because of the holidays.

[19:13] So now that you’ve seen real life examples of our customer successes, how can you benefit from using our tools in regards to cost optimization. Execution of various types of cost optimization will involve different parts of the organization and varying levels of involvement by IT. The first step is the easiest one and involves the fewest players. Usage metering can provide invaluable data both for the right sizing of contracts but also in deciding what terms would be beneficial for the company. Step two is to optimize within IT operations. With good access to usage data you’re able to plan, prioritize, and document the various steps to optimize operations and support your cost-cutting projects within standardization, consolidation, automation, and virtualization. Using tools for metering and reporting also reduces the time you spend on reporting and collecting data as well as automating some of the analysis and optimization. Advanced tools have access controls for various stakeholders and an easy folder structure for reports delivered directly to them.

[20:33] Step three, any cost savings optimization done has to be done with business users being supported so they can be more efficient in their work. Using License Optimizer you can easily cut software costs but can also support the users of IT so they get more work done in less time since they don’t need to go in and out of applications even if the licenses are made accessible for other users. The bottom here you see step 4, this has to do with making the right choices. Work smarter not harder. With the right mix of software you can support the optimal workflow. If you’ve succeeded in one location or on one project you want to document best practices and implement this across the organization. Usage data can capture best practices. Documentation can help you decide who needs more support and you can get training for these to get up to speed for new products and workflows.

[21:45] Open iT reports add scalability to software agreements with pay-per-use elements. Apply usage metering and optimization to look at current usage trends before, during, and after using outsourcing or cloud offerings. Move to more usage based internal chargeback to increase accountability.

[22:16] If there’s a high peak in usage of the software just a few days a month or a year, leasing or rental options or pay-per-use options should be considered. If there’s a local or regional need for a certain type of software there should be no reason to buy or use global licenses if they’re more expensive. With usage data you can simulate what would be the most cost-effective mix for you given the usage pattern you have and the price structure the vendor has on local, regional, or global licenses or on concurrent versus Named User agreements etc. If you have a tool installed that automates all the metering and reporting for you, you get to do all the valuable analysis to back up your cost optimization programs within IT procurement without bothering IT system engineers with homegrown solutions or your users with complicated surveys. And you’ll get your return on investment in half a year.

[23:22] LicenseAnalyzer™ reports can be used for negotiating best terms and to support your decision making in right sizing deals. And you can zoom in for further details about who the users are that have used this application, how much active versus inactive time have they spent in this application. This is useful if you want to look at users who could be champions for your core tools, for improving user efficiency, and for increasing the adoption of new technology across the enterprise. You can also look at the way users use the software by looking at mouse clicks or keystrokes.

[24:11] So to recap on how our customers achieve a high return on their investment. Harvest low-hanging fruit, you’ll find candidates for savings or improvements in user or asset efficiency everywhere. Don’t renew software you’re not using or are under-utilizing. Make sure all your licensed software is needed and redeploy assets you intend to keep but which would better benefit another user or user group. These could be automated by setting up special rules for high priority users for each asset etc. Track your usage by user, user group, location. Make sure you spend your support and training dollars where they have the greatest effect, also to support all the silent users out there. Find bottlenecks. Lower your operating costs. Get the reports you need faster, don’t waste time on manual administration or report gathering. You can get direct access to the data you need and make sure you spend some time defining what kind of usage data would be powerful to get and how often. Last but not least do not risk non-compliance.

[25:35] Now Open iT can help you know what you have in order to make the most of it. Now you know how to use Open iT asset management tools to make the most of your hardware and software investment and maintenance and support. Thanks for your attention today. I just want to invite all of you to visit our website at www.openit.com and schedule a live demo if you like.

[26:05] Lynn: That’s great. I’d like to thank Tanya Kristiansen of Open iT for participating in this program today and as she said if you have any additional questions please refer to the contact details on this final slide. Thank you everyone.