Operational intelligence as a value-add

Bob Tarzey outlines two sales opportunities for resellers around business insight

IT operational intelligence is an opportunity for resellers to improve their services and to sell customers a new information stream for business insight. This was the subject of our recent Masters of Machines report, sponsored by vendor Splunk.

The report defines operational intelligence as "the harnessing of machine data to gain real-time insights into operations to access, tune and improve IT and business processes, to identify security threats, highlight performance issues and see emerging customer trends."

"Machine data" meaning the stuff automatically generated as IT systems log their own activity: which data went via which router, who accessed which application and when, the IP addresses, URLs and devices via which websites are accessed and so on.

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Operational intelligence fits the five Vs often used to define big data, making it a true big data problem and opportunity. The volume of records involved can run into billions per year for a given organisation, the data is derived from a wide variety of sources. The opportunity is to use the data in near real time - velocity - to provide accurate insight or veracity to add value to an organisation's operational capability.

The report delves into many issues regarding the operational intelligence capabilities of Europe-based organisations across a variety of sectors and business sizes. An index is defined for operational intelligence maturity and this is used to measure how organisations vary in their ability to capitalise on all the machine data available to them.

One area that was examined was the sharing of operational intelligence with partners. The more likely an organisation was to outsource the management of its IT infrastructure, the more value it placed on operational intelligence capability. This is because there is plenty of value in sharing operational intelligence and experienced service providers will be more likely to know about this than an IT department that operates in relative isolation.

However, overall, the sharing of operational intelligence with partners was low. Of all the roles that have access, IT managers topped the list, with partners and service providers coming near the bottom. That may change with awareness; the data shows that where there has been investment in operational intelligence (leading to the greatest maturity), value has followed well beyond internal IT.

Some 82 per cent of those with maximum maturity were making operational intelligence available to board-level execs for business decision making.

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The report went on to look at the ways that machine data is gathered and processed to provide operational intelligence. Most organisations still use ad hoc tools such as spreadsheets, general-purpose business intelligence tools, and database systems. Few are using purpose-built tools - but those that do already collect and analyse more machine data, and the figures will likely improve as the use of tools that are relatively new to many players matures.

Splunk is arguably the leading operational intelligence tools provider; its main competition is the use of home-grown tools designed to do other jobs. It also overlaps with providers in other areas with some of the same capabilities, such as system management, application and network performance monitoring, and user experience monitoring.

So, those new reseller opportunities again: first, if your services extend to managing elements of your customers' IT infrastructure, sharing operational intelligence through capable tools can provide better insight into problems and mean they are anticipated in advance and more quickly fixed. Second, improved operational intelligence opens up a new stream of business insight for your customers' non-IT execs. A win-win if ever there was one.

■ CRN readers will find the report freely available at:
www.quocirca.com/reports/955/masters-of-machines--business-insight-from-it-operational-intelligence

Bob Tarzey is analyst and director of Quocirca