The FireBlog

Our response to the IT Skeptic

After running across this recent post about FireScope on the IT Skeptic's blog, we offer the following response, posted here in case our original comment submitted to his site does not get published.

First let us say that we’re flattered that the IT Skeptic “Rob England” pored over our site content, and as would an engineer or techie studying a set of equations, source code or a set of black and white facts, he found areas that might-could-maybe-potentially be problematic or crap as he put it. While we can all be grateful for detail-oriented types like Rob, his article suggests that the information we present on our site is errant.  

Unfortunately for Rob that is not true as the information provided actually came from our customer’s experiences as well as, from publicly available information about our competitors.  So while, Rob may feel that we are not a viable alternative to the Big 4, that is just his opinion, and hopefully most prospective customers are going to download and try our products (try that with the Big4) and see how many happy Fortune 2000 customers we have globally and give us a try.  After all, it seems that is all it usually takes.

So why would a person with Rob’s experience ad smarts go out of his way to disparage an underdog startup and aid the Big 4’s high price, extensive services and poor maintenance model that so many are dissatisfied with.  Don’t you wonder why the Big 4 continue to buy so many startups, when they supposedly have such great products???  It's called innovation!  And why is the dissatisfaction of many Big 4 customers so widely reported by the mainstream press and other notables sources???  Well, I can only speculate that Rob comes from the perspective of an engineer or techie (by the way, many on the FireScope team have been less skeptical techies for many years) and likely believes the following from an insightful article on gaebler.com:

“Right off the bat, you need to recognize that an engineer is wired differently than an entrepreneur. His training and experience have conditioned him to value quantification and objectivity. But in business, many decisions cannot be easily quantified. And when it comes to marketing . . . well, let's just say that marketing is – by nature – a highly subjective endeavor. With that in mind, here are some other things you need to know about why your engineer partner struggles with marketing. Engineers love facts. At the end of the day, engineers love facts more than anything else. The problem is that facts are only part of the marketing equation. How you present information is often just as important as the information itself. Engineers need to understand that while it's necessary to present facts in a marketing campaign, facts alone won't get the job done. Engineers are skeptical about advertising. Most engineers genuinely believe they are immune to the power of advertising. They believe this not because they are arrogant, but because they have been trained to make decisions based on logic rather than emotion. Although it's debatable whether or not engineers are truly unaffected by advertising, conflicts arise when they transfer their beliefs about advertising to the rest of they buying public. The simple truth is that consumers make their buying decisions based on a combination of logic and emotion. To be effective, your marketing campaign has to target consumers' emotions as well as their minds. Engineers avoid bells and whistles. Engineers have a "no frills" perspective on life. Their job is to find the simplest, most straightforward way of doing things. Most marketing campaigns frustrate engineers because they emphasize bells, whistles, and other features designed to attract consumers' attention. If they had their way, your marketing campaign would probably consist of a typewritten, black and white ad lacking photos or graphics of any kind. Okay, maybe that's a little extreme, but you get the idea. Someone needs to show your partner why bells and whistles are a vital part of your marketing efforts."

So why does Rob belittle the efforts of a small entrepreneurial company?  Is it because he thinks their conclusions are incorrect? Or because he loves the in-efficient model of the Big4? We have no idea. Hopefully, he will try our product and come over to the underdog’s side.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of fair competition and respecting one’s opinion, we strongly recommend that Rob and any readers of the IT Skeptic please go to BMC, IBM, HP or CA’s respective websites and feast on the facts and validation regarding return on investment (ROI) and other marketing efforts.  Good luck on that as marketing and presenting a company’s information or collateral in a palatable form is an honored and respectable profession, albeit subjective.  We do wish however that Rob would comment on our competitor’s facts in the spirit of fairness and journalistic pride.  How about it Rob…is there some fair play in the cards??? 

Sincerely,

Your loyal readers from the FireScope Team.  :)

Change for the better

They always say to look before you leap, right?  Well here at FireScope, we’ve listened closely to these wise words, and kept them in mind while creating the Change Management feature of CMDB.  

Change is chaotic - all too often a system enters maintenance without clear understanding of who will be impacted, if the change will be beneficial, or if it will disrupt other applications.  Whether it's new assets introduced to the enterprise or legacy systems being retired, changes need to be thoughtfully and thoroughly planned.  FireScope  CMDB’s pre-flight testing makes change structured and predictable, essentially letting you document, approve and organize your change so there are no surprises.  Experience the magic for yourself by downloading a free trial of FireScope CMDB!

 HIGHLIGHTS

•  Easy, straightforward process

•  Point-and-click change planning, reduces workload

•  Plan mode provides sandbox for evaluating change and impact.

•  Easy visibility into change impact on critical services

Keepin’ It Real-time

The Live Links feature of CMDB is a rare bird.  Unique to FireScope, Live Links gives you on-demand, attribute-level federation with virtually any data repository.   Most federation techniques grab information on a set schedule or as one-time occurrences, meaning by the time you see it, your data is already hours old – not good.  While this may be acceptable for the majority of your data, there's always a few key pieces of information that are constantly changing; think things like the number of open tickets for a CI, current status.

We created FireScope Live Links to keep data fresh.  Sometimes you just want a quick glance of information in a third-party solution such as those mentioned above, the last event identified by your monitoring tools, or who last logged in.  Live Links gives you complete control over what data to aggregate and how it fits with your data model. 

RECAP

FireScope Live Links = Gain instant, on-demand access to fresh data from your existing applications, and connect with any standard database technology.  Plus the setup is just two easy steps – it takes minutes.  TRY CMDB FO FREE!

Service Visualization – its not just maps and graphs

Everyone is different – even here at FireScope. There are no two people here who have the same opinions, same taste in music, same tattoos, or same way of wanting to visualize data. That diversity is really a driving force behind one main concept that we strive to deliver in our products – customizable - we give our clients the framework to do whatever they want or need to do with the data presented to them.

 

Take visualization, for instance. When you think of visualization, what comes to mind? Graphs? Tables? Pie charts? What about Google Maps? What about something I’ve never even thought of? That’s my point exactly – it’s not up to us, the power is in your hands.

 

When we designed FireScope BSM we wanted to free the user to do as they please. You want charts, graphs and trends? You got it. You want an interactive Google Map actively displaying real-time event status for every location? You got it. How about a customized graphic with the layout of your datacenter, with live map links displaying live event notification? Sure, you can have that too.

 

Until now, users who wanted a customized view into their data had major restrictions placed on them. Mostly limited to graphs and a static map, users were getting tired of being told what visualization was supposed to mean to them. FireScope has taken the power back and put it in the hands of those who best know what they need and how they need it. In fact, FireScope allows users to upload their own icons, images and maps – even Visio Diagrams.

 

But that wasn’t enough – the custom maps that users upload are not only clickable and possess exploration possibilities through drill-down functionality, but they can display status for any event at all, not solely up/down. The capabilities are truly endless.

 

FireScope BSM gives users such power to provide visualization to services and so far, we’ve had great feedback!  So for fun, we’re starting a gallery of customization.  Send us screenshots of how you have utilized our drag and drop features or uploaded your own graphic and used it as a custom map.

Here are some examples:

Here is a map created by one of our customers who uses the custom map as a relationship map. The links are live map points displaying active relationships. This was created by adding CI’s, and dragging and dropping the icons to create a relationship map.

 

These are racks of servers from a datacenter. The green servers in this case indicate that there are no events (critical or not - all defined by the user), if there were any notifications, the server status color would have changed to red. (The red server in the second rack from the right is the FireScope appliance)

This major theatre chain uploaded their own drawings of their locations and can easily monitor their services in each auditorium, at each location. In this example, the red auditoriums indicate a failed event on the monitored service in that auditorium. 

So, in what creative ways do you use the powerful visualization offerings? Send us screenshots and we'll post them for everyone to see!

IT’s Role in Customer Service – Part I

Does IT have a role in customer service?  Well, let me ask this another way.  How many times have you given up trying to buy something online because the site was taking too long to load?  How many times have you walked away from a business after seeing ‘Out of Order’ on a kiosk?  Have you ever switched banks because their online banking was too painful to use?

These are just a few examples of how IT directly impacts your customers’ experiences.  In fact, it’s probably fair to say that your customers interact more with a business’ technology than its employees.  And a poorly performing or failed application can be just as damaging to the business as a rude or incompetent employee, if not more if you consider the scale.  So, in times like these, where every business is scrutinizing the bottom line, how you manage your digital customer experience is more important than ever. 

Consider these questions:
1.  Do you know ALL of the interfaces – websites, terminals, kiosks, applications, etc. – that your customers are using to transact business with you?  (Surprisingly, in many organizations this information is scattered, fragmented)
2.  Who is the first to notify you when customer-facing interfaces have failed, especially remote assets such as kiosks or terminals?  The fourth customer to give up?  Employees who happen to walk by?
3.  How quickly does it take on average to restore services once you’re notified?
4.  Do you actively measure the performance, from the user’s perspective, of customer facing interfaces?  Do you have thresholds for required performance, or processes to ensure performance?
5.  Do you track failed transactions?  Do you have processes in place to investigate the cause as part of a continual service improvement system?

The point of these questions is this – what are you doing to reduce the number of lost customers or lost opportunities?  Imagine the impact to your business if 15% of these damaging incidents could be avoided in a six month period, and 10% more in subsequent improvement cycles?

In this 3-part series, I’ll talk about how IT can start measuring it’s impact on customer service, the KPI’s of IT customer service, and the approaches FireScope customers have used to improve the quality of their customers’ experiences.  Check back next week for the second installment.