I recently joined Monolith and since doing so I have received numerous calls and emails asking me; what is Monolith and why did you go to Monolith???

My experience in the Infrastructure management space has been at Micromuse, Voyence, and EMC.   Each firm had a “best in breed” tool which was appropriate for the infrastructure management market at that point in time, but as David Mamet once titled a great movie, “Things Change”.

Over the last several years, I have had customers consistently asking me for end-to-end views of their infrastructure.  In the past, the answer was to wheel in multiple products, and then propose a services engagement to stitch them together.  In reality, we recommended they add more software, hardware, and administrators, effectively increasing the cost and complexity to address a simple requirement – end-to-end management.  The end-to-end views require more than just an event- or fault-based web top, more than a report with 30 different statistics that make up a service but standalone provided little value, and more than a portal to see or open a trouble ticket.  What customers want and need is a holistic view of their critical service or application, a common requirement across every complex IT or Service Provider infrastructure.  Every customer understands the need to have fault, event, performance, and topology data to determine the health of the service.  The fundamental problem is that the standard approach from the entrenched vendors is to literally propose multiple standalone solutions, which add to the complexity and cost of providing service level management.  Their solutions, if they can be called that, are also very “self” centric: their respective “solutions” are frameworks which are best utilized with their own fault, performance, topology, and co-relation products – the sum providing more complexity, more cost and in some cases sub optimization of performance,  while adding tools that are NOT best in breed to the framework.

So why Monolith?  Monolith approaches Service Level Management in a simple but powerful manner.  The key enabler and differentiator of Monolith is its concept of “normalization.”   Normalization allows Monolith to provide the end-to-end view, or service level management capability that is unique in the industry.  Monolith can normalize fault, event, topology, synthetic transactions, and performance data-within the Monolith product or from external sources-devices, OSS tools, EMS’s etc.  Once the data is normalized it can then be co-related, reported on, and extended into other OSS tools and finally made available to provide web based Service Level Management views, that are METRIC based, not event based.  The simple concept of normalizing data, then leveraging it into manageable information in a single highly-scalable code base is the secret sauce.  I have been on many calls in my first month and literally every customer is trying to do the following:

• Drive an end-to-end view of their infrastructure for improved service levels, and to extend metric-based service level management to their customer base.
• Consolidate tools – total cost of ownership is a key issue as the buying “best in breed” solutions has resulted in driving the cost to manage environments up, becoming a major inhibiter when trying to manage new initiatives such as virtualization, converged networks, co-relating transport to IP and more.

The Monolith approach and message is straightforward.  Monolith can:

• LEVERAGE existing tools and data sources to provide end-to-end performance, event/fault and topology management, resulting in metric-based Service Level Management.

• ENHANCE existing tools by filling gaps such as performance management, correlation of layer 1 through 7 topology, application management – leveraging transaction data  –  and more.

• REPLACE existing tools by eliminating legacy fault, MOM, performance, correlation, pollers, discovery tools, and synthetic transaction tools.  Monolith can provide improved performance due to inherent scaling and failover capabilities and improved total cost of ownership by reducing existing software maintenance, hardware requirements, and operational efficiencies.

The Monolith message has resonated with every single customer I have met or talked to.  No other vendor in the marketplace can provide a similar capability. The legacy vendors are saddled with their acquisitions and are using the framework approach.  This approach runs counter to the direction that the industry is moving to, as seen by the virtualization, cloud, and converged services trends-each of which absolutely needs Service Level Management to succeed.

I came to Monolith as it is uniquely positioned to address the current and future requirements of the IT and service provider customers need’s for Service Level Management.  I came to Monolith because it has a stellar track record in Leveraging, Enhancing, and Replacing existing tools at very complex and large organizations.  I came to Monolith because the management team is totally focused on the needs of the market and customers, not the need to maintain and protect 10 to 20 year old revenue streams.  I came to Monolith to make a difference in a market where things have changed but the legacy vendors frankly either have not or are targeting other IT markets such as ITSM.  I hope anyone reading this blog that is trying to address the issues I have discussed will give us a call – you will not be disappointed.

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SLM, Service Level Management, End-to-end management, Micromuse, EMC, Voyence, Bill Cannon, Monolith Software, Performance Management, Infrastructure Management, Best-of-breed