Why 2009 Was a Good Year

I have a little time to kill on my flight.  How to kill time?  Blog, of course!

Monolith finished up 2009 strong.  We grew year over year about 220%.  Not bad, considering the crazy economy that we are in.  A strong part of our success continues to be due to migration projects.  The majority of our revenue came from clients that migrated off of their existing platforms and onto Monolith.

What were the drivers that compelled clients to make changes to their monitoring and management tool sets?  Cost reduction, tool consolidation and new capabilities are the three main drivers.

Cost Reduction

Cost is certainly part of the equation.  In an economy such as the current one, it certainly helps to be able to assist organizations in reducing their existing cost structures.  We have seen reductions anywhere from 50% to 80%.  Over the course of 3-5 years that generally adds up to a substantial sum of money.  Doing more for less is generally a very good thing, and easy to sell with management.

Tool Consolidation

While cost is a key factor, it is almost never the only benefit clients derive by making the change.  Tool consolidation continues to be a key benefit.  Reducing your software base from 4-5 packages down to one offers a bevy of benefits:

-       Fewer vendors & maintenance contracts to manage

-       Fewer applications to administer

-       Less head count allocated to managing the monitoring environment

-       A reduction in servers to be managed by 50-75%

New Capabilities

Another key driver is new capabilities that are enabled.

Scalability We generally find that organizations have some common requirements that cannot be readily met with their current disparate set of monitoring applications.  In some cases, especially in larger organizations, scalability is a problem that we help to address.  Scalability also reduces complexity.  I have talked to many organizations that have 30 or more instances of the same monitoring application running, due to lack of scale (and multi-tenancy).  What does it cost to maintain an infrastructure like that?

Real-Time Dashboards

The ability to provide real-time dashboards is another big one.  The folks inside organizations who own the budget or who have decision-making authority are often big supporters of dashboarding technology.  It provides a big picture or holistic view versus having to get mired in the detail.  Dahsboarding is great because it gives a way for organizations to create specific views (department, technology, application, etc) out of the sea of components that are being monitored.  This empowers application owners and business units to directly and proactively monitor what is in their sphere of control.

Service Level Management

SLM has become increasingly important.  SLM is one of those things that everyone wants, and knows they ultimately need to deliver, but in life you often have to play the hand you are dealt.  Accomplishing service level management is a very difficult task if you are chartered with leveraging your older, disparate monitoring applications to make it happen.  The fact is, the applications do not talk or integrate very well together, which makes automated SLM very difficult.  Migrating to a newer solution offering such as Monolith makes a lot of sense because this is enabled out of the box.

Portals/Multi-Tenancy/Consolidated Views

Monolith provides a consolidated view of all of the managed components.  I had someone describe us as an umbrella MOM the other day.  That made a lot of sense.  The term MOM – Manager of Manager – originally was used in the event space.  The ability to provide a MOM across availability, performance, events for networks, systems and applications is a big deal.  The ability to have a 100% browser based view with full RBAC (role based access control) gives organizations the ability to leverage the system for both internal and external users/customers of the application.  THIS IS A BIG DEAL.  I have not talked to a Service Provider in the last year who hasn’t has some sort of initiative or interest in this concept.

Cheers!

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Monolith Software, IT Management, Cost Reduction, Tool Consolidation, Multi-tenancy, Service Level Management, SLM, Scalability