Monolith recently learned that Software Magazine has ranked the company at #472 within its prestigious Software 500 listing, as well as in the Top 10 Growth for companies under $10 million in revenue for its 127 percent growth.
At first look, this may not seem to be a lot to get excited about—or is it?
I see it all the time. So many companies are dealing with the negative impact that software vendor “certifications” have on meeting revolving requirements (e.g. a new IOS release), supporting a new device, or rolling out a new service. The majority of these customers have a service assurance tool where they believe they’ve purchased Out of the Box functionality.
read more…
External validation is always great to receive. Recently I have gotten some wonderful feedback from a few new Channel Partners that we’ve brought aboard this year. Just yesterday I received an email from the CEO of a large VAR/consulting company who had the experience of going on a week’s worth of appointments in Europe with Bill Cannon, Monolith’s VP of Sales. Here is his feedback in an email to me: read more…
At Monolith Software, we’ve tried to focus as much as possible on development and innovation. Every day we see customers with growing management challenges. The only way to meet those growing challenges is with innovative and flexible software solutions, informed by real-world operational requirements. read more…
IT Dashboards have accumulated a bit of a mixed record: a good dashboard supported by clear policies and procedures can improve the quality of services delivered and make business and technology decisions easier. But even the best dashboards are somewhat myopic, and badly designed dashboards can lead to complacency, poor communication and eventually overlooked issues, degradations or outages. read more…
We often use this blog to address strategies we think are flawed– like trying to deliver comprehensive monitoring through a patchwork of acquired tools.
Now and then we need to highlight the strategy we’ve chosen: constant and consistent improvement of a uniform software solution, across a range of technology monitoring operations. read more…
The founders of Monolith Software spent the better part of a decade working with the products of the industry’s legacy leaders in the monitoring & management space. Judging from the freely-offered comments made by customers over the years, users of established software packages were adamant and unanimous in their frustration with having to rely on signed clients or browsers with Active-X or JRE (java runtime engines) in order to use the software. read more…
Hey Folks, sorry for the delay in posting this one. It’s been in my draft folder for a couple of weeks now.
I recently read the Network World article titled, “Cloud or customers? Why CA wanted Nimsoft” by Denise Dubie. I thought this announcement deserved a bit of comment.
I did some recent searches in Google News. Found some interesting quotes: read more…
How often do you hear that an IT group is bragging about the quality of their network services provided to the organization -while backing it all up with simple to read dashboard reports? Not often! Well, that’s exactly what Craig Yappert, senior director of global IT at Oracle is doing. read more…
Featuring Live Views into Oracle’s Performance Dashboards
** 3/30 – UPDATED – Fixed broken links.
Jeff Parker, president of Monolith Software will join Craig Yappert, senior director at Oracle, to showcase Oracle’s use of Monolith to report on services delivered to 4.5 Million Oracle On Demand end-users and 85,000 employees over their 10,000-device global network. read more…
Doing a little research on the internet provides some interesting perspective on EMC’s powerful framework management solutions. Below is a snippit from the press release on one of EMC’s many acquisitions in the monitoring & management arena. I think that the quote effectively indicates EMC’s overall managing strategy: read more…
In this blog, we talk a lot about the challenges faced by organizations trying to cope with multiplying services, diverse technologies and siloed monitoring and management tools. You will also hear us mention that these challenges are far more daunting when services like VOIP and video need to be delivered globally and without interruption. read more…
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. read more…
In talking with a customer recently, I was able to pick up an interesting use case for Monolith’s Knowledgebase. One of our industrious clients came up with a new and unique idea for leveraging our out-of-the-box wiki-based knowledgebase – shift hand-offs. read more…
On a plane heading down to Atlanta. The weird thing is, the weather is warmer in Chicago than it will be in Atlanta today. I usually look forward to the warmer weather when I head down to Georgia. Oh well, life is like a box of chocolates. read more…
The managed services space is one that continues to thrive, as enterprises focus more and more on their core competencies and less on managing different aspects of their IT infrastructure. Managed services ten years ago was fairly simple: it meant managing a router and a DSU, and providing basic performance reports — typically from either a switch on the network, from the DSU, or from a router performance tool. Today we now see all types of “managed services:” VOIP, hosted applications, MPLS, and more. read more…
Much has been written and said over the past ten years about leveraging data in a Network Operations Center (NOC) to help position service offerings in the marketplace. Today, carriers sell network performance reports, commit to service level agreements tied to availability, and offer portals that will allow a customer to pull this data down whenever they want to. While clearly these offerings have value, (they must, since customers are paying for them,) they still reflect a 20 year-old approach to infrastructure management— conducted one silo at a time. None of the reports that I have seen offer any type of competitive advantage. Nor do they reflect or enable the guiding business strategy of the vendor providing the “service” (more on this later). Standard reports that leverage 10 to 20 year-old technology represent the first generation of OSS tools. While reports are typically displayed in a single portal to give the appearance of being “integrated,” in most cases they are simply pulling stand-alone, silo reports into that portal to make access easier. These are still legacy reports.
Literally every customer I have talked to is asking, ‘can you provide end-to-end views?’ We at Monolith call it Service Level Management (SLM), the right term if used in the context of end-to-end fault, availability, topology, and performance management. (Say SLM to a BMC user and the term suddenly takes on a whole different meaning; for this blog I will discuss SLM as it relates to FCAPS/ETOM.) To reiterate, literally every provider of a service needs to have an end-to-end view, for two reasons. First, they need complete visibility for internal management reasons. Second, they need to address the concerns of the marketplace. End users, customers of managed services, IP services, wireless services, hosting services, outsourced services etc. are all being driven to show how they provide Service Level Management—SLM that is measurable, holistic, and verifiable.
What is really driving this? It’s simple—the customer. What has changed is the services offered, or rather the fact that the “IT or SP-centric” providers have matured. Product or service offerings are now being sold that are made up of multiple technologies, (perhaps you have heard of converged services?) Anyone reading this knows that the services are built upon different technologies to differentiate them in the marketplace. Services today are built to support one of three go-to-market strategies: product leadership (think Apple), operational efficiency (think Wal-Mart) or customer intimacy (think Nordstrom). [These three market disciplines were defined in a great book, The Discipline of Market Leaders by Michael Tracey and Fred Wiersema. Any book that simplifies complex strategies is worth reading-- read this one.]
If one looks at the IT or network-centric marketplace, it is clear that these three strategies are used today, and it is also clear that the data residing in a NOC or in the FCAPS/ETOM model is data that can be used to package and position these products for potential and existing customers. It is also clear that SLM needs an enabler, or a product set that can tie together the disparate data sources, matched to the SLM aspects of a new or existing service, again tied to the core strategy of the business—product leadership, customer intimacy, or operational effectiveness. I have not used industry names to show examples of the three approaches, as I could create confusion by interpreting a firm’s offering or strategy incorrectly. I am utterly confident, however, that there is a real need to show true, metric-based SLM leveraging real time data– fault, performance, availability– and virtually every customer I have talked to has struggled with how to deliver or meet these rapidly evolving requirements.
Monolith not only addresses these requirements, we allow reports to be customized down to the single customer via our multi-tenant capabilities. We have a Web 2.0 architecture, which allows for the creation of custom dashboards—quickly. We have an SLM metric manager which ties together different services to enable the end-to-end, metric-based SLM that the market is demanding. Check out our SLM datasheet, or drop me a note if you want to discuss this. A brief blog does not do this justice; more content and more examples will be posted in the future.
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NOC Monitoring, IT Management, OSS Tools, Availability, Performance, End-to-end management, Service Level Management, SLM, Converged Services,
Cross domain correlation: often touted, never delivered – until now.
As service providers continue to build IP-based networks on top of transport (ie Layer 1) networks, customers have searched for “cross domain correlation”. The nirvana was to have one topological view of Layers 1, 2, and 3 such that one Network Operations Center (NOC) operator could actually have a common view of the transport, switching and routing layers all on one screen. I assume anyone reading this blog will understand why. Over the last decade, I have been in multiple work centers where the current cross-domain correlation capability is achieved via swivel chair, or a conference call between the transport and IP work centers. Several vendors have tried to address this problem – with minimal success.
For example, I know of a service provider that is providing IPTV over copper to the home, using fiber as the backbone. This service offering is complex and utilizes key vendors who rely on Element Management Systems (EMSs) to front-end the edge and core networks. The EMS management approach is common in legacy telco networks. This provider selected a vendor who historically has offered excellent Root Cause capabilities on a true IP network, where access to each device is the best approach in building topology views and determining root cause. However, the solution struggles with the EMS/layer 1 world, as it frankly was built and optimized for IP device management. Having the EMS – yet another software tool to integrate – between the NOC and the end customer creates multiple challenges. The solution was bought because it would deliver the nirvana of cross domain correlation. To be clear, the solution that was sold worked, though with heavy support from all parties involved. The set up is awkward, and impossible to scale. (The alternative approach was to use a combination Manager of Manager (MOM) product with another IP-centric solution. The problem here was simple—too much integration, no common view of the topology, no common method of correlation, in effect no solution – hence it was not selected). This scenario was from five years ago, neither solution has changed over the last five years. So what is different about Monolith?
Monolith can provide a common topological view of layers 1, 2 and 3. Critically, it provides a common view of event AND performance metrics for layer 1, 2, and 3 devices. It can adapt and parse data from an EMS and import it in a NORMALIZED fashion into the topology view. This topology view then can have a hierarchical correlation capability, applied using Monolith’s Hierarchical Storage Engine(HSE) capability which will provide Probable Root Cause Analysis across not only layers 1, 2, and 3 but across application topology as well. For instance, IPTV can be stitched into the topology to provide a true Layer 1 through 7 view.
Bottom line, the Cross Domain Correlation capability that was touted five years ago, and which is now effectively dead from the leading vendors, is provided by Monolith. Not only can we provide the common topology, we can then extend event, topology, and performance data into true end-to-end Service Management views, this is true cross domain management. Monolith does this by normalizing event, topology, and performance data. As I have said in earlier blogs, Monolith can leverage, enhance, or displace existing infrastructure management tools. The end goal was cross domain correlation, which we can do today with our product. Virtually every service provider—cable, wireline, broadband, MSP, wireless provider— needs to correlate the transport layer to the switching/IP layer, and we can do it now. The Holy Grail is Service Level Management capability, where a customer—internal or external as well as the NOC— can see the overall health of a service, drill down to see the Probable Root Cause, and even remediate the problem.
To learn more check out our white paper on Normalization, or read our datasheets on Service Level Management and Correlation.
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Correlation, Transport, Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, Cross Domain, IPTV, FTTH, EMS, Element Management System, Fiber to the Home, Topology, Monolith Software, End-to-end management, MSP, Broadband, SLM, Service Level Management
I’m sitting in the Atlanta airport waiting to fly back home to snowy Chicago. Hopefully no flight delays. I had a good series of meetings over the past two days. Fortunately for Monolith Software the business that we are in is doing very well. Our pipeline has never looked so strong. I attribute that to a number of different factors: great product, uniqueness in a market crowded with dinosaurs, and TaDa, the ability to help companies reduce their cost structures. The financial piece is a big one, but I don’t believe you get the opportunity to help reduce costs if you do not have a product that is an ‘upgrade’ to what customers are currently using. This point is rarely debated after we have an opportunity to present Monolith to our prospects.
One of the meetings that I had recently was with a sales engineer from a software company that only provides a performance management solution. They have a strong solution in the performance management space. Not too many would argue with that, but there’s a problem. When talking with this individual about some of the challenges they have in closing business, he mentioned always hearing the same questions:
I couldn’t have scripted his comments better. Of course that is what customers are asking for. Like anything else in life, people and companies are trying to get more bang for the buck. People stay at the hotels that have the best amenities for the best rate, people join the health club that has the nicest facilities for the lowest monthly fee. Why would they choose to buy a limited solution, deal with more vendors, deal with more moving components, have to perform manual integration when they could buy a solution that provides much more comprehensive capabilities in a single, consolidated foot print?
They wouldn’t. At least that is what the market seems to be saying. Choose your path wisely…
Technorati Tags:
Monolith Software, performance management, auto-discovery, topology mapping, root cause analysis, fault management, event management, infrastructure management, network monitoring, server monitoring, application monitoring