www.tideway.com (BTM - business technology management) Tideway was founded to provide the tools today’s enterprises need to allow IT to run like a business by providing the complete and authoritative source of operational IT intelligence. To run IT like a business, IT managers need to implement repeatable, automated processes across their organisations. They also need up-to-date and reliable management data to allow them to plan, execute and measure progress. Some of the key data required includes
* A clear understanding of the operational capabilities of their IT organisation (both from personnel and technology perspectives)
* The requirements of the business
* The key outputs of IT (generally the business applications, services and SLAs)
However, most organisations have a poor understanding of how IT infrastructure supports the business, with the knock-on effect that there is limited or no understanding of the cost to deliver specific business applications.
This is vital to managing IT like a business, as what gets measured gets done. Measurement data has to be stable, reliable and meaningful, yet despite the massive investment that organisations have made into IT management products, the data is still:
* Expensively, manually gathered
* Shallow – only containing basic asset information
* Of poor data quality – typically less that 50% correctly registered
* Out-of-date, and therefore obsolete almost instantly, especially in environments with a high rate of change
* Poorly organized - not normalized across technologies, with no understanding of depedencies, and therefore not actionable
* Of low relevance - the data is typically presented as an accounting view for financial asset management, rather than a management view.
As a result, IT processes are suboptimal, and consume precious time and resource that should be spent innovating for the business. Tideway’s product - Foundation - focuses on providing an up-to-date trusted view of exactly how components of the IT infrastructure support the business across all technology layers. Tideway Foundation’s data:
* Is automatically gathered (zero-touch inventory)
* Is deep (collects hundreds of data points per server)
* Has excellent data quality (100% accuracy)
* Is always up-to-date (manages environments of over 45,000 servers)
* Understands dependencies between components of IT
As, at the top level, Tideway Foundation models IT from the perspective of business applications and services, down through all technology layers, it is now possible to manage SLAs, Charge Back and Compliance from the perspective of the customer – the business user community, and make the value that IT delivers totally transparent.
IT processes can finally be optimised and automated, and IT can focus not on firefighting, tactical projects and ‘keeping the lights on’, but instead on delivering innovation to the business to help build true sustainable competitive advantage. Tideway has developed methodologies to allow our customers to achieve this vision in a managed and sustainable way, delivering tangible and measurable value at each step of the process. See Tideway’s Configuration Management Maturity Levels Model for more details.
