Start Your Engines!

Peter Grant

Start Your Engines!

by Peter Grant | 18 Jul 2008 | Permalink |

I’m often asked to explain the benefits of automated vs. manual discovery, and what Tideway does compared to other players in this space. A good way to explain it is to think of how motor racing has evolved over the last 50 years.

If you think of a racing car as your IT infrastructure, the body is the data centre, the engine the servers, the petrol the power and the wheels are the business applications that steer the business. In the 1950s a pit crew (your IT Team) relied on only one source of the truth – the driver – to provide them with critical data about the cars’ performance as it raced around the track. When the driver came in for a pit stop he would communicate to the crew what was wrong with the car – more air in the left front, change the fuel mix, adjust the back wing to increase down force, and so on. Problem is, this is a manual and backward facing process that’s dependant on only one data source and lacks real depth. What you really need is a forward looking view…

Tideway represents the modern racing car, with real-time telemetry that feeds back to the pit crew. The driver needs to focus on just the racing while the crew uses modern technology to hone the cars’ performance. We see the racing car as our competition and we audit it on our customer’s behalf to ensure optimal performance. Unless you have extremely accurate near real-time data points, the car will always under-perform – and you’ll never see its true potential.

This type of real-time view enables you to make changes on the fly and react to situations even before they arise, thus reducing the risk of a break down and ensuring winning success, or a competitive advantage. Tideway turns the telemetry (masses of data) into meaningful information to prioritise your company’s business objectives. Without these accurate data points, it’s like trying to drive a 1950’s car in a 2008 Formula One race.

But other vendors have done it this way for years, you say…

I say Search on the internet was exactly the same. Yahoo & Alta Vista provided this service but the user experience was poor because they used ineffective algorithms and focused on making money through a suit of products like email, storage, stock reports etc. That was their business model. Google saw an opening in the internet search market to vastly improve the quality of search and believed a search engine, with more sophisticated algorithms, that ranked & indexed the information more accurately, would become a trusted source for internet discovery. Today Google’s success is down to the focus on data quality and how they can then use that data to help their customers be more efficient in their everyday life. A good example is key word search linked to Ad-Words.

Tideway has the same ethos across the IT enterprise. Before a customer invests in end-to-end solutions they need to focus on the quality of data they will push through those products. Poor data will result in a poor decision making process. (One of our global investment banking clients has a gold standard of 97% data accuracy – and they’ve said only Tideway can give them this). Tideway uses the same process to index data and turn it into meaningful information so IT can make informed decisions in real-time to support the business – for example, being able to discover all servers in your infrastructure and confidently rip out obsolete hardware.

Comparing Tideway to manual discovery is like comparing Google to your public library. You can automate, rank & index in real-time through Google to find information, or you can go to the library, where you think you know where everything is, and try and find what you’re looking for. Of course it changes daily as books get lent out and returned to different shelves… But you might be able to find what you’re looking for…eventually.

Comments

By Appletosh on 16 Jan 2009
Alexander van Elsas wrote a post about our pointless need for real-time information. As usual, it is a very interesting read, and he gets you thinking. I commented on his post, but I felt like there was more to say. To start, Alexander makes an interesting point of whether information really has any value if anyone can have access to it: Because I have small children, I tend to relate things to simple quotes from cartoons or kids' movies. Alexander's quote reminds me of something said by Dash in The Incredibles. He states that if everyone is special, that is the same as saying nobody is special. Both this quote and the quote from Alexander seem to generalize the idea a little too broadly. If everyone has access to information, that does not mean that people get the same things from the information. In the case of news information, some people just skim headlines to stay on top of the general happenings in the world. Other people will read several articles in order to gain knowledge about a topic. They still have access to the same information, but the end result is very different. In the end, knowledge is the differentiator. Alexander does talk about this in relation to Stephen Hawking and information about black holes. If you have all published information about black holes readily available, that does not mean that you understand them as much as Stephen Hawking.

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Peter Grant

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Peter Grant is VP of World Wide Sales at Tideway, where he is responsible for driving the company's revenue, particularly across the channel. Peter brings more than 12 years of IT business and sales management experience and a proven track record in revenue growth and operational expansion to his leadership…

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Start Your Engines!