Tag Archives | Network Management
Ellen Puckett, OppenheimerFunds

At CA World: How OppenheimerFunds’ Good IT Organization Got Even Better

By on April 11, 2013 in CA World

Editor’s note: This is the next post in a continuing series of short Q&As featuring speakers scheduled to talk at the upcoming CA World 2013 conference, April 21 – 24 in Las Vegas.

OppenheimerFunds, Inc., one of the United States’ largest and most respected investment management companies, is on a trajectory from technology-focused monitoring to operational service monitoring through improved infrastructure modeling and service-oriented dashboards. In the “How a Good IT Organization Got Even Better” session, Ellen Puckett, AVP of the Corporate Technology Group at OppenheimerFunds, shares how they made this transition and some of the challenges they faced along the way. As we get ready for CA World, we asked Ellen four questions about her session and goals for the show:

Tell us about your upcoming session at CA World 2013.

OppenheimerFunds will present a case study of our recent project to implement an integrated service monitoring solution using Spectrum, SOI, eHealth, VAIM, dbInsight and xMatters .

What are the top 3 things you want attendees to learn from your session?

  1. Integration is the key to automation and reducing mean time to respond
  2. Be Flexible  – deliver customer requirements in small doses and be adaptable to change
  3. Hire good people and let them do their job
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Infrastructure Management: The Foundation of Success in Cloud, Big Data and Other Innovative Business Services

By on April 8, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

CA Technologies commissioned Forrester Consulting to study how the organizational and economic dynamics of infrastructure management are evolving to provide its intended goal of streamlining performance and availability across diverse systems, networks and applications. “Forrester conducted in-depth surveys with 150 IT decision makers in North America and Europe”; the results can be found in the Evolve Infrastructure Management Into Service Assurance study*.

One of the most pertinent takeaways is that, in today’s world of cloud, big data and collaboration, a strategic Service Assurance portfolio underpinned by infrastructure management is as vital as ever. The vision of infrastructure management is that it should enable improved service quality, predictability and efficiency—and as the authors make clear, realizing this vision is critical to the success of the cloud and other innovative business models and services. The study shows that while organizations are making progress in this effort, Europe ahead of the U.S., they still have work to do.

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IM Heat Chart

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss

By on April 4, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

The September 2012 launch of CA Infrastructure Management (CA IM) was just the first step towards the future of our converged infrastructure management strategy. What have we been up to lately and how are we keeping the momentum going?

We are using what I like to call a “tripod of innovation.” First, we adopted new processes to accelerate innovation. We’re taking Agile software development best practices to new heights at CA Technologies, leading to rigorous and responsive release planning that allows for course adjustments to be made when warranted. This focus on Agile has enabled us to rapidly deliver two new significant releases to the CA IM solution in just over 6 months that added such capabilities as self-certification tools, browser and dynamic trend chart views, context pages administration, technology certification portal and much more that reduces the time,  effort and cost required to manage complex infrastructures.

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Let Us Show You What Innovation Looks Like

By on March 25, 2013 in CA Infrastructure Management

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth… “
– Eric Hoffer

Innovation is the ingredient that keeps solutions fresh and enables companies to gain a competitive edge in whatever game they are in. In a business environment that is constantly changing, a tried and true solution may feel safe but can leave you in the dust as the industry marches on.

And it’s not just customers who stay in the land of the tried and true. Vendors with a solid infrastructure management solution and with many other products competing for R&D dollars can lull themselves into thinking that their offering can easily maintain vendor share for a few more years.

But here are the real questions. Has your infrastructure changed in the past five or ten years?  When you deployed your current management solution where you even aware of some of the technologies that now exist in your infrastructure, such as virtualization, cloud services and an ever increasing number of personally owned devices?  Is your infrastructure management solution capably supporting these new technologies or are you holding it together with duct tape and tribal knowledge?

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5 Predictions for IT Management in 2013

By on January 7, 2013 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

As we tear the wrappers off the fresh 2013 calendars that are full of blank days and endless possibilities, the Service Assurance team shares what it thinks will be the top five IT management trends in the New Year:

  1. Streamlined end-to-end visibility and consolidated views of divergent traffic types will become increasingly important, as organizations are serviced by a variety of providers, both internal and external. – Pam Snaith, Principal Product Marketing Manager
  2. Size and complexity will matter:   The size and scale of enterprise deployments will separate the wheat from the chaff in the APM vendors.  Those vendors that are not optimized for the largest and most complex environments will be limited to serving only the SMB market (hello, Bob’s Surf Shop), while those that can handle enterprise-class apps, will dominate that market. – Melissa Hamilton Sargeant, Senior Director, Product Marketing
  3. APM vendors will make a significant move into the pre-production and DevOps space to improve the reliability and performance of business services that are being delivered at an accelerated rate. – Sohail Siddiqui, Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager
  4. Most traditional APM vendors will launch some form of APM as-a-service providing customers with an alternative sourcing model.  Most offerings will not provide the full robustness of on-premise solutions therefore most enterprise customers will continue to rely on on-premise solutions but supplement them with SaaS offerings throughout 2013. – Paul Ellis, Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager
  5. Big Data will get bigger: 2012 was the year of hype around Big Data and 2013 will be the year organizations start to get their heads around the concept and begin reaping the rewards. For IT, demonstrating ROI around Big Data projects will be critical to success, which will help increase IT’s leadership on innovation. – Jason Meserve, Senior Product Marketing Manager
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CA Network Flow Analysis

12 Things That Could be Clogging Your Network

By on December 12, 2012 in CA Infrastructure Management

To celebrate December 12, 2012 (yes, 12-12-12) here are 12 things that could be impacting the performance of your network and the critical applications they support:

  1. YouTube: Yes, cat videos are fun. However, if too many employees are streaming too much video, your network is going to slow to a crawl.
  2. Blackberry 7 Messenger Wi-Fi calls: RIM’s latest Blackberry Messenger update supports Wi-Fi-based calling. That’s great for saving cell minutes, but could add load to the network.
  3. Skype: Microsoft is retiring its Windows Live Messenger communication app in favor of Skype. While instant message traffic should breeze across the network without issue, Skype does make it easy to do voice and video calling, possibly adding to the burden on the network.
  4. Apple FaceTime: Do your employees love their iPhones? If so, they might be using FaceTime to communicate with colleagues and friends over your Wi-Fi. Enough people start using it and your bandwidth could suffer.
  5. Pandora: It’s the holiday season and I love to listen to the Pandora “Christmas Radio” station. Thankfully, I work at home so I am not clogging the office network (and I don’t stream it over the VPN.)

More after the jump.

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The Right Infrastructure Management Solution for Your Needs

By on October 9, 2012 in CA Infrastructure Management, Service Assurance

While the one-size-fits-all approach may work moderately well for things like winter hats, it’s definitely not the correct approach for a network and infrastructure management system. With different sized IT organizations and varying skillsets, one solution for managing the infrastructure just doesn’t work everyone.

That’s why CA Technologies is investing in infrastructure management solutions that span the entire range of business needs. One of those solutions is our brand new CA Nimsoft Monitor version 6, which we released this week and features added capabilities for network and application flow analysis, commonly referred to as NetFlow.

The addition of NetFlow capabilities to Nimsoft Monitor, which is available as a SaaS or on-premise offering, allows customers to better determine what is running across the network and quickly find the root cause of traffic-slowing problems. Access to your CRM slowed? NetFlow can show that too much bandwidth is being consumed by non-critical applications like YouTube or a music-streaming service and allow you to make the necessary changes to ensure the CRM app is freed up to keep business productivity high.

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CA Infrastructure Management

Social Networking Delivers Better Software

By on September 25, 2012 in CA Infrastructure Management

For those remaining social skeptics, a recent collaborative effort around a new product release from CA Technologies proves the power of community discussion, crowdsourcing and peer networking will deliver a slew of results.

CA Technologies used an online user community called Polaris to unite CA developers, partners and customers in the ongoing development of its CA Infrastructure Management solution released just last week.  The updated product, which translates disparate performance data into actionable information across converged infrastructure elements, can credit some 20 ideas in its latest release to the collaborative efforts the Polaris community.

With more than 600 customer, partner and CA Technologies members, the community hosted Webcasts, conducted contests, moderated message boards, posted polls and more to garner input on desirable features and “Ideas” related to the enterprise management software upgrade. Oleg Kupershmidt, Product Manager for CA IM, was inspired to found the Polaris community in September 2010 based on experience in a previous gaming industry position at which Kupershmidt “learned the importance of online communities and social media and how they can be leveraged by product management development teams to create more innovative solutions faster.”

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Finding your way out of the IT Corn Maze

By on September 17, 2012 in CA Infrastructure Management, Service Assurance & ITIL

It is almost autumn in New England.  As the leaves turn colors and apples ripen for picking, the farmers charge you 10 bucks to get lost in their corn mazes.  I am always impressed by people who find their way out of the maze in minutes, while most of us take twice as long.   Some hapless folks even need to be led out by a farm-hand or spend a cold night huddled under the stalks.

The fast ones remind me of the Level 2 and 3 Engineers who have knack for “knowing the lay of the land.” They’ve been troubleshooting networks and systems for so long that they can pick up the right signs – and visually correlate multiple queues faster and better than us mere mortals.

But as applications and IT environments get more complex (i.e., multi-tiered apps, highly virtualized data centers, cloud, wireless, converged infrastructure, etc.), even the pros need help to get them through the maze of monitored data to identify, fix  and even prevent problems.   And the novices need hand-holding even more.

Recently, CA Technologies created a global community of more than 600 IT pros (network and systems managers, engineers, tool architects, operations technicians, etc.) to advise the company as it developed its next-generation converged infrastructure management solution.  This vocal crew knew what they wanted to help them get out of the maze – and they asked for it.

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Meeting Customer Expectations Through Better Infrastructure Management

By on September 14, 2012 in CA Infrastructure Management

With yesterday’s announcement of the newest release of CA Infrastructure Management (CA IM), we took the opportunity to catch up with Mike Sargent, General Manager, Enterprise Management, to learn more about how this solution can help enterprises and service providers deliver a superior and differentiated customer experience.

What was the customer challenge or need that drove development of CA Infrastructure Management?

One of the biggest challenges facing enterprises and service providers is meeting the soaring expectations of their own customer base – whether that customer is an internal employee or a consumer using a wireless network. Consumers have come to expect easy, immediate access to innovative services, and this in turn has put pressure on IT organizations to deliver a similar level of service innovation. In today’s competitive world, our customers are striving to deliver a superior and differentiated customer experience to retain all consumers of their services – at a time when the complexity of the IT infrastructure has been increasing exponentially.

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Live Olympic Coverage

Someone Forgot the Network at the Summer Olympics

By on August 2, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

While things seem to be running pretty smoothly for those of us watching the 2012 Summer Olympics from afar – save for angst over tape delays on NBC – there have been network-related issues cropping up at the Olympic venues in London. Issues that could have easily been prevented with a little better planning and some good network management tools.

During a few of the outdoor cycling events, it looks as if the cellular networks were being inundated by traffic from fans doing what fans do – tweeting, texting and surfing the web on their phones. Many of the cycling races are loops around a course, so what else is a fan to do when waiting for the racers to go by?

While it’s not the end of the world that a slow network may have caused problems for tweeting fans, it is an issue in that it caused major problems for BBC’s coverage of the event. The network was relying on the cell network to receive GPS data from the bikes for tracking purpose, meaning the saturated network left commentators without knowledge on how far apart various riders were on the course. Oops.

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Can't we all get along?

Why Can’t Application, Infrastructure and Network Execs Be Friends?

By on July 24, 2012 in CA Technologies on APM

When there’s a performance problem with a critical, revenue-generating business service, hearts race, questions fly and the blame game begins.  Application executives often point fingers at the network. In turn, network executives may blame faulty application logic as the problem source. At the same time, infrastructure executives may not know if it is the app or the network, but they know for certain it is not the underlying infrastructure.  This war-room approach to problem resolution not only wastes time and drains resources but it also hamstrings an IT organization’s ability to respond to changing business demands.

With so many advanced performance monitoring tools at their disposal, why do so many IT organizations continue to struggle with problem resolution?

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