FAQs

If you have a question that's not here or would like to know more about how we can help your organisation specifically, please contact us and we'll be ready to help.

 

What does Sumerian do?back to top

Sumerian is an Analytics company. We’re experts in transforming vast amounts of data into business-transforming results.

We sell a range of hosted subscription-based analytics services that are specifically designed to meet the needs of today's complex, operational IT environments - from helping organisations manage their journey to the cloud, to making trading platforms run at optimum speed.

Since 2002, we've been helping global companies and their enterprise IT organisations by providing the transparency and decision-making framework they need to optimise existing IT investments and maximise future opportunities.

>Download the Sumerian brochure
>Watch our 1 minute movie

 

Why use analytics to inform IT decision making and optimisation? back to top

Analytics has fast gained prominence as a way to gain a competitive edge in the world of business, with industry leaders such as Google, Amazon and Tesco being high profile innovators in the space. In the realm of applying analytics to optimise IT environments and improve decision making, Sumerian is at the forefront.

We are a member the Innovation Value Institute (IVI), a consortium of academic and business leaders whose IT-CMF (Capability Maturity Framework) is an end-to-end integrated framework designed to help the CIO manage the complexities and tradeoffs required to continuously evolve the IT capability in an organisation while delivering measurable value.

One Critical Process within the Framework, Service Analytics and Intelligence (SAI), focuses specifically on the use of analytics by IT organisations to support improved decision making. Further information on IVI and Service Analytics and Intelligence can be found on the Innovation Value Institute web site.

Today's IT environments and the critical services running on them are getting increasingly difficult to manage and optimise due to the sheer amount of complexity and change involved in their operation. IT organisations have to react fast to deliver new and innovative services that are continually aligned to the business - all the while maintaining exemplarily levels of everyday service quality.

Historically, CIOs and business managers have grappled to gain the necessary level of visibility to keep pace with such demands. Although many IT organisations have invested in a variety of tools and management systems to improve the situation, these methods are often siloed, reporting on different parts of the infrastructure and applications, and incapable of providing the necessary "joined up" IT-business visibility that's needed to target real, tangible improvements.

Instead, by using an analytical approach that intelligently analyses the "big data" generated by your infrastructure and applications, organisatons can begin to answer challenging questions from both the IT and business perspective, such as:

IT	BUSINESS
How can we ensure we've right-sized capacity for a new online service that the business is launching?	How can we be sure we're delivering a world class online user experience to our customers?
How can we assure performance to meet response times and third party SLA targets?	How is IT performance impacting our sales revenue?
How can we be sure changes to our infrastructure won't impact the end user experience?	We want to launch a new service to customers - how can we be sure IT won't let us down?

Why can't we do this ourselves in-house?back to top

Although organisations can indeed attempt to undertake an analytics approach themselves, using various software tools and in-house resources, there are a number of process, skills and budgetary challenges that can often make it difficult to set-up and maintain on an ongoing basis.

As an illustration, Sumerian has invested 10 years in developing its analytics platform - which allows us to capture, cleanse, store, integrate, model and analyse vast amounts of big data fast, accurately and repeatedly. The combination of skills we possess are not commonly found in an enterprise IT environment; they include data scientists, mathematical modellers, statisticians and economists, alongside our IT specialists.

By collaborating with a specialist analytics provider like Sumerian, organisations can take advantage of the dedicated skills, investment and expertise that has been built up across a broad range of clients and challenges - but at a fraction of the cost and resources that it would take to set up and maintain such a capability in-house.

What challenges can you solve?back to top

Many of our clients approach us with a current challenge in mind that we can help them to solve quickly. From this first analysis, our clients gain an appreciation of the value analytics can bring to their business and, from this initial start, rapidly realise the huge potential this not only brings to IT, but to the business as a whole.

Our analytics insight can be applied to inform a range of today's complex IT challenges.

Application performance	Cost reduction (IT rationalisation)	IT-business alignment	Supplier management
Capacity management	Datacentre transformation	Batch processing	Testing
Cloud migration	IT chargeback	Storage	Virtualisation
Communications	Trading latency

What do we get with Sumerian's services?back to top

We deliver a hosted subscription-based analytics service that takes care of everything for you - there’s nothing to install and no costly set up. And because we use the data that already exists in your environment, there is no performance impact to your systems and no agents to deploy.

We strongly believe that the key to delivering analytics value is applying a combination of technology and people, so our service is highly flexible and can be tailored to support your operational context.

All our analytics services are delivered using our Analytics Platform, which securely cleanses, aggregates and stores your data in our world-class datacentre facilities. Data security, quality and provenance are assured, with a full audit trail delivering complete transparency.

Data management and modelling

Using our platform, we rapidly mine and integrate your data, extracting key information for our models. Our data management and modelling provides:

• Secure hosting and maintenance of your data
• Data integration, cleansing and normalising
• Ongoing data maintenance and calibration of models

Web portal

As part of our service we host a dedicated, secure web portal that allows quick access to interact, explore and export your modelled and analysed data. Into this portal we plug our collection of Apps, which span our complete solution portfolio and present a range of targeted views. Apps currently available include:

Trading Platforms	Enterprise Cloud
Latency Anaytics	Capacity Analytics
Capacity Analytics	Performance Analytics
Performance Analytics	Usage Analytics
Batch Analytics	Invoice Audit
Fill Rate Analytics	Chargeback Analytics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Web portals provide on demand access to your chosen Apps, allowing you to work with your data and rapidly mine its inherent value, features include:

• View rich visualisations of your modelled data
• Configure visualisations to present the data that you are interested in, such as business demand on a particular part of the IT estate across a chosen date range
• Mine correlations that Sumerian has found in your data, to understand the strengths of relationships discovered between demand and resource utilisation metrics
• Import visualisation images into Microsoft PowerPoint, Word or Excel - or export images as a PDF
• Create your own slides packs with our powerful ‘Clipbook’ feature – allowing you to select specific visualisations and arrange into a slidedeck to be shared with your team and organisation
  
  

The portal also facilitates a collaborative environment where you can work in conjunction with Sumerian’s Data Scientists – allowing you to access expert analytical support as and when you need it. Our team are also on hand to help configure the portal to your exact requirements.

Expert Analytical Services

In addition to the portal, we offer a range of supplementary Expert Analytical Services to help you get the most from your data – from providing on demand, deep-dive analytical support to regular expert reporting and recommendations (see below).

Our service has been built around what our clients have asked us for over the past 10 years - for some, that means a managed service with regular expert weekly, monthly or quarterly reporting, and for others, it simply means access to their modelled data via a web portal. We can support both and anything inbetween. Whatever your focus, we have the service mix to fit your needs.

What results can we expect to achieve?back to top

Put simply, we're specialists in delivering the insight and recommendations you need to understand the ever-changing complexity of your IT and business landscape - leaving you to concentrate on taking positive, practical action that makes a real difference to your business.

We have a proven track record of delivering successful solutions to a growing number of world leading organisations. Some of our recent successes include:

• Enabling Bank of America Merrill Lynch to achieve its FX market growth ambitions by reducing trading latency and optimising capacity - resulting in headroom growth from 11% to 30% without the need for further investment and directing investment to minimise latency by over 75%.
• Quantifying and right-sizing the configuration for a major datacentre consolidation/ private cloud initiative (from 30 datacentres down to 1) for a large professional services company, driving significant cost savings and operational efficiencies.
• Supplying a major UK retail bank with insight to recover a multi-million pound billing error for over-charged communication costs, and also identifying improvements to overall service quality.
• Helping a leading investment bank validate the feasibility of moving grid/HPC engines offsite to a more cost effective location while maintaining performance and latency targets. The quantified insight supplied by Sumerian yielded multi-million pound savings.

How is Sumerian different?back to top

Sumerian is one of a new breed of IT services in the market today. We provide our analytics as a flexible subscription service - with low upfront investment and a light touch deployment. Fundamental to our service is strong and respectful collaboration with our clients. We know that you are the experts on your business, so we don't walk in with any pre-conceived notions. Instead, we bring an analytics capability to your organisation: the ability to capture, mine, model and analyse vast quantities of your data, on a rapid, repeatable basis.

Powerful, proven analytics capability

Our advanced analytics are tried and tested. Our services are based on 10 years experience using a range of proven mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques to discover the relationships in data, correlating across business, application and underlying infrastructure layers, and running sophisticated, predictive ‘what if’ scenario modelling. We do this using our Analytics Platform - it's highly scalable and processes massive volumes of heterogeneous data on a daily basis. Our analytics services offer maximum flexibility and are easily configured to match your operational context. Pure play analytics

We’re analytics specialists

Nearly 60% of our highly experienced team are Data Scientists and we have subject matter experts in Operational Research, AI, Sociology, Economics, Business Information Management, Computer Science and Mathematics, to name just a few. This expertise translates directly into our technology and services, complementing your own IT expertise.

No hassle, hosted subscription service

We have designed our services based on our clients' input over the past 10 years, and what they’ve told us is important. That’s why our hosted subscription services are flexible, cost effective and low impact to run. There's no deployment or installation impact - and no upfront costs; and because we use the data that already exists in IT environments, there's no performance impact and no agents to deploy.

 

What benefit does Sumerian's service have over our existing monitoring systems?back to top

Many of our clients have an ongoing programme of investment in IT management, monitoring tools and capabilities. Sumerian's services complement and build on these core investments, delivering targeted management insight and recommendations for proactive IT optimisation.

Sumerian's approach works hand in hand with IT management tooling and instrumentation by building on the real-time, technical visibility provided, and accurately joining the dots between IT and the business to provide a new business-focused perspective - a perspective that enables proactive management of IT performance, capacity and cost, and helps you to de-risk change.

For more information download our guidance on how Sumerian supports an Integrated IT Management strategy>

How is Sumerian's approach different to a consultancy approach?back to top

Sumerian's flexible subscription services are very different to a traditional consultancy style model. In typical consultancy style approaches a dedicated team will be put together to deliver a project from start to finish, and ongoing delivery will rely on that team being maintained. Instead, the investment we have made in our core IP - with our highly scalable  platform - means our services are fast, flexible and designed to be easily repeatable, delivering value on a ongoing basis and giving you the momentum to stay closely aligned to the business.

How does Sumerian's service work?back to top

All our analytics services are delivered using our Analytics Platform, which securely cleanses, aggregates and stores your data in our world-class datacentre facilities. Data security, quality and provenance are assured, with a full audit trail delivering complete transparency.

Find out more about the Sumerian Analytics Platform>

 

How do you perform your analytics so quickly?back to top

The key to performing our analytics so quickly is our powerful analytics platform. Our investment into the necessary IP, infrastructure, skills and processes means we can turn around our initial analytics from a standing start in just 6 weeks. Once our service is running, we can turn around repeat analytics even faster, at whatever frequency is required - daily, weekly, monthly.

How can you handle such vast quantities of data?back to top

Our investment into our analytics platform and data capture infrastructure means we can handle very high levels of incoming data on a daily basis. In a typical week we capture, cleanse, verify and backup many terabytes of data.

What data sources can you use?back to top

Sumerian is expert at capturing, cleansing and integrating a vast array of data sources. Our solutions can use whatever data is available, but there are a number of common ones which we frequently see from our clients. The type of data we capture is dependent on the analytics we are conducting and the particular challenges you want to address. As an example, a baseline analysis of a service's performance and capacity can require as few as 2 or 3 data sources to get started.

The example list shown below illustrates the diversity of data sources we can use and is not is exhaustive.

Server - operating system log data provides server utilisation measurements that can indicate the demand applications are placing on hardware.	BMC Patrol
	Measureware Glance
	PerfMon
	Windows Event Logs
	Orca
	ITRS
	Unix and Linux monitoring tools such as Sar
	nMon
	Symphony
Web server - Web servers can be configured to output W3C logs. This data can help us understand the demand on the Web server, the user load accessing the Web site, and if configured the response time of the Web server in serving Web pages	IIS
	Apache
	WebSeal
	SiteConfidence
Application server - tools such as Introscope can be deployed to indicate the performance of the Java Virtual Machine, including measurements such as thread count, CPU or virtual memory. In addition, specific applications may output bespoke log files that can be parsed to inform us of key events or execution times.	ASP logs
	WebSphere
	Wily Introscope
	Safesign Server
	Staffware Workflow Engine
	WebLogic
	Citrix
	Allot NetEnforcer
	Bespoke application logs
Database - a wide variety of information can be collected regarding the operation and efficiency of processes for enterprise databases.	Oracle AWR files
	Statspack output
	DB2 Connect
	SAP
Mainframe - mainframe logs can give details of the utilisation and capacity of LPARs in terms of CICS regions, MIPS or similar.	Mainframe CICS
	Mainframe data
Networked application - many organisations have probes deployed at key parts of their network. These probes provide log data that can indicate usage and performance of the network. Organisations may also have tools that can simulate user transactions; this data can help show whether the end-to-end performance of a service is impacted and degrading over time.	Packeteer
	PacketSeeker\Packet Shape
	NetVantage
	NetScout
	Topaz BPM
	Allot NetEnforcer
	Tivoli
Virtualised environments - for clients running virtualised environments, virtualisation software will provide us with information on maximum resource capacity (CPUs in Pool), entitled capacity (CPU Allocated), and actual usage (CPU Used), enabling accurate capacity management of resource pools against demand.	VMWare
	Xen hypervisor
Non-functional Testing - data from testing tools is used to gauge user and/or transaction performance and capacity under peak loads, also enabling accurate scenario modelling simulated to the test environment.	HP Loadrunner
Trading environments - Sumerian are specialists in analysing data from complex trading environments - from equities to fixed income, flow, risk analytics to batch processing and HPC/grids, quantifying latency distribution, trading volumes against capacity, batch and grid optimisation.	Summit
	FXTransact
	Corvil
	Correlix
	ITRS
	TIBCO/Datasynapse
Storage - storage data can indicate the level of disk I/O, throughput, load balancing and similar measurements.	EMC Storage Scope
	MRTG
	EMC Performance Manager
	NetIQ disk usage
Mobility and voice - organisations often use tools such as Citrix to allow desktop applications to be accessed remotely. Data from the remote access tools can help show the load each user has on the applications and their environments.	Citrix report logs
	BlackBerry BES logs
	Neoteris
	Radius
	PSTN & mobile call records
	NetScout
	Packeteer
Business transactions and end user information - Sumerian can infer most business transaction volumes purely from infrastructure metrics alone, however, additional summary reports from the business can help us to provide an even greater degree of transaction/business level insight.	Sales/transaction figures
	End-user satisfaction surveys
	Building swipe data
Outsourcing - information from outsourced suppliers such as billing and contract coverage schedules enable Sumerian to quantify charged supplier billing against actual business consumption.	Supplier billing and contract coverage schedules
Helpdesk information - knowledge of incidents, change requests and problems around a particular application help Sumerian correlate service activity with observed operational changes and business improvements.	Clarify
	Peregrine
	Remedy
	Touchpaper

How secure will my data be?back to top

Sumerian employs the highest standards of internal governance and best-in-class data warehousing facilities to protect the security and privacy of all our clients' data. Sumerian's primary automated data capture process (from your organisation to the Sumerian datacentre) provides secure encryption of all data. However, for companies whose security policy may restrict the transfer of data in its raw form, Sumerian offers data anonymisation/encryption and client hosted data capture solutions as alternatives.

Since the beginning of 2008, Sumerian has been ISO27001 compliant, the international standard for Information Security Management System (ISMS). This standard is designed to ensure the selection of adequate and proportionate security controls.

For more information download our information sheet on Sumerian Security>

How scalable are your services?back to top

Like any growing business, we had to build our service with scalability in mind. Our analytics platform is highly scalable and ready to expand to deliver our services to an increasingly global market place. From starting our business in the UK in 2002, we have grown our client base over the years, expanding our operations to mainland Europe in 2007 and most recently launching in North America in 2010.

How does the Sumerian deployment process work?back to top

We follow a series of simple, light touch steps that are designed to get your service up and running quickly and smoothly. We work closely with you at all stages to set up the service and demonstrate how you and your team can get the most value out of our analysis and reporting.

• We run a 2-3 hour workshop with you to find out more information about your environment and available data sources.
• We arrange set-up of the data capture process with you.
• We then begin the data collection process, securely transferring your data to the Sumerian datacentre environment ready for modelling and initial analytics.

How do you capture our data?back to top

We specialise in, and have invested heavily in, data capture and integration. Our proven approach to automated data capture provides secure and reliable delivery of your data for ongoing analytics. We treat the security of all client data with paramount importance and use SSL encryption for all file transfers.

The typical method for capturing and transferring data is by using Sumerian's Data Collector application. The Data Collector application is deployed on a server within your network and controls the compression and transfer of files from your organisation to the Sumerian datacentre, maintaining an audit trail of all activity. For companies whose security policy may restrict the transfer of data in its raw form, Sumerian offers data anonymisation/encryption and client hosted data capture solutions as alternatives.

How long does it take to get a Sumerian service up and running?back to top

For a typical deployment, examining 1-2 services, we can deliver our initial analytics quickly, typically within 6 weeks. This includes all service set-up and data capture, modelling and analytics delivery. Once the service is up and running, we then continuously feed the models with data collected from your environment, providing ongoing and repeatable analysis, typically on a monthly basis.

How much effort is required from my team?back to top

We recognise the workload that today's IT organisations bear and, consequently, we require minimal resource from you. A nominated service owner and 2-3 man days input from experts in your organisation to talk through your service architecture and identify key data sources is all that's needed.

 

How does Sumerian's service scale and adapt?back to top

Our service scales as and when required. Many of our clients have taken an iterative approach to implementing our service into their environment, for example, starting with capacity management for one of their key applications or domains such as a trading platform or the network, then expanding coverage to more strategic areas such as informing migration to virtualisation and cloud, infrastructure consolidation and IT planning.

Key to our service is being responsive to your priorities and changing environment - we adapt the analytics we deliver to match the challenges you are facing.