You’ve got questions – we’ve got the answers

We provide IT Analytics - a ground breaking approach to optimising enterprise IT environments. IT Analytics is a combination of data-driven analytics and expert human analysis. This powerful combination provides actionable insight that radically improves IT service performance, informs decision making and maximises IT to business alignment.

So why do I need Sumerian’s IT Analytics?

Put simply, Sumerian’s IT Analytics provides the visibility and fact-based evidence that enables your IT to reach its full potential. Our IT Analytics enable you to make the most informed decisions for the future of your IT services - helping you to improve service quality, reduce risk and gain a firm control of costs.

What analysis can you do and what problems can you solve?

Our analysis spans the full breadth of the IT estate and extends from operational (IT optimisation and alignment) to strategic (identifying change and innovation investments ). For example:

• Investigation into performance and availability issues
• Optimising supply and demand for IT capacity
• Change scenarios – for example, voice/data convergence, fixed/mobile voice convergence, datacentre migration and so on
• New technology introduction – impact of Blackberry rollout, SSL VPN, Virtualisation
• Contingency planning for business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios
• Outsourcer audit – ensuring quality of service and cost compliance
• IT Consumption – analysing how IT is consumed by staff and how it could be better aligned
  

Find out more about our solutions.

What benefit does Sumerian have over my existing systems?

Your existing IT monitoring systems will typically provide you with an isolated view of each of the parts of your infrastructure and due to this limited capability can only provide a reactive way of managing IT. They provide no real value beyond your technical specialists and can’t provide a complete end-to-end view of your IT estate that enables you to make informed decisions on how best to optimise alignment and deliver value back to the business.

The Sumerian approach is very different to most vendors in the market today. In short, we turn raw, isolated data into powerful business information that decision makers can use to transform the organisation. By leveraging the data from across your infrastructure and business we build a one-stop end-to-end view of your IT estate that allows proactive management of your IT. We quantify the impact of service demand on your infrastructure and establish the correlations and factors that influence service delivery to the business. Our holistic view means we can dramatically reduce the time required to isolate performance issues, and also prevent issues by proactive trend analysis.

All our analysis is delivered via a tailored Web portal so you can access tailored views of your services in the terminology and depiction that your business understands, dramatically widening the constituency that can make use of that data.

Sumerian’s IT Analytics address key strategic and operational issues to deliver the actionable insight needed to make informed decisions and align IT services to the business. The benefits of doing this are vast.

For operational challenges

Our Service Delivery Analytics solution delivers one-stop daily insight that enables you to optimise your IT estate and accurately align supply to business demand.

For strategic challenges

By providing boardroom-ready reporting through Business Value Analytics, we deliver factual evidence of IT’s contribution to the business and detail how changes to IT can bring about the most value to overall business performance.

Is it real time and if not then why is it useful?

Typically all views for a given day are populated by 9:00am the next day. This is very useful, for a number of reasons:

1. Most performance and availability issues on services are cyclical. Sumerian’s proactive trend analysis dramatically improves performance and availability by detecting deviations from normal early, before they become problems
2. Almost all performance problems are not solved within one day, many last for months due to the difficult issues inherent in diagnosing performance problems. Our dashboards and automated analysis, although presented a day after "live" is therefore extremely valuable in problem resolution

Our system is dynamic so how would your models deal with that change?

Our whole service environment is designed around the principle of rapid change. We know that IT environments are highly dynamic, and change multiple times weekly.

Our services are fully configuration driven, and utilise various auto-detection methods to discover changes in the data we receive, from which we can rapidly adjust our services. Because our offering is a fully hosted service not a product, the impact on you is minimal – we take care of everything to do with change management.

We’re monitoring our IT already, how is Sumerian different?

There are many differences to the Sumerian IT Analytics approach that set us apart in a market:

One-stop end-to-end visibility

Our service makes use of your most underused asset – your data. We capture the wasted, disparate data from across your IT and estate and management tools you already have in place to provide a consolidated, holistic view of your IT services with unified service management information and reporting. This progressive view enables you to quantify how IT impacts business performance and establish which investments make the most business sense.

Proactive, predictive analytics

Because we present a one-stop view of what your service looks like when it is performing normally, we can search for trends and deviations that indicate when issues or service degradation is likely to arise. This cutting-edge feature enables you to become proactive with your IT management and address issues before they even become a problem.

Data-driven analytics paired with real human expertise

Unlike most of our competitors, we know that actionable insight needs real human support and interpretation. Our hybrid model pairs data-driven analytics with a dedicated analyst team, so our recommendations are personal, independent and always relevant to your priorities.

Subscription service

Our solutions are delivered as an on-demand subscription service, so no large upfront investment or complex integration is required to implement them. And because our delivery model is tailored and highly flexible, we produce results quickly and always stay continually aligned to your changing needs.

Sumerian's approach to analytics is to connect and relate layers of data that exist within an organisation - from low-level infrastructure components right up to business strategy - to make the relationships between them tangible and quantifiable. Our approach follows a pragmatic set of steps that build into a final solution. The steps we take are:

• Capture - we collect data in its raw form from across your enterprise
• Model – using our extensive suite of models and modelling components - covering all aspects of IT infrastructure, service architecture and business process - we rapidly create an end-to-end representation of your service/application environment
• Analyse - we run Analysers against the data-rich models to identify trends and emerging issues. Our dedicated team of analysts, who are highly skilled in all aspects of IT service analysis and optimisation, further analyse and interpret the results
• Inform – our insight is delivered to you via a secure Web portal using a unique combination of views, tools, reports and direct interaction with our analysts

We follow a series of simple, low touch steps that are designed to get your IT Analytics service up and running quickly and smoothly.

Download our Deployment Process Overview guide

How do you capture our data?

It’s pretty straightforward for us. We specialise in, and have invested heavily in, rapid data integration as our business depends on our ability to do it. We deploy a PC into your data centre which acts as a data collection agent. Better still, we install our software onto a PC provided by you, that conforms to your security and build requirements. This data collection agent is used to collect data from other management systems by file copy, ftp, ConnectDirect and many other industry standard mechanisms (whatever works for you). It then transmits the data securely to our data centre using firewall-friendly https. We can also receive data as e-mailed reports.

Download - Data capture process guide

How secure will my data be?

Sumerian employs the highest standards of internal governance and best-in-class facilities to protect the security and privacy of our clients’ data.

Download our Security information guide

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

Typically, we can have a portal enabled with the first application service included within 20-40 days, including all the various data integrations. Thereafter, adding each subsequent application service takes approximately 10 days.

How much effort is required from my team?

Surprisingly little. We recognise the workload that our clients bear and consequently, we have designed our approach to minimise any impact. What we require is:

1. A half-day Scoping workshop with your technical and business team.
2. A point of contact to follow up actions and review progress on a 1 hour long weekly call.
3. Sumerian can perform all integration work, but we require a point of contact to answer any questions we may have for each data source.

What types of applications/architectures can you model?

Any multi-tier architecture, including mainframe, midrange, unix, wintel, all network technologies, all remote access platforms, all wireless platforms, any application, any business process.

How much data do you need before you can provide us with something useful?

Depending on the task, often very little. To model a service we typically start with 2-3 data sources and correlate those. For example, user load and server CPU can provide significant insight when correlated. As each subsequent data source gets added, more and more value flows. But we start returning valuable insight very early.

Download - Selecting data sources deployment guide

When is the data available on the portal?

Data is available on the portal typically within 1 hour of it being sent to our data centre. In many cases data from management systems is sent to us overnight so that it is available and on the portal by 8:00am the next day.

How do you deliver?

Our IT Analytics are delivered as an on-demand subscription service. There is no upfront investment cost of lengthy integration. The service is always up to date and aligned to your latest needs and the fast results and on-demand response means that you are equipped to respond to the needs of your business units.

How long does it take to add a new application to this portal?

10 days on average.

How does the service scale?

Many of our clients have taken an iterative approach to implementing IT Analytics into their environment, starting with the end-to-end visibility of just one business application such as e-mail or CRM. From the first view they have been able to gain an appreciation of the value it can bring to their business and from this first step start to imagine the huge potential this not only brings to IT but the business as a whole.

Our solutions can therefore scale to the size (estate coverage) and scope (operational/strategic) you need it to cover.