Press Releases | AccelOps

Thank you for your interest in AccelOps and welcome to our charter edition of our OpsAdvisor newsletter.

This newsletter is designed to provide recent news, updates, advice and information regarding IT service management, our company and the AccelOps solution. We anticipate the content expanding to illustrate customer successes, present best practices and serving as a reference to our upcoming OpsAdvisor Blog.

With the recent announcement of the release our AccelOps solution, we are excited about our journey ahead and we are equally eager to share our news with you. Please send us your suggestions and comments to info@accelops.net with the word Newsletter contained in the subject line.

Regards,
Imin Lee
Co-Founder and CEO

Want a Quick Overview on AccelOps

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and watch a 5-minute animated overview of the AccelOps value proposition. Watch the Video

If You Missed Our Webcast

If you are a mid-tier enterprise that wants to learn the value, realities, and considerations for IT service management, we have a can't-miss webinar for you. AccelOps has partnered with leading IT management research firm Enterprise Management Associates to host a webinar on the topic: The Fast Path to IT Service Management for Mid-Tier Organizations; Beyond the Myths For What Really Works. This informative online seminar, presented by respective company VPs Dennis Drogseth and Scott Gordon, provides research, best practices, considerations and enabling technologies for mid-tier organizations to mature IT service management capabilities and cost-effectively enhance service reliability. Hear the webcast now

AccelOps Origins

AccelOps datacenter and IT service management solutions culminate nearly two years of development effort and beta software testing that began in 2008. On June 23rd 2009, ProspectHills had changed its name to AccelOps, Inc. and we announced our namesake as version 1.0. We are at the start of our mission to advance IT service management for mid-tier enterprises. However, the founders' and key team members' motivation to break down operational barriers and automate infrastructure and service-oriented intelligence originated from overcoming past networking and security obstacles.

AccelOps evolved as a conceptual extension of a former product called MARS (which stood for mitigation and response system) developed by Protego Networks back in 2002, and subsequently acquired by Cisco. Protego MARS set out to filter infrastructure noise, present pertinent incidents and recommend corrective action in order to radically reduce network security risks and increase security management efficiency. This required significant networking, security, systems, analytics and data management experience.

Fast forward years later after Cisco and our founders asked the question: why not capture and manage all the diverse operational data to add clarity to IT operations and provide immediate service-level intelligence. We believe that in order for to make service management tangible and effective, one needs to understand and assess all the infrastructure components, configurations, dependencies, topology, network and systems resource utilization norms, virtualization, identity, location and objects relationships.

Our initial solution is off to a great start - an IT service management platform that breaks down barriers impeding service reliability and provides significant functional depth and breadth. While we pride ourselves on technological innovation, the thing we take even greater pride in is helping our customers put that innovation to work. Please share your suggestions on how we can improve AccelOps by sending an email to info@accelops.net with the word Suggestion contained in the subject line.

It's a Product, It's a Service

AccelOps markets our software solutions as either a product or a service. The AccelOps virtual appliance is an on-premise software product that installs as a VM guesthost running on a VMware ESX platform. The necessary VM system, virtual machine allocation and storage (be it local, network attached or SAN) are procured by the customer. The virtual appliance combines the out-of-the-box integration and rapid use advantages of an appliance with the deployment and expansion flexibility of software. AccelOps virtual appliance details

AccelOps also offers a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service solution) service. The AccelOps SaaS approach offers the same features and customization capabilities as the Virtual Appliance. With SaaS, the customer downloads the AccelOps Collector software client (not an agent) that also runs as an on-premise VM guesthost running on a VMware ESX platform. The AccelOps Collector software locally aggregates, compresses and securely transmits the operational data to the AccelOps datacenter. As part of the SaaS subscription service, the AccelOps datacenter processes, manages and stores each customer's operational data and offers 24x7 availability and maintenance of the AccelOps application. AccelOps SaaS details

MSP JUMPSTART
If you are a system integrator or consultant, expand your current service practice, leverage existing customers and reach new business. Broaden your managed services portfolio with a co-branded AccelOps datacenter and IT service management offering. Email us at: cobrandedmsp@accelops.net.

Customer Profile: San Diego Unified Port District

The San Diego Unified Port District is a mid-tier enterprise serving over 625 employees and 75 contractors. The port manages the San Diego bay and surrounding public lands, which includes a cruise ship, 2 marine terminals, 16 parks and the management of over 600 commercial waterfront tenants. The port has a staff of over 18 operating one datacenter and ten remote sites lead by Director of IT, Adolfo Segura. The port's infrastructure is comprised of brand name vendors such as Cisco, VMware, Microsoft, Novell, Sun, Citrix, SAP, Oracle and McAfee. They employed a variety of isolated IT management tools, shareware utilities and homegrown applications.

Requirements
Drivers

Operational & asset visibility
Tool Consolidation and means for better monitoring/planning
Service delivery - reduce operational and security risks

Considerations

Cost, Implementation effort, Maintenance
Event consolidation, correlation
CMDB, topology, service map
Platform with broad application

Results Achieved
Advantages

Rapid datacenter oversight
More responsive (MTTFS, MTTR)
Operational and security control automation and reporting

Cost / Benefit

Streamlined SaaS deployment
Low TCO w. OpEx to CapEx
Eliminating and phasing out tools

AccelOps' datacenter visibility and service-level controls have proved to be superior in comparison to other platforms we've evaluated," said Adolfo Segura, director of IT at the San Diego Unified Port District. "For IT management, AccelOps' fast integration, depth of integrated functions and breadth of use across my organization are impressive. With AccelOps, our organization can respond more efficiently to support our business - which equates to uptime, better use of resources and driving down operational costs."

In a Word: CMDB

CMDB, or configuration management database, is a repository that describes and maintains information related to all the attributes of components (also referred as Configuration Items or CI's) within an information system as well as tracking configurations, configuration changes and component relationships/ dependencies.

AccelOps has an automated and seamlessly integrated CMDB. Our CMDB is utilized throughout the entire AccelOps solution spanning performance, availability, topology, search, analytics, dashboards and reports.

AccelOps rapidly populates its CMDB by employing a multi-factor assessment approach. Beyond using conventional SNMP, the solution also continuously correlates data from network flows, SSH/Telnet-based system access, virtualization management access, directory service monitoring, and infrastructure event logs enterprise-wide.

Based on this multi-factor technique, our customers have visibility regarding CI details, dependencies, trends, incidents, integrity and service relationships.

Latest Review

Redmonk analyst Michael Cote took a first look at AccelOps and provided some pretty balanced blog commentary. Read the review

"A pretty compelling suite of IT Management functionality across monitoring (performance, application, server, configuration, networking, and security), a pragmatic CMDB, reporting, and a "hidden gem," so to speak, in the analytics they offer on-top of everything else... analytics cover from availability, performance, security, and change management, covering things like, but not limited to, anomaly detection, access violations, and misbehaving network devices... the AccelOps team has taken their past experience in analytics for networking security and broadened out to all of the silos in IT Management... For the mid-market that AccelOps is targeting, the positive benefits of a SaaS offering should tend to outweigh the cultural FUD of moving a traditionally on-premise application to - yup - the cloud... And, of course, if you don't like the whole cloud thing, AccelOps is offering a virtual appliance to run the application on-premise..."

Feature Profile: Intelligent Service Definition

AccelOps dynamically links IT services and their underlying IT infrastructure, and continuously monitors and reports on service delivery. We accomplish this by providing a bottoms-up, pragmatic approach to Business Service Management via our intelligent IT service definition feature. Simply establish a service by selecting applications and AccelOps helps by automatically identifying the respective systems and infrastructure delivering the applications. All monitored key performance indicators and rules for any component is inherited by the service. Then add additional service level requirements. The result provides proactive service monitoring, prioritized incident response, faster problem diagnosis, SLA trending and business impact assessment.

Disparate Tools and IT Service Management in Mid-tier Enterprises

The numbers are in - a recent Ogren Group research revealed mid-tier market dissatisfaction with infrastructure management tools and over 80% lack confidence to support IT service management. The research, conducted on behalf of AccelOps indicated that mid-tier enterprises are not confident that they have adequate tools in place to monitor and optimize network and application availability, performance, compliance and security. This critical IT shortcoming affects confidence to deliver timely and cost-effective services to the business. Additional IT management concerns illustrated in the survey included:

40% use at least 6 or more independent tools to manage their infrastructure
Only 17% felt very confident that their tools support service management requirements
No network, system, application or security management tool category rated above average with performance, availability and security faring the least satisfaction, and
Tools that support critical IT staff activities regarding problem diagnostics, component to service assessment, and operational control fared average or worse.

The survey findings are clear - real progress to lower operating costs, maintain uptime and support IT service management are eluding the mid-tier market. To learn more, seethe Ogren Group report, "The Impact of Disparate Tools on the State of IT Service Management in Mid-tier Organizations."

Free 14 day Trial

AccelOps integrated datacenter and cloud service management solution, provides a single pane of glass into IT from a 360° service perspective. The result yields unprecedented enterprise visibility, operational efficiency, service intelligence, reduced MTTR, and resource savings. It's like nothing you have seen before. Do more, control more and save more - right now! Try AccelOps out for a 14-day no obligation evaluation.

FOR MORE DETAILS, PLEASE VISIT - www.accelops.net/tryandbuy.php