Architecting Successful Service Models

IT service providers and outsourcers have a critical balance to achieve. On one hand, they need to standardize their service architecture so they are stabilized, so personnel and technical resources can be easily leveraged or reassigned, and so their costs can be easier to manage and predict. Yet every client is different in circumstances and desires, requiring that service-oriented architectures (SOAs) or frameworks based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) are agile and demand-driven.

The end of the tunnel is to move IT services into the ubiquitous nature of a utility. At the heart of all utility computing and service delivery frameworks is ability to cost out assets and services and then optimizing them. But IT is a massively diverse environment involving independent silos of technology and unending change.

The Blazent platform provides a crucial management component towards visibility, control, and optimization within a service delivery framework. When used in conjunction with utility-billing/chargeback systems and SLA management and monitoring systems, Blazent completes the asset analytics and optimization necessary for an IT service delivery framework.

Multi-Tenant Asset Analytics

Blazent's business intelligence approach enables IT outsourcers and their clients to master the data quality of their asset management systems while gaining flexible analytical and reporting capabilities to fuel quicker, more reliable business decisions. It offers immediate value including:

• Vendor and data agnostic integration — Automates collection of configuration item data from multiple data sources, such as IBM Tivoli, Opsware, Microsoft SMS, EMC, Peregrine Asset Center, BMC Remedy, and virtually any structured file (spreadsheets, databases, etc.)
• Data quality and certification — Accelerates data accuracy with automatic cleansing and normalization functions, and improves ongoing accuracy through ticket-based workflow
• Data segregation and aggregation — Provides individual client views to pinpoint business issues, as well as roll-ups to corporate level views across clients for maximum responsiveness and planning
• Portal interface — Easy-to-use web interface enables role-based drillable analytics specific to end-user clients, client service and support teams, and corporate-level executives