Metagen Integration Framework

Support for Whatever Data You Have

Asset data exists across the enterprise in varying forms, and each has its unique purpose. It may be to relay asset transaction processes, define or track configurations of assets, procure assets, establish billing or cost schedules, etc. One thing is certain, the same data will not work for everyone and rarely does it even mean the same thing.

The Blazent platform drives better, faster integration across operational, organizational, and financial tools through the Blazent Metagen Integration Framework. The Metagen framework uses a dynamic, analysis-driven data model to allow acceptance, definition, recognition, and integration of any structured data, regardless of format or vendor.

Data sources Blazent supports are, but not limited to:

Discovery Products and Network Scans	Blazent supports a variety of agentless, real-time network scan determines existence of hardware platform inventory including servers, PCs, mobile devices, peripherals, storage systems, etc. Blazent can also collect hardware and software profiles on servers, PCs, etc., including machine data, software and hardware inventories, and software and hardware utilization.
IT Asset and Configuration Management Systems	Data from help desks and asset management systems including Altiris, BMC Remedy, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft SMS, Peregrine, CA, HP, LDAP directory services, CMDBs (configuration management data bases), etc. can be incorporated into the intelligence data warehouse to provide a global view of the IT management lanscape as well as to consolidate it with discovered data and business information. The Blazent Intelligence Data Warehouse can also feed back into IT management systems to close the IT workflow loop and ensure greater organizational accuracy.
Financial & HR Management Databases	Data from business, contracts, licensing, procurement, including Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc. provide the business perspective on IT. Once integrated into the Intelligence Data Warehouse, Blazent can readily draw this dynamic information as part of it's analyses, providing a unique business-IT alignment layer.
Open Formats	Any data from ODBC/JDBC repositories, XML/CSV flat files, or third-party and open-source asset discovery products. The Intelligence Data Warehouse offers an extremely flexible data model which allows custom integration of information. This ensures that organizations are no longer limited by another vendor's constructs for data collection.

How Metagen Works

Metagen’s business value is the ability to change and add data sources quickly, and immediately be able to involve them into your analysis. And integrating additional sources improves both the data quality and your ability to gain additional perspective from every business and IT discipline in your organization.

Take any structured data, for example a CMDB or an asset repository or a billing system, and allow Blazent to point to it with an open data connector. You can also point to a spreadsheet or manually upload the file to into Blazent. Data collection can be scheduled to coincide with when it would least impact your systems.

Blazent links data fields from various sources together that it knows as part of its best practice library, and any additional fields that are needed are automatically included into the new model. The definition of fields can be changed so that, in your unique environment, your concept of what a web server is, for example, fits.

Based on additional precedence and merge rules, as well as cleansing functions, the result is a data model uniquely tailored to your management tools, with definitions as you need them to be. If you change a data source (changing vendors, consolidating tools, including additional data), you can easily reconfigure how the data is linked and recognized.