Problem Management

Opalis looks at problem management and problem resolutions as just another runbook procedure. A runbook procedure that is triggered by an event from a monitor such as Microsoft MOM, NetIQ AppManager or BMC Patrol for example. If a company has gone to the effort of codifying, formally or informally, the steps that should be taken in the event of a specific event being raised by a monitor, it is a candidate for automation.

“Most IT departments can’t deal with exceptions in their network because they are so consumed with routine maintenance tasks. With OpalisRobot, my staff deals with exceptions the minute they walk in the door in the morning!”

The key to optimal performance of the IT infrastructure is to have maintenance performed regularly. In many organizations even well understood procedures, critical to the health of applications, are overlooked or completed sporadically due to an overburdened IT department. The inefficient management of IT workloads and the lack of defined maintenance schedules can negatively impact application performance and compromise availability, resulting in downtime.

Adopting a formal maintenance process significantly reduces the time required to complete routine tasks. By eliminating the time spent moving between applications, dashboards, and logs the maintenance window can be greatly compressed.

OpalisRobot delivers an object oriented environment to easily model and automate what IT staff do manually – assimilate information from disparate sources, analyze data, and implement steps in specific sequence.

“We used to have all of our new hires sitting at a desk dealing with incoming data and files for months before we implemented OpalisRobot. Now those new hires go right to work generating revenue for the company!”

There are many operational dependencies around the arrival or distribution of files and data. In many cases IT staff are responsible for manually sorting through various types of data and distributing content to appropriate applications or personnel. Today’s corporate environments require a more efficient way to manage the flow of information. To meet this goal, many IT departments are looking for a flexible and reliable method to filter, analyze, and process data to control costs and improve productivity.

Data Process Automation

“The decision makers at my company demand data on a more frequent basis than our batch process can deliver; OpalisRobot lets me analyze data based on events and automate transactions without human intervention, so I can deliver data more frequently.”

OpalisRobot’s graphical workflow environment provides complete automation of processes that are currently being performed manually and therefore inefficiently. Workflows may be combined, in parallel or sequentially, to achieve a fully autonomous or interactive automation strategy. Automating manual tasks into reliable, repeatable processes improves the quality and consistency that is critical to zero latency processing.
  

 
Market Trends

The days of large and growing budgets for IT shops are done. CIOs and IT Managers are being told to drive down costs and increase the service per dollar of budget. This is a result of companies learning that only a portion of their IT operations are strategic and skyrocketing costs cannot be justified. The room to reduce costs in most IT shops is present. Many IT shops rely on ‘human glue’ to hold their fragile IT infrastructure together. Many IT processes are locked up inside the heads of key IT staff, service desk tickets are entered manually and no attempt is made to integrate or automate these operations. This has created an IT department that is very expensive and unable to react with any sort of agility to common business events such as mergers/acquisitions, regulatory compliance requirements and systems management vendor swap outs.