MAX 2015 Recap: LogicNow Makes Bold Move Toward Automated Analytics
By The Business Solutions Network
Last week I was at LogicNow’s (formerly GFI Software) MAX 2015 partner event in Washington DC at the Gaylord National Convention Center. LogicNow captures literally petabytes of data points with the help of its 12,000 managed services provider (MSP) partners throughout the world who collectively manage more than 2 million end points.
During the event, Dr. Alistair Forbes, general manager at LogicNow, unveiled LOGICcards, a data analytics and machine learning upgrade to the company’s IT service management platform. “According to research from SMB Group, only about 18 percent of small and about 57 percent of medium businesses currently use business intelligence and analytics solutions,” he shared. “It’s simply financially out of reach for most organizations, plus they don’t have the technical and human resources to capitalize on it.”
LogicNow does have those resources. And, according to the company’s CEO, Walter Scott, “We’ve spent the past 24 months building a cloud-based infrastructure that’s capable of aggregating data from millions of devices in real-time and presenting meaningful information that our partners can act upon.”
Prescriptive And Automated Analytics Trump Descriptive And Predictive Analytics
The example that LogicNow Data Scientist Dana Bullister shared during her presentation was a security anomaly. “Let’s say, for example, 12 out of 13 workstations at a customer’s site have a particular security configuration, but one workstation does not. The anomaly will be flagged and presented by the LOGICcard in the MAX RM [remote management] dashboard, so the MSP can investigate a possible error such as the AV software wasn’t turned back on after an application install.”
Another LOGICcard example Bullister shared was an alert showing “Windows Server 2003 detected on your servers.” In addition to a three sentence description of the problem presented in the MAX RM dashboard (e.g., Microsoft ended support for Windows Server 2003 on July 14, 2015), it shows all customers with Windows Server 2013 devices under management. “Additionally, the LOGICcard alert presents relative links, such as a migration strategy to upgrade the customer as well as a video pertaining specifically to machines that cannot be migrated,” she says. “It’s like having a technician constantly looking through your dashboard and identifying problems that need to be resolved.”
The big differentiator with LOGICcards, says Forbes, is that it goes beyond traditional automation and efficiency metrics offered by descriptive (past trends) and predictive (future projections) analytics toward prescriptive-based analytics (e.g., a navigation app, like Waze, collects user input to suggest alternate routes to avoid traffic jams) and automated analytics (e.g., Google’s self-driving car). “The Google self-driving car gathers 750 MB of data per second in order to determine the actions the car is going to take. In the six years they’ve been on the streets testing and logging more than 1.8 million miles, 100 percent of the 12 minor accidents they’ve had with the car have been caused by other drivers not doing what they were supposed to be doing.”
While LOGICcards has many similarities to the collective intelligence used by Google’s driverless vehicle, it is different in that it is configurable by each MSP, Forbes assured attendees. The LOGICcard experience will differ for each MSP based on which suggestions they “like,” “follow,” or “ignore” similar to how social media works. “We’ve brought you what we believe is a glimpse of the future, but we believe there is so much more we can do with this,” he concluded.