Why Solutions Providers Need An IoT Strategy Now

By Puneet Pandit, Founder and CEO, Glassbeam

System integrators know that often the most vexing issue in managing a network is the considerable time spent on identifying the root cause of a network disruption by finding, organizing, and making sense of the glut of diagnostic log data they are receiving. Internet of Things (IoT) analytics effectively addresses this challenge and many others.

Organizations’ networks are becoming increasingly complex, driven by many well-known trends: BYOD (bring your own device), mobile workforces, ubiquity of streaming video, increased security needs, cloud computing, and many more. Because an increasing amount of an organization’s IP is embedded in its network, the need for 24/7/365 availability is more important than ever before.

Conflicting with increased demands for flexibility, high performance, availability, and more, are IT budgets that are largely stagnant.  A recent report from Spiceworks reveals that just 33 percent of those surveyed expect their IT budgets to increase this year.  Another 45 percent anticipate their budgets remaining stagnant and 12 percent expect their budgets to shrink. 

Many IT teams have realized that outsourcing monitoring and routine maintenance of their networks to systems integrators is an attractive option. It enables IT leaders to keep headcount as low as possible and also can provide better results, as the integrator can call on a wider range of expertise as needed to address a particular situation. For integrators, it creates an opportunity to continue engagement with the customer after completing a project and earn a stable, ongoing revenue stream. In addition, by maintaining an ongoing presence at the customer, of course, gives the integrator a “leg up” when the customer issues an RFP for subsequent projects. 

But, with the upside benefits of an ongoing presence and revenue stream, the integrator must now be available 24/7/365 to address network performance issues that arise, and ideally effect any necessary changes before there is a network disruption.  Customers typically require an integrator to agree to very specific quality of service (QoS) metrics as part of comprehensive service level agreements (SLAs) when signing on to a managed services contract.

IoT Analytics Help Integrators Provide Managed Services Efficiently

IoT analytics can be a powerful solution to improve the efficiency of an integrator’s managed services offerings. IoT is the concept that many of today’s machines, systems, and devices have the ability to communicate with other machines, systems, and devices and produce massive amounts of data in the process. Integrators can enable a customer’s network to communicate with the integrator’s network. 

New, powerful information analytics platforms exist that collect, distill, analyze, and present massive amounts of operational data in easy-to-digest formats. These automated solutions can help an integrator’s customer support team in three ways:

1. Proactive: Applying rules to incoming data and taking proactive action, such as opening up a customer case, dispatching a part, and alerting the integrator’s customer support team enables them to take preventive action.

2. Predictive: Uncovering failure rates before failures happen or identifying upsell opportunity before customers ask for upgrades. Essentially, before an incident happens, the integrator customer support team becomes aware that an incident is “about to happen” and can address a problem.

3. Prescriptive: Before an incident happens, the platform provides information that provides the integrator’s customer support team can implement to prevent the incident through an interface with knowledge base and providing tips to avoid a potential problem.

These insights can help integrator managed service teams meet and exceed QoS requirements.

An additional benefit of effective analytics is its ability to allow integrators to study how their customers use their network devices. With this information, integrators can help customers purchase new hardware and devices that includes the features they need, with the necessary “future proof” capabilities to ensure the new purchase is viable for many years.  Integrators can save customers money by steering them away from product that include features they don’t need. 

How To Select The IoT Analytics Provider Right For Your Customers

While the concept of IoT analytics is simple, effective execution has been very difficult until recently. The data from network components has traditionally been difficult to collect and analyze, due to both the enormous amounts of data involved and the fact that the data comes in a variety of formats, such as text logs, XML, JSON, CSV, or SNMP. There are different data class categories, like event messages, configuration blobs or statistical dumps. Data is likely to be in different protocols, such as email, FTP, or SFTP, as a stream, or as a batch log file.

But advanced analytics companies have developed new solutions that are able to handle the volumes and disparate types of data involved in real time, making machine data analytics practical and affordable for a much wider range of organizations.

When integrators consider partnering with an IoT analytics provider to support their customers, the integrator should look for four critical capabilities from the analytics provider.  These include: 

• Ability to work with the integrator to set up for the customer a centralized data repository that can capture terabytes of structured and unstructured operational data
• Analytical tools that can describe and create meaning and relationships between elements in the data
• Reporting capability on how customers are using existing products, performance information on components within existing products, et al.
• Dashboards and similar elements that enable the integrator to uncover performance trends that can indicate a network disruption may occur.

Creating A New Competitive Differentiator

Integrators should think about IoT analytics as an important competitive differentiator.  Studies have shown that utilizing these analytics can reduce the mean time to resolution for support issues by as much as 40 percent and also help better the economics of a support organization in numerous ways. Integrators can boast improved QoS and reduced costs when marketing their services in competitive situations. In today’s highly competitive marketplace, IoT analytics give integrators a new competitive edge.

Puneet Pandit is the founder and CEO of Glassbeam, a provider of machine data analytics software. Prior to Glassbeam, he was founder and CEO of Orchesys, a professional services firm focused on enterprise storage solutions. Glassbeam was incubated inside Orchesys and launched in 2009. Prior to Orchesys, he led the Database and Business Applications Solutions Group at NetApp. He also worked at Ernst & Young strategic advisory services and Tata Unisys as a management consultant. Puneet Pandit holds an MBA from University of Chicago and graduated with Electrical Engineering degree from Punjab University.