In this technology-dependent business world, IT functions are not only subject to the enterprise-wide mandate to ‘deliver more with less’, but also IT-specific challenges that include the demonstration of the business value delivered by IT and the need to maximise the availability of business-critical services at an optimal cost. CA’s portfolio of IT service management (ITSM) solutions is an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3-aligned, fully integrated software suite that can help an IT organisation addr…
Technology Audits - published 24/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
IBM Tivoli Service Management is a suite of IT Service Management (ITSM) products, based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 best practice, aimed at helping organisations to effectively manage complex IT infrastructures. It is suitable for all organisations irrespective of size and industry vertical, with the ability to scale from a small IT deployment to a global enterprise with multiple data centres. Tivoli Service Management is feature rich; for instance it provides access to relevant information, …
Technology Audits - published 03/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
CA Spectrum Service Assurance offers organisations a business-service-centric view of IT management and performance. It uses service definitions and service models, defined in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), or other Management Data Repository (MDR), to build a unified real-time service model of business-critical services and the underlying infrastructure elements that support them. CA Spectrum SA collects operational performance information from domain management tools to report at a busines…
Technology Audits - published 01/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
Akamai provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and Web application delivery. The company uses its EdgePlatform, a globally distributed network of 50,000 servers across 1,500 locations and 70 countries, and a set of patented software tools, to provide what it calls an Application Delivery Network (ADN). Akamai argues (and Ovum agrees) that the majority of performance degradation while delivering rich and/or dynamic Web content over the Internet occurs as a result of problems …
Technology Audits - published 01/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mark Blowers
Enterprise IT Management (EITM) is a Web-based Programme Management solution from Sterling Key for the management of IT activities and resources where project-based management is needed for increased visibility and control. This fills the gap that exists between day-to-day IT operations activities and enterprise-level projects, which are often handled by corporate portfolio management tools. EITM integrates with an organisation’s Service or Help Desk tool to provide a joined-up approach to managing IT pr…
Technology Audits - published 27/01/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
Citrix XenDesktop is a virtual desktop delivery solution that offers a serious alternative to traditional ‘fat-client’ desktop infrastructure. While the complexities involved in managing the fat-client-based enterprise desktop landscape have been well documented, technologies such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) have failed to offer a viable solution that lends itself to most user groups. Citrix XenDesktop offers a new approach to virtual desktop delivery by using Citrix’s proprietary FlexCast te…
Technology Audits - published 20/01/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
Neptuny Caplan™ is a capacity-management solution for frequent and comprehensive business-oriented capacity planning with minimum resource investment. Caplan™ is agentless, and the solution uses standard and custom connectors based on both ETL and Web services technologies to populate a data warehouse with performance and workload data from systems-monitoring and management tools, and business-related data drawn from business applications. Caplan™ correlates the data between infrastructure and business K…
Technology Audits - published 20/01/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
The levels of inefficiency that many IT infrastructures are operating at today have become completely unsustainable. The constraints on IT spending, as well as the desire to reduce the environmental footprint of IT have increased the pressure on IT departments to become more prudent in the allocation of resources to technology requirements. Furthermore, many IT departments are approaching the physical limits of their legacy infrastructure. Enterprises need to become more efficient in order to scale up th…
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 08/12/2009 - Alaa Owaineh, Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
AppliDis, the flagship product from Systancia, offers a range of options to use virtualisation to streamline the delivery of business applications and desktop environments to end users. In doing so, AppliDis aims to ease desktop and application management overheads while at the same time demonstrating business value around increased data security, regulatory compliance, a longer hardware refresh cycle, and aiding a reduction of carbon footprint. The application delivery capabilities are based on a server…
Technology Audits - published 08/12/2009 - Alan Rodger, Balachandar Ganesh
The Thinkmap SDK is a Java-based platform for developing applications that aid organisations in visualising sets of dynamic, complex, structured data. The solution offers native support for relational databases, XML, and flat files, and ships with a flexible data source API that lets organisations integrate the application with any underlying source data set. Once developed, Thinkmap applications can be embedded as a Java applet and published via any standard Web browser, or can be embedded within Java-b…
Technology Audits - published 25/11/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
Unstructured content accounts for approximately 80% of an organisation’s total data, yet many organisations are still failing to manage it adequately, despite having implemented a Content Management system. This suggests either that insufficient planning has gone into the implementation or that an inappropriate solution has been selected. Defining the objectives for a new solution and planning the implementation are critical; a badly implemented solution can be more damaging to the company than not deployin I?i nknown] = Forms!Add!text29, 5 [Unknown] = Forms!Add!check31,...
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 23/11/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s Sagent Data Flow is an ETL (Extract, Load, and Transform) solution for the creation of enterprise data warehouses. Sagent Data Flow extracts structured and unstructured enterprise data from various sources, then applies a set of rules-based transformation policies, and loads the manipulated data into the target database. It offers connectors to third-party Business Intelligence (BI) solutions that use the information in the enterprise data warehouse to aid strategic busine…
Technology Audits - published 08/10/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sarah Burnett
IBM Tivoli is a suite of products under the Tivoli brand that enables organisations to effectively manage the complex infrastructure required to support businesses today. As the demands on CIOs increase, the effective use of human resources becomes a critical factor in any IT department; Butler Group likes the ability that IBM Tivoli has to automatically correct predicted problems before the end user is aware of the problem. However, we believe the packaging and marketing of these products can appear ove…
Technology Audits - published 05/10/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
Novell, through the Service Driven Data Centre (SDDC) portfolio of products, offers capabilities that are aimed at building, managing, and measuring the performance of a heterogeneous data centre. Novell offers three modular, yet integrated, solutions that deliver against the three aforementioned aspects: the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (build), the PlateSpin range of workload management solutions (manage), and the Novell Business Service Management (BSM) portfolio (measure). Novell’s acquisitions of Pl…
Technology Audits - published 30/09/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
Jive Social Business Software (Jive SBS) 3.0 is a Web 2.0-based enterprise social collaboration platform that can be deployed as an internal-facing employee collaboration tool or as an external, customer-facing social media solution. A differentiator for Jive SBS is a bridging module that combines the ability to bridge internal employee collaboration with external partner and customer communities and deliver them as a single application suite, thereby enabling Jive Software to position SBS as a solution …
Technology Audits - published 14/09/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
When it comes to Enterprise Collaboration, many organisations remain 'land-locked'; restricted by the architectures, deployment models, and functionality of solutions that were conceived in another age - an age when there was no Web 2.0, no mobile Internet, no impending pandemic, and no economic crisis. Of those organisations that are trying to move ahead in the 'new world of work', many IT departments are struggling to keep pace with the rapidly-changing world of information worker solutions and with th…
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 09/09/2009 - Angela Eager, Balachandar Ganesh, Chandranshu Singh, Mark Blowers, Richard Edwards, Rob Hailstone, Sarah Burnett, Sue Clarke
WSO2 is a provider of an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform based on the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) component model. The company’s SOA offering provides tools for service creation, service connection, service composition, and SOA Governance, as well as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for connecting services. This Butler Group Technology Audit focuses on the SOA Governance aspect of WSO2’s offering, and the associated products that enable organisations to establish and s…
Technology Audits - published 11/08/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mike Thompson
Neocase’s Customer Service solutions provide functionality that manages and optimises the resolution of inquiries (‘cases’) from customers, employees and vendors that pertain to product issues, technical support, employee benefits, and so forth. Many enterprise applications and systems of record fail to provide such functionality, which is increasingly needed for compliance reasons, as well as to promote efficiency. The Neocase solutions provide specific functionality for business functions such as Human…
Technology Audits - published 11/08/2009 - Alan Rodger, Balachandar Ganesh, Somak Roy
Centrix WorkSpace 4.0 is a virtual access platform for applications and services. The solution aggregates all applications across the typically fragmented underlying virtual infrastructures and presents them via a single centralised browser-based Rich Internet Application (RIA). WorkSpace 4.0 offers out-of-the-box support for resources hosted by virtualisation technologies such as Citrix XenApp (Presentation Server), Microsoft Terminal Services and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) desktops hosted on …
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
HP Total Records Information Management (HP TRIM) is a well established Document and Records Management (DRM) solution from HP. This solution is based on Microsoft technology and integrates well with many desktop and server products from leading providers of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Technologies. It provides a number of modular features in addition to DRM, including workflow, archival management, space management, and Web Content Management (WCM). HP TRIM can be accessed through a Web browser …
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
MooD® Solutions, from Salamander, are live, interactive, architecture-driven software applications that deliver agile support to strategic processes focused on changing, rather than running, an organisation. The solutions are designed, configured, and deployed using the MooD Enterprise Business Architecture software platform. Whilst the target market and focus area of each solution is different, the overarching principle of all of these solutions is the same – exploit the proven, scalable MooD platform t…
Technology Audits - published 24/07/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mark Blowers
Modern businesses rely on enterprise applications like ERP and CRM to enable them to carry out the business of business, which makes those applications highly strategic and highly critical. Implemented over several years, modified and extended, tuned and customised, they represent substantial financial and intellectual property investments. They are valuable business assets that need to be managed as such. In challenging economic times it becomes even more important to nurture these evolving assets in or…
Technology Management and Strategy Reports - published 07/07/2009 - Angela Eager, Balachandar Ganesh, Chandranshu Singh, Mike Thompson, Rob Hailstone, Somak Roy
NetMRI is an appliance-based solution from Netcordia that aids organisations in network configuration and change management. Often, unintended or unauthorised configuration changes in network devices can have an undesirable effect on availability and can, at times, lead to network downtime. Netcordia’s NetMRI attempts to offset this risk by mapping out the network topology and establishing the interdependencies of network elements to aid in impact analysis. The solution uses built-in subject matter exper…
Technology Audits - published 06/07/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
Nuxeo is a provider of open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. The company’s flagship offering, the Nuxeo Galaxy suite comprises the Java-based Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP) and components that sit on top of it to provide horizontal- and vertical-specific services. The EP is built on an infrastructure of plug-ins and extension points based on Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) standards. The components, which are essentially packaged applications, are built on a component-composi…
Technology Audits - published 03/07/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
Alfresco’s Enterprise Content Management solution, Alfresco 3.1, provides an open source platform for Document Management, Web Content Management, Records Management, Image Management, and Digital Asset Management. Enterprises and business units often struggle with ad hoc document management and collaboration, and Alfresco’s model reduces acquisition costs whilst offering a highly scalable Web-based architecture, that simplifies roll-out to a broader user population. The shared drive-like interface, MS S…
Technology Audits - published 29/06/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
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