KUALA LUMPUR: Some companies have a lot of “white elephants” in their information technology network; these can be servers and applications or sometimes, idle employees.

IT solutions company Compuware Corp claims it has an intelligent network management solution, Vantage 11, that identifies redundant hardware and software, as well as underperforming staff.

“If a business has employees who are goofing off by playing videogames on its network, which eats up bandwidth needed for more vital tasks, our product will pinpoint the problem,” said Linh Ho, senior product marketing manager of ITIL v3 Foundations at Compuware.

But, she said, Vantage 11’s more important function is to help chief information officers spot redundant servers or applications that are using up precious resources, or if there are faults in their networks or others that are connected to them.

Get the big picture

This isn’t always easy to do because company networks are usually highly complex and require a management tool that offers high visibility into their inner workings.

“There can be thousands of servers, multiple service providers, application codes, and in some instances, a mainframe or two, in a network,” said Linh.

Vantage 11 also provides a bird’s eye-view of application performances on a network — from the mainframe right up to the frontend, which is usually the point that a company’s customers’ access,” she said.

“Also, if an application is performing poorly, Vantage 11 can flag the company as to how many users are being impacted by that.”

It can make sense out of all the different data points and help companies make better business decisions, according to Linh.

Being able to recognise a problem, means a business can fix it quickly before the defect impacts it.

Fast response

J.R. Wong, Malaysia country director of Compuware Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd, cited an example. With Vantage 11, a bank would know immediately if a customer is trying to access his or her bank account via the Internet and is experiencing a problem connecting, he said.

This information is important to the bank. “Studies show that only 2% of bank customers who experience transaction problems actually complain. The rest just switch to another bank,” said Wong.

According to him, most businesses, when they run into such problems, think they need to upgrade their networks or put in more servers. “This may not be the best thing to do,” he said.

He believes they should instead take a long and close look at their IT infrastructure for “white elephants” that may be causing bottlenecks in the system, and get rid of these first. It costs less than buying new hardware or upgrading.

Fault finding

Wong cited another example where having Vantage 11 helps. There was a bank having a problem with its e-loan facility, he said.

“But the problem wasn’t within the bank’s network. It was the fault of an external network,” he said.

“When the system sent out an applicant’s information to a third party for a credit check, the process slowed down tremendously, causing a major disruption to the e-loan service.”

Vantage 11, he said, helped the bank pinpoint the source of the fault.

ITIL — or Information Technology Infrastructure Library — is the most widely used best-practice for IT service management, development and operations.

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www.compuware.com