Boy, Did This Guy Understand Actional!

I love talking to people who get it.

I was talking with a guy from Cornell today about AppZero's server virtualization technology and he mentioned that they have a consultant talking to them about ITIL, and the challenge that all the information being put into their ITIL compliant CMDB would be out of date the second it was entered. Sorry Greg, but the conversation turned from AppZero to Actional's end-to-end visibility in less time than it took me to shift so I was standing between this guy and the door.

I commiserated and mentioned that it's one of the really interesting things about Actional - that we track that message flows automatically and therefore provide two key benefits:

1. Accuracy
2. Low cost of ownership (due to non-manual discovery)

We started talking about one of our oldest customers, University of Phoenix. They're the largest online university and they use our products to track the flow of messages as they flow through the network. Our conversation was a breath of fresh air. Not that many people get it so quickly:

"Wait, you can track dependencies?"

"Yep."

"Boy, could I have used you recently. We were taking down an old system and we emailed everyone, we checked log files, and we sniffed the network. But, what it came down to was simply disconnecting the machine and going to see where the screams came from."

I laughed, because that's one of the oldest case studies I talk about. An early customer of ours had a similar problem and it would cost them two weeks every time they decommissioned a system. It was nice to hear someone else pitching my story to me.

Here was a guy who understood the difficulties of the anonymous consumer, as well as the futility of manual discovery when his own internal processes were not robust enough to keep up with the changes in his environment.

I'm sure I'll be talking to him again soon.

Comments

[David Bressler]

Greg,

Actional could help with moving workloads to the cloud in two or three ways (off the top of my head):

1. WRT AppZero, we could easily tie into your management system and deploy new instances based upon load/demand (or other business KPI's). This would require some minor customization (not development) in that we'd simply create a call out rule (at the Interceptor Block in the Actional Intermediary) and have to write the logic for the rule to start up your processes (and start them).

2. Actional could act as a layer to abstract out service location, and make it easier for customers to move to the cloud through location transparency.

3. Actional could (and this is my fav) ensure SLA's between cloud provider and consumer, giving a very unique level of transparency to customers to be sure they get what they are promised from cloud vendors.

4. Finally, Actional's unique (and patented) discovery enables customers to figure out what their systems are doing so that they can successfully move to the cloud. It's amazing how many times we deploy in a POC and have the customer say "I didn't know that piece was still there!"

I hope this makes sense. Let's chat directly if there are some opportunities you think make sense to pursue.

David

PS It was the Amazon, not the Nile! And, it was awesome. The river is cool, but the Amazon Jungle is simply unbelievable. I heard it recently described as the "lungs of the planet", and I think that's an appropriate description.

[Grerg O'Connor]

David -

Can Actional help with moving workloads to the cloud? In addition to the end to end visiblity an Actional users gets, can it help me with provisioning and de-provisioning to smooth out bottlenecks? Of course, workloads that are burst oriented spill into the cloud these days.

How is the Nile?

GregO
CEO AppZero
Co-founder Sonic