Disruptive Systems Management for Cloud Computing with BOOM

Robert Alcock talks to Mike Silberman from Netage Solutions

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Mike Silberman – Managing Director, Netage Solutions

An innovative player in telecommunications, netage solutions GmbH is the software developer behind boom, business open operations manager, an enterprise-class event and fault monitoring solution made in Germany. With its powerful filtering and correlation engine, boom helps OSS organizations to prevent, detect and solve problems in real-time on their managed systems, hosts, applications and services. The netage architecture uses a lightweight polyvalent and versatile agent that provides local intelligence, reliable operations, and minimizes network traffic in firewalled and DHCP environments. As a TM Forum Catalyst participant, netage is demonstrating boom for Resource Alarm Management with leading Service Providers, such as Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and Orange.

Michael (Mike) Silberman began his professional career at IBM more than twenty years ago. After various positions in Switzerland and the IBM Europe headquarters in Paris, he was nominated partner in the IBM consulting organization in Germany. Since 2009, he is the managing director of netage solutions GmbH, which he acquired at the time.

Q: What makes boom disruptive?
A: There are three fundamental factors that make boom disruptive in the systems management market. First, boom allows for a significant reduction in CAPEX and OPEX. This ensures that boom always has an attractive business case. Second, boom is fast and easy to implement, as well as to migrate to. This means that the change management risks and effort involved are minimal. And third, boom enables the intelligent monitoring of systems.

Q: How do you explain the significant reduction in CAPEX and OPEX?
A: For one, many companies today don’t want to be burdened with license costs. Therefore, with a subscription model we eliminate these costs entirely. Furthermore, as a newcomer with a modern and innovative tool and a low-cost development, we can offer enterprise-grade functionality for a fraction of the cost. With regards to OPEX, boom is easier to use and more efficient with its process-oriented approach to systems monitoring so that drastic savings in effort are possible.

Q: How can a complex system be fast and easy to implement or to migrate to?
A: We have the advantage with boom of entering a well established market with standards and known interfaces. With boom, we have followed those industry standards and we have taken advantage of existing interfaces to give boom a maximum of openness and versatility. Being based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) ensures that boom can fit into any IT environment. It also helps that boom is developed in Java and uses the Eclipse GUI platform to make it highly portable and flexible.

Q: What makes boom intelligent?
A: The secret is the boom agent. Having a lightweight and versatile Java agent makes a big difference. Depending on the requirements, we can give the boom agent all kinds of instructions and tasks to carry out on whichever objects we put it on. It also uses a sonar-like technology to manage objects that cannot have an agent. The right agent is the key to ensuring low cost, low effort, performance, effectiveness and security.

Q: Nowadays, security plays an important role in everything IT. Is boom secure?
A: This is pretty much a given. Without security in terms of access management, encryption, or network protection you cannot put a product with a good conscience on the market. We take security very seriously and have invested in giving boom state-of-the-art security features. This allows boom to be used in very public environments on the internet, another cost and ease-of-use advantage.

Q: Let’s talk about cloud computing. How does boom relate to cloud computing?
A: Cloud computing needs boom, just as boom is made for cloud computing. Let me explain. In a more and more virtualized, pervasive and networked IT environment the requirement for monitoring and operations management grows. Therefore, boom is the answer to a world that relies more and more on cloud computing.

Q: What does boom bring to cloud computing?
A: More devices, more objects and more machine-to-machine (m2m) interactions means there is more to monitor and more events to cover than ever before. This tremendous amount of events and information that are produced in a cloud computing environment cannot be handled, nor be paid for with legacy systems management solutions. Only boom has the ability to manage the mass of objects, the complexity of interactions, and the costs related to cloud computing.

Q: Let’s focus on CSP’s. How can boom help them with the challenges of cloud computing?
A: This is something we talked about a few months ago.1 We talked about how boom can help CSP’s decrease customer churn and how boom can make CSP’s proactive. Specifically with cloud computing, boom can help in two ways. First, boom is cloud-ready, meaning that if a CSP has a cloud strategy, boom can be easily fitted into it. Second, a CSP can use boom to offer value-add cloud services.

Q: What is different for CSP’s with boom for cloud computing?
A: Nothing really from a functional point-of-view, but, the whole difference is in the day-to-day operations. As the business model of CSP’s evolves, also their support functions need to evolve. In systems management boom in the cloud disrupts the legacy paradigm with software licenses, hardware, and services. With the cloud, it is just services, without the issues of software licenses and hardware.

As more and more CSP’s look for partners to help them jointly manage their infrastructure, bear the risks, and provide a high-quality service, we have the means with boom to do just that. Ensure peace-of-mind with a one-stop offering for systems management based on cloud computing concepts.

Q: Can you explain boom for cloud computing in more detail?
A: Sure. With boom in the cloud the CSP gets a service and does not need to be involved with issues like software licenses, hardware purchases and set-up, and also many internal responsibilities and activities are drastically simplified or eliminated. The boom in the cloud customer defines and requests a service with regards to the management of their systems, applications, and devices. We provide a service, which does exactly what is required, when it is required, and delivered as required.
Basically, we provide a managed service that eliminates many risks and costs of traditional IT.

Q: What else can boom in the cloud do?
A: This is where the real disruption comes into play. CSP’s can offer boom systems management to their customers as a value-added service. This gives the CSP something of true value to offer their most important and valuable customers. With boom in the cloud technology, CSP’s can offer their own branded systems management.

Q: What can you say about the future of boom?
A: It is a long list, but we can start with the fact that boom will be monitoring millions of devices, and not just IT servers, and will be a service to masses of companies and individuals instead of just enterprise accounts. Monitoring will become through boom more democratized and available to anyone with a need to be reassured about the availability and performance of an intelligent device.

For more information please visit:
www.netage-solutions.com

See “Get Your Business boomING” in InterComms, Issue 16, or www.netage-solutions.com.