When managed service provider Ensono spun out of its corporate parent, Acxiom Ltd., in January, it wanted to make a distinctive mark in a crowded business. As the IT arm of the marketing technology and services giant, the organization had a long reputation as an expert in managing mainframe infrastructure, but with mainframe installations on the decline, it needed to blaze a path toward helping customers grow.

Because mainframes are expensive, the companies that use them can’t easily scale up at a moment’s notice. Many of Ensono’s customers are in the marketing and sales business, meaning that their capacity needs relate to the peaks and valleys of campaigns. If Ensono could provide better forecasting, it could reduce slowdowns and save infrastructure costs by helping customers better balance their batch and online processing needs.

Holistic operations

“We take a holistic approach to IT operations management,” said Tim Beerman, Ensono’s chief technology officer. “We felt predictive analysis would enable us to deliver more value.”

The company conducted a rigorous technical comparison of several vendors of performance management suites and settled on TrueSight Operations Management analytics-driven software from BMC Software Inc. “We saw that BMC has come a long way” from its mainframe performance monitoring roots, Beerman said. “It’s way past telling you when the CPU is running hot. It’s now providing visibility and analytics into trends and taking proactive actions.”

BMC has a 35-year history of helping IT operations managers run their data centers more efficiently. TrueSight Operations Management is an analytics-driven evolution of the company’s traditional monitoring tools. It combines event, application and impact management with data analytics to identify, prioritize and resolve performance and availability issues across hybrid environments, including on-premise and cloud infrastructure. BMC says IT operations staff can build simple application models in under five minutes, and that the software’s proactive analytics can learn the behavior of an application and reduce false alarms by up to 90 percent.

Which is exactly what Ensonoo needed to fulfill its holistic approach. TrueSight Operations Management “is not just reacting to what’s taking place, but instrumenting and tooling to react to trends and look forward,” Beerman said.

Complexity has moved

Despite the rise of virtualization, microservices and automation, managing complex IT infrastructure has in many ways become more difficult. “You’re abstracting away from the infrastructure to what’s happening at the services level,” Beerman said. Managing core infrastructure may now be easier, but multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures require a view across a broader framework. “The complexities have moved,” Beerman said.

Ensono is in the process of updating its current data centers and will be fully running with the BMC suite within a couple of months. In lab tests, TrueSight Operations Management has proven capable of monitoring and predicting workloads across a range of platforms, including on-premise mainframes, private and public cloud. “We can see what’s happening in reaction to a marketing campaign the customer is running and how that relates to their future infrastructure needs,” Beerman said. “We can see what spikes are coming, how that relates to infrastructure on the back end and then tie that visibility into the underlying IT resources.”

The business payoff is not only in customer satisfaction by also resource efficiency. “The more we can leverage these kinds of tools, we can get ahead of problems, do things outside of maintenance windows and make recommendations that don’t involve buying hardware at the last minute,” the CTO said.

BMC, which has been reinventing its business since it was taken private by a group of investors nearly three years ago, is in step with what large customers like Ensono need, Beerman added. “BMC has not only what we need today but for the future as well.”

Photo by Bob Mical via Flickr CC