The problem of plenty is a good problem to have. The problem of having plenty of problems? The more the better. The way we see it, each problem is also an opportunity.
But what do you do when you have plenty of opportunities? Which one do you prioritize first? Well, we have all learnt Pareto principle in our schools, colleges etc. Quick revision: Choose the 20% problems that cause 80% of the mayhem. Simply put, choose the one that would drive the maximum impact.
Or is it?
Imagine this: You are a real estate developer. Which part of the building is most lucrative for your customer or brings the most eyeballs? The club house, the balcony view or maybe the interiors? Loads of growth gurus telling you – “build what customers want”. But is that what the customer really wants? A big club house or others? The first implied want is that the house should last. The customer does not say it. And no good builder will ask the customers if they want a building that lasts! At least I hope they do not. It is implied and understood.
So, despite the fact that customers might get glittery eyes about that deck balcony or the chic interiors, the builder builds the foundation first. Without the foundation, nothing sells – irrespective of the impact some of the features may have. And that’s what we have chosen to do – to build the foundation first.
Very few understand the convoluted nature of the problem that’s holding the infra industry back, fewer appreciate how crucial it is to build a strong foundation first before we take on the bigger pieces.
Here’s the foundation of the industry that’s missing imho:
No customer relies solely on a single hardware provider. Almost all firms & colleagues that I have worked with and spoke to in our lifetimes, at least have a dual sourcing strategy as a supply chain risk management measure, most have a multi-vendor sourcing strategy – which makes a heterogeneous environment a reality for more than 95% of the end customers. The rest 5% are heavily dependent on their server supplier – results in unwarranted hand twisting because you are at the mercy of your supplier. Could have been easily avoided if right risk management policies were in place/followed.
Anyway.
To manage their servers, some server providers (not every) provides their own dashboard to its customers. Some of these dashboards are fairly shallow, while some are marginally better. Most of these dashboards enable you to log in to one server at a time, most do not let you perform cluster level operations. Simplest example is – restarting 200 servers at a time. You literally need another set of console to do that and cannot do it from the server management dashboard.
Overall, the dashboards provided by server manufacturers are (a) not good enough to manage the servers they came along with, (b) not at all compatible with the entire heterogeneous fleet as they won’t talk to other makes & models; (c) non existent in some cases – ODMs fail miserably despite a fairly competitive hardware. So what does the customer do? Well, there are two customer personas here – (1) IT team, & (2) IT Infrastructure team. The IT team is a more tactical team – focusing on managing the distributed office network, laptops, other devices and sometimes even a back office like the call centre or warehouse. The IT Infrastructure team is the one that manages prod environments/platforms and are slightly more strategic in nature.
Now, to the question of what do our customers do:
- The IT team buys something called an IT Asset Management (ITAM) or a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tool. There are some pretty solid asset management tools out there in the market that solves the “asset management” or “inventory management” aspect of the problem – which IT teams are generally concerned with. And hence, these ITAM/DCIM tools augur well with them.
- The IT infra team goes into a loop – goes into a loop – struggles with ITAM/server dashboards, writes scripts to manage their problems themselves, code breaks, struggle continues. ITAM/DCIM is not sufficient as they are designed more from an inventory management perspective rather than health/performance monitoring pov. And they can’t dig in because they are dwelling on the surface.
So what are we doing?
I will keep this one simple – building a single pane of glass that gives the IT Infrastructure teams complete visibility of their heterogeneous server fleet. Think of us as no nonsense, one stop deep visibility into your rather unlooked server boxes.
How are we doing it?
That’s a secret! Book a demo to know more. Shout to us @ manish@asama.ai / sg@asama.ai.
Sharpey Speaks 