Need for Fast Analytics Across All Kinds of Healthcare Data Spurs Converged S...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how a triumvirate of big players have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability across disparate data types for the healthcare industry.
The UNIX Evolution: An Innovative History reaches a 20-Year MilestoneDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how UNIX has evolved in the 20-year history of UNIX and the role of The Open Group in maintaining and updating the standard.
Rolta AdvizeX Experts on Hastening Time to Value for Big Data Analytics in He...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on using the right balance between open source and commercial IT products to create a big data capability for the long-term.
Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups Make Leap to Cloud...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Using a Big Data Solution Helps Conservation International Identify and Proac...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a conservation group, partnering with HP, is bringing real-time environmental data into the hands of policy decisions-makers.
Need for Fast Analytics Across All Kinds of Healthcare Data Spurs Converged S...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how a triumvirate of big players have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability across disparate data types for the healthcare industry.
The UNIX Evolution: An Innovative History reaches a 20-Year MilestoneDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how UNIX has evolved in the 20-year history of UNIX and the role of The Open Group in maintaining and updating the standard.
Rolta AdvizeX Experts on Hastening Time to Value for Big Data Analytics in He...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on using the right balance between open source and commercial IT products to create a big data capability for the long-term.
Using Testing as a Service, Globe Testing Helping Startups Make Leap to Cloud...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how Globe Testing is pushing the envelope on Agile development and applications development management using HP tools and platforms.
Using a Big Data Solution Helps Conservation International Identify and Proac...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a conservation group, partnering with HP, is bringing real-time environmental data into the hands of policy decisions-makers.
Intralinks Uses Hybrid Computing to Blaze a Compliance Trail Across the Regul...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how regulations around data sovereignty are forcing enterprises to consider new approaches to data, intellectual property, and cloud collaboration services.
Putting Buyers and Sellers in the Best Light, How Etsy Leverages Big Data for...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how Etsy uses data science to improve their buyers and sellers’ experience as well as theiown corporate destiny.
SAP Ariba Chief Strategy Officer on The Digitization of Business and the Futu...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them portends new and higher degrees of business innovation.
How New York Genome Center Manages the Massive Data Generated from DNA Sequen...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how the drive to better diagnose diseases and develop more effective treatments is aided by swift, cost efficient, and accessible big data analytics infrastructure.
A Tale of Two IT Departments, or How Governance is Essential in the Hybrid Cl...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how two organizations have been improving their application’s performance via total performance monitoring and metrics.
How Big Data Generates New Insights into What’s Happening in Tropical Ecosyst...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how large-scale monitoring of rainforest, biodiversity and climate has been enabled and accelerated by cutting-edge, big-data capture, retrieval and analysis.
'Extreme Apps’ Approach to Analysis Makes On-Site Retail Experience King AgainDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how technology providers have teamed as an ecosystem to develop new dynamic and rapid analysis capabilities for the retail industry.
How INOVVO Delivers Analysis that Leads to Greater User Retention and Loyalty...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advanced analytics drawing on multiple data sources provides wireless operators improved interactions with their subscribers and enhances customer experience through personalized insights.
How New Technology Trends Will Disrupt the Very Nature of Business Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how major new trends and technology are translating into disruption, and for the innovative business -- opportunity.
How HTC Centralizes Storage Management to Gain Visibility, Reduce Costs and I...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully.
The PPT is intended to provide an open discussion on the subject matter covered in the 30 + slides.The knowledge collected and shared here has culminated from thousands of hours with SMEs and practitioners dedicated to the transformation of the power grid, the creation of an industrial internet and finally putting this knowledge to practical use so that a knowledge economy can be realized and sustained for all.
The challenges are daunting but not impossible to overcome.Change is needed in how we solve such complex problems by actively seeking new pathways that are less traveled. One only needs to draw from the courage one needs to take the first step in a thousand mile journey.
Intralinks Uses Hybrid Computing to Blaze a Compliance Trail Across the Regul...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how regulations around data sovereignty are forcing enterprises to consider new approaches to data, intellectual property, and cloud collaboration services.
Putting Buyers and Sellers in the Best Light, How Etsy Leverages Big Data for...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how Etsy uses data science to improve their buyers and sellers’ experience as well as theiown corporate destiny.
SAP Ariba Chief Strategy Officer on The Digitization of Business and the Futu...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them portends new and higher degrees of business innovation.
How New York Genome Center Manages the Massive Data Generated from DNA Sequen...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how the drive to better diagnose diseases and develop more effective treatments is aided by swift, cost efficient, and accessible big data analytics infrastructure.
A Tale of Two IT Departments, or How Governance is Essential in the Hybrid Cl...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how two organizations have been improving their application’s performance via total performance monitoring and metrics.
How Big Data Generates New Insights into What’s Happening in Tropical Ecosyst...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how large-scale monitoring of rainforest, biodiversity and climate has been enabled and accelerated by cutting-edge, big-data capture, retrieval and analysis.
'Extreme Apps’ Approach to Analysis Makes On-Site Retail Experience King AgainDana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how technology providers have teamed as an ecosystem to develop new dynamic and rapid analysis capabilities for the retail industry.
How INOVVO Delivers Analysis that Leads to Greater User Retention and Loyalty...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how advanced analytics drawing on multiple data sources provides wireless operators improved interactions with their subscribers and enhances customer experience through personalized insights.
How New Technology Trends Will Disrupt the Very Nature of Business Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how major new trends and technology are translating into disruption, and for the innovative business -- opportunity.
How HTC Centralizes Storage Management to Gain Visibility, Reduce Costs and I...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on why bringing a common management view in to play improves problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully.
The PPT is intended to provide an open discussion on the subject matter covered in the 30 + slides.The knowledge collected and shared here has culminated from thousands of hours with SMEs and practitioners dedicated to the transformation of the power grid, the creation of an industrial internet and finally putting this knowledge to practical use so that a knowledge economy can be realized and sustained for all.
The challenges are daunting but not impossible to overcome.Change is needed in how we solve such complex problems by actively seeking new pathways that are less traveled. One only needs to draw from the courage one needs to take the first step in a thousand mile journey.
(CMP404) Cloud Rendering at Walt Disney Animation StudiosAmazon Web Services
"Each year, the technical complexity of making the next great Walt Disney Animation Studios film increases. Animation and Visual FX studios continue to push the bounds of what is possible in computer graphics. This complexity drives rapid technological growth in both computational resources and storage to the point that it exceeds what we can physically provide with our on-premise compute cluster. As a result, we have started to adopt a hybrid approach with the cloud.
This session addresses the hurdles that animation and VFX studios face and focuses on automation of 'disposable' components (specifically infrastructure, licensing, fleet management, data and dependency management in a large-scale batch workload). We apply these general cloud techniques and utilities to an animation/VFX workload and push the limits with a very large scale cloud renderfarm deployment.
The team from Walt Disney Animation Studios walks through how they use cloud technologies to maximize render capacity. Learn how to leverage high-performance storage (like Amazon EFS), Amazon EC2 networking and the latest EC2 Spot features to provide a fully functional renderfarm at production-quality scale."
Along with the arrival of BigData, a parallel yet less well known but significant change to the way we process data has occurred. Data is getting faster! Business models are changing radically based on the ability to be first to know insights and act appropriately to keep the customer, prevent the breakdown or save the patient. In essence, knowing something now is overriding knowing everything later. Stream processing engines allow us to blend event streams from different internal and external sources to gain insights in real time. This talk will discuss the need for streaming, business models it can change, new applications it allows and why Apache Flink enables these applications. Apache Flink is a top Level Apache Project for real time stream processing at scale. It is a high throughput, low latency, fault tolerant, distributed, state based stream processing engine. Flink has associated Polyglot APIs (Scala, Python, Java) for manipulating streams, a Complex Event Processor for monitoring and alerting on the streams and integration points with other big data ecosystem tooling.
Jeff Davis
UNIQUE indexes have long held a unique position among constraints: they are the only way to express a constraint that two tuples in a table conflict without resorting to triggers and locks (which severely impact performance). But what if you want to impose the constraint that one person can't be in two places at the same time? In other words, you have a schedule, and you want to be sure that two periods of time for the same person do not overlap. This is nearly impossible to do efficiently with the current version of PostgreSQL -- and most other database systems. I will be presenting Exclusion Constraints, which has been accepted for the next PostgreSQL release, along with the PERIOD data type (available now from PgFoundry). I will show how these can, together, offer a fast, scalable, and highly concurrent solution to a very common business requirement. A business requirement is still a requirement even if your current database system can't do it!
(SEC303) Architecting for End-To-End Security in the EnterpriseAmazon Web Services
This session tells the story of how security-minded enterprises provide end-to-end protection of their sensitive data in AWS. Learn about the enterprise security architecture decisions made by Fortune 500 organizations during actual sensitive workload deployments as told by the AWS professional service security, risk, and compliance team members who lived them. In this technical walkthrough, we share lessons learned from the development of enterprise security strategy, security use-case development, end-to-end security architecture and service composition, security configuration decisions, and the creation of AWS security operations playbooks to support the architecture.
Delivering a production Cloud Foundry Environment with Bosh | anyninesanynines GmbH
anynines CEO Julian Fischer leads through how to build a failure proof Cloud Foundry environment using infrastructure availability zones with Bosh including a SPOF-free Cloud Foundry runtime and on-demand provisioning data services.
Small Cell State of the Nation presentation given by ThinkSmallCell at Small Cell Forum stand of Mobile World Congress 2016. Compares the commercial success of Carrier Wi-Fi, Small Cells, DAS and Remote Radio Heads with discussion of how the market is likely to evolve.
Wall Street Derivative Risk Solutions Using GeodeVMware Tanzu
SpringOne Platform 2016
Speaker: Andre Langevin; Consultant, CIBC
In this talk, I will discuss how Geode forms the core of many Wall Street derivative risk solutions. By externalizing risk from trading systems, Geode-based solutions provide cross-product risk management at speeds suitable for automated hedging, while simultaneously eliminating the back office costs associated with traditional trading system based solutions.
Oracle 11g New Features Out-of-the-Box by Alex Gorbachev (from Sydney Oracle ...Alex Gorbachev
Learn some of the Oracle 11g gems that often gets unnoticed. Features that are not revolutionary in nature but can greatly simplify day-to-day life of any Oracle DBA.
The presentation is based on the material presented by Christo Kutrovsky at the Oracle Open World 2007 and later used by me to produce content for this presentation at the IOUG Collaborate 2008.
2016 Cloud vs. On Premise Brand Leader Survey ReportIT Brand Pulse
This IT Brand Pulse mini-report includes only market leader data from the independent, non-sponsored survey covering six categories of brand leadership–Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service & Support and Innovation–for fourteen classes of Cloud Service and On-Premise Providers.
Complete survey data for each product category is available. Please contact us at info@itbrandpulse.com for information and pricing.
Read the 2016 Cloud and On-Premise Brand Leader Survey Press Release: http://www.itbrandpulse.com/press-release/it-pros-vote-2016-cloud-and-on-premise-brand-leaders/
Organizations often struggle to select and implement big data projects that produce meaningful results.
Learning from the success and failure of other organizations will help you identify common pitfalls and get more value from your big data initiatives. A new study from 451 research takes an in-depth look into six organizations and their cloud-based big data adoption efforts.
In this webinar, we will share some of the key findings from this research and see how organizations across a variety of industries use the Cloud to drive measurable value from big data. You will learn the challenges they faced, the tools they use to address these challenges, and the benefits of using AWS Cloud to develop and deploy big data solutions.
Learning Objectives:
Hear the experiences of organizations in a variety of industries, including a mobile technology analytics platform provider; a mobile application platform provider; a financial services regulator; a technology consultancy; a marketing strategy firm; and a mainstream financial services firm
Identify some of the challenges of deploying big data solutions
Learn 5 ways the Cloud delivers value for big data users
Understand the benefits of using the AWS Cloud to develop and deploy big data solutions
Who Should Attend:
Business & technical decision makers, architects and director-level or above of development for Big Data solutions, business analysts, data scientists, VP/Directors of engineering, CIOs, CTOs
How Modern Operational Services Leads to More Self-Managing, Self-Healing, an...Dana Gardner
A discussion on how Hewlett Packard Enterprise Pointnext Services is reinventing the experience of IT support to increasingly rely on automation, analytics, and agility.
Enterprise Mobile and Client Management Demands a Rethinking of Work, Play an...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on the new landscape sculpted by the increasing use of mobile and BYOD and how Dell is helping companies navigate that terrain.
HP Simplifies Foundation Care Services to Deliver Just-in-Time Pan-IT Support Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on how HP has allowed CIOs to make easier choices about which support plan fits their need best at the most effective cost.
The Evolution of Data Center Infrastructure Has Now Ushered in The Era of Dat...Dana Gardner
A discussion on how intelligent data center designs and components are delivering what amounts to data centers-as-a-service to SMBs, enterprises, and public sector agencies.
How Digital Transformation Navigates Disruption to Chart A Better Course to t...Dana Gardner
A discussion on how HPE Pointnext Services advises organizations on using digital transformation to take advantage of new and emerging market opportunities.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major telecom company has improved its IT performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for its businesses and end users alike.
Fast-Changing Demands on Data Centers Drives the Need for Automated Data Cent...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how organization need to deal with the impact that IT and big data is having on data centers and how DCIM can help.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and Grafana
IT Support Gains Automation and Intelligence to Bring Self-Service to Both Legacy and Mobile Users
1. IT Support Gains Automation and Intelligence to Bring Self-
Service to Both Legacy and Mobile Users
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how automation, self service, and analytics are
combining to allow IT helpdesks to do more for less.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HPE Discover Podcast Series.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and
moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making
an impact on people’s lives.
Our next IT support thought leadership discussion highlights how automation,
self-service and big data analytics are combining to allow IT helpdesks to do
more for less.
We will see how automation and ITSM-driven insights endow helpdesk
personnel with more knowledge and provide a single point of support for end users, regardless of
their needs and still catering to their preferred method of help.
Here to share the latest on how IT support is advancing in the era of bring your own device
(BYOD), cloud, and tight budgets, we're joined by three experts. Please allow me to introduce
you to David Blackeby, Program Solution Owner for Cloud Services at Sopra Steria, and he is
based in the UK. Welcome, David.
Deliver an Automated
Seamless SaaS Service Desk
Start your Service Anywhere Trial
David Blackeby: Good morning.
Gardner: We're also here with Diana Wosik. She is Group Program Manager at Sopra
Steria and she's based in Poland. Welcome, Diana.
Diana Wosik: Good morning.
Gardner: And we're here with Mark Laird. He is Group Technical Architect at
Sopra Steria and he is also based in the UK. Welcome, Mark.
Mark Laird: Good morning.
Page 1
Gardner
2. Gardner: Thanks for joining us everyone. Let’s start at a high level and talk about how support
has changed and why enabling self-service is so important nowadays. Mark, why is this self-
service such an important issue when it comes to IT helpdesk?
Laird: For us, there are probably a number of issues. We have a range across our customer base,
from millennials, who are used to dealing with websites, mobile, tablets, who really don’t want
to call a call center, and don’t want to end up talking to somebody on the phone,
through to the legacy users who are much more used to picking up the phone,
asking for help, and talking through a problem.
So they're looking for a more human approach, human interaction, versus the
millennials who want to fix it themselves, want to do it quickly, and really don’t
want to talk to somebody about it. That’s introducing a range of problems and
challenges.
Gardner: It sounds as if you need to deliver support in a spectrum of ways, more medium, if
you will, but perhaps with a common core to that support function.
Underlying answer
Laird: The underlying answer to the problem, whatever the problem is, is likely to be the
same. If you have a log-on issue, it will be a password reset or an account issue. It’s how you get
that information out to the person who has the challenge.
If it’s a person on the phone, it's easy enough to talk them through it. But if you have somebody
who is coming through a self-service portal, you have to provide them with that same
information. So yes, at times, you connect a single call, a single database, and send your
knowledge environment to a range of callers.
Gardner: David, we're being called on here to deliver support across the spectrum of modalities,
methods, or even latency, but at the same time, many of the world governments are asking for
austerity and savings in their budgets for IT. How are we able to reconcile this need for more
variety and the delivery of helpdesk services, but cutting costs at the same time? Is there any way
to reconcile them?
Blackeby: It’s part of the core challenge in the current world with austerity,
where both our public and private customers are looking at how they can do more
for less money.
IT has continuing cost pressures to reduce cost and overhead of providing IT. At
the same time, we talk about new methods of self-service, different types of
platforms and different types of devices and this multi-channel effect that costs
time, effort and money to invest in these technologies.
Page 2
Laird
Blackeby
3. That’s the underlying driver for how it comes down to the service provider to do that. The only
way we can do that is looking at industrializing that service delivery and automating processes,
moving activities that may have previously been done by Level 2 and Level 3 resources. We're
looking at how we can move those to cheaper or lower-cost resources, such as a service desk, or
in an ideal world, remove them entirely from the cost chain and drive the automation. So the
activity increases the speed and the agility while reducing the cost of delivering the service.
Gardner: Diana, another variable in the mix here is the increased use of mobile devices, of
fluidity of the user in terms of their geography, their location, even the time of day that they
might be working, and of course there is a plethora of devices, if you want to bring your own
device organization. How is mobility affecting this equation for a more complex approach to
helpdesk?
Wosik: Mobility is very important nowadays, because everybody uses mobile devices, every
single day. We need to ensure a single point of contact, so they all can approach their helpdesk at
any time they need, and they need the availability 24×7 for that.
Gardner: So, we've established that we have a need for more variability,
addressing more types of help from more types of users. Tell me a bit more,
Mark, about automation and self-service and how they support one another?
What is it about automating processes that endows the user with more access
to help, but then maybe that same feedback loop between the user and the
support infrastructure can be brought to bear on future issues?
Laird: Automation is doing the same thing in a repeated, controlled fashion. Whether it’s a
password reset or the delivery of a service or a server, what you're doing is scripting. You're
putting into a workflow a process that a user can call on. Whether that user is an end user, an end
customer, or in fact one of the operations team, it allows them to do that fairly standard process
in a repeated quality controlled fashion.
And that can allow lower cost, potentially, as David said, bringing the tasks from maybe a
qualified Level 3 expensive support person into an operations center, or in fact, maybe on to the
self-service portal, where you're not having to give access to systems to end users, but you are
allowing them to run a script.
Double benefit
Gardner: David, perhaps you could help me understand why self-service is a benefit to both
the receiver of the help, the end user, as well as the organization. What is it about self-service
that refines process and benefits the deliverer of the help, but at the same time, gives more speed
or perhaps options to the receiver of the help?
Blackeby: Essentially it supports both sides of the equation. From an end user perspective, it’s
that instant gratification, I can go into a centralized portal. I can do my search or raise my request
Page 3
Wosik
4. and I can be instantly satisfied with the response. I could be presented with a knowledge article
that tells me how to fix my particular issue.
If I'm requesting a new service to be delivered through orchestration in the back end, I can make
my request, and the orchestration comes in and drives the automated delivery of that service to
me. So it increases the agility for the user and it reduces delays.
From the other side of the equation, looking at it from a service provider’s perspective, the more
work the user can do themselves takes cost away from us as a service provider.
Historically, a user would have called the service desk, so as a part of that conversation you need
to understand who the user is to provide them the service. Make sure it’s a service that they are
potentially allowed to have and sort of help through the process. That means that we need a body
to answer the phone, and the amount of time that we spend on a typical call from the user drives
the cost from a support center perspective.
Even if you have a scenario where a user using the portal today, and still need ultimately a
human interaction to deliver that service, we already know who they are, and will have asked
relevant questions upfront which means we don’t have to ask the questions later on down the line
when we try to deliver a service. That reduces the handling time by our agents and by the people
who are delivering them the service.
Gardner: Before we dig into the how you do this, now that we have established why it's an
important new aspect of helpdesk, Diana, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about Sopra Steria,
the organization, and to what degree you're supporting helpdesks in your markets?
Wosik: I can give you a good example of how it works in Poland and how the automation helps
us out regarding the functionality of helpdesk.
We apply quite a few solutions, like virtual machine (VM) provisioning that has been
automatically provisions the machines aligned to customer needs. There is a monitoring tool that
is automated. So not only we monitor whatever is going on, but we're also able to answer the
needs very quickly, thanks to our automation services.
And then there's the thing regarding the automatic deployment of our releases. Whenever there's
a new release of the system, we don’t need a bunch of people who are going to work on it. We
can also deploy it very quickly in production, and that helps us to bring the solution as quickly as
possible to our customer.
Higher-level view
Gardner: David or Mark, could you give us a higher-level view of Sopra Steria the
organization and to what degree helpdesk support is part of a larger portfolio of services?
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5. Laird: We're a European IT company. We run IT for a wide range of European customers. We
deliver services. We write software. We do business process outsourcing. Essentially, if there's a
computer involved in there somewhere, that’s what we do.
We have a presence in 27 countries across Europe, in India, and then smaller offices in
Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. We have 36,500 staff, and an annual turnover of about 3.5
billion euros. So, we're a reasonably large company, one of the top 10 European IT companies.
For us, the service desk is the single point of contact. For all of our customers, that is their point
of contact with us, whether it’s through the Global Delivery Center in Poland, where we're
offering French, German, English, small amounts of Spanish and Italian, or through some of the
in-country service desks, such as the ones we have in France and the UK. So that is our single
point of contact and it’s of key importance to us.
Blackeby: Just to follow on from that, the key piece of that is that it’s an intelligent service desk
as opposed to a helpdesk. It’s really about having the phones manned by intelligent people who
are able to both try and fix or resolve issues straight away, as opposed to just logging a call,
creating a ticket, and passing it off to someone else.
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Gardner: Let’s dig into that a little bit. How is it that we're providing those individuals on the
front line with better knowledge? Are they getting more tools? Are they getting more data? Is this
really just correlating a single point of access to the existing data? Is it all of the above? How do
we empower those people to do this difficult helpdesk job better?
Blackeby: In the same way that we try to have a single point of entry for users, for a portal, it’s
really the same piece for our support staff as well.
While there are many systems that underpin our service delivery, the key element we try to strive
for is that the operators have a single place to work. It’s very much thorough the integration of
various systems and data sources into a centralized repository, so that the person that’s trying to
act on a ticket, request, or other activity has everything they need in one place, so they can
immediately see what the issue is, see what the request is, and then deliver the service to that end
user.
Gardner: It strikes me that whether it’s a helpdesk’s person or the end user, the more they use
this, the more the data can be collected, the more knowledge can be harnessed from the
interactions, and therefore brought back through a feedback loop into the next level of support.
Is the cost savings on this ultimately about you're better able to understand the market because of
the self-service, because of these portal approaches? Is that a big part of it?
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6. Key items
Blackeby: It feeds into that. If you're looking at industrializing or automating, you're really
looking for repeatable activities that are done time and time again. The data helps to support that.
It identifies suitable candidates that are high volume, high throughput transactions that are really
the key things that you want to focus on in terms of introducing automation into the
environment, or automation into task elements in a given process. So, over time, it’s pretty much
what we are doing.
As Mark mentioned, we're a managed service provider (MSP), providing the services across
many customers. So, a lot of the economies of scale we get are best practices that we apply in
one account or particular scenarios or issues that we see in one, we can see correlations in other
customer accounts as well. So we can bring those efficiencies and bring that investment we make
and automation through our back office processes to benefit multiple customers.
Wosik: What is very well known right now is big data and smart analytics that will help us to
gather all the information from our customers, so the more tickets and the more incidents are
logged, the more information you can gather as well. This is gathered and analyzed. This is when
we can provide more accurate and quicker answers to our customers. It’s something that has
really impacted our quality of service.
Gardner: Let’s look also back to the systems, when we think about gathering information, more
and more big data gathered from logs and other output data from the systems themselves, from
the platforms. How are you at Sopra Steria managing the knowledge gathering from your
systems and then applying that into this other knowledge base about the activities on your
helpdesk and from the self-help portal?
Laird: We're looking at some of the new technologies around smart analytics and big data, but
we're starting with some of the simpler approaches, which as David alluded to and as Diana
mentioned earlier, are just the simple high-volume transactions, the things that we do on a
regular basis that are maybe quality issues or maybe they are just time consuming, but those are
the key ones we're after.
Then, over the next three to six months, as we move into some of the newer technologies around
smart analytics, for example, we'll be taking some of the incidents and things coming into service
desk, into the service management system, and looking at those and doing problem management
on them.
Have we suddenly got an influx of incidents around our exchange platform? Is that actually
indicating that there is an underlying problem or an underlying system error that we need to fix?
It’s starting to link all the various systems, whether it’s the business service monitoring system to
the back end that the operations teams are using, or the service management platforms at the
front that our service desk people are using, pulling all those together, tying them in with, for
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7. example, the configuration management platform, so that people are seeing the same
information, both from a front-end user impacting view, or from a back-end infrastructure and
service view.
Gardner: And I should think that would also help in more agility to do root-cause analysis and
making it faster to time for resolution.
Automate and fix
Laird: Exactly. That back goes back to when we fix problems, close incidents, and if there's a
resolution in there, doing the analysis on them to identify common fixes. If an incident comes in
or a particular type of incident comes in and we always do the same thing to it, we can automate
that. We can actually either get the service desk or helpdesk people access to that quick fix or just
automate it right at the start, so when that issue occurs, we automate and fix.
In some cases, that’s moving out of the customer’s view completely. We're fixing it almost before
there's an impact.
Gardner: We've talked a bit about making these helpdesk approaches better from the end-user
perspective, empowering the personnel in the helpdesk organization itself, and finding some new
technologies and analysis benefits to propel that forward, but I would like to go back to the issue
of cost.
How are we wringing out more cost from this process, perhaps things like identifying automation
and what’s called shift left, better or earlier in the process. So, where are we targeting to get the
most results when it comes to cost reduction in all of this?
Blackeby: It really talks about how people do transactions, what things are continually occurring
that have a high amount of touch points to them. Some of that comes out through time.
One of the challenges we have when we take on a new customer is that you don’t have the
excellent benefit of hindsight around how the organization works and what their common
problems are. So, as we take on a new customer or a new contract, we have the ability to go and
talk to their existing service provider or their in-house person. A lot of that comes out over time.
There are some standard things that we can recognize, because we have similar customers in
similar marketplaces or industries and things that we would expect to get from the outset, and by
looking at things like password reset tools and things like that are common and applicable across
all types of clients.
Then, it’s a case of looking at your volumetrics over time, your repeatable activities, incidents
and requests, identifying how can we drive the agility and improve the service levels that we're
delivering, and at the same time, reduce cost.
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8. Take a simple thing like software deployment to users machines, historically, that might have
been a call to the service desk. They might have dispatched a desk-side engineer or used remote
control to be able to connect with a user’s device to go and install the software.
These days, more and more commonly, we can use software distribution, or automated software
push tools, that don’t require human interaction at all. We can automatically deploy software to
the user.
Zero-touch environment
That moves into that zero-touch type of environment. Through a portal request, we can manage
the workflow around any approval activities. Then once fully approved, through the orchestration
at the back-end, we can interface by software deployment solution to automate the delivery of
that software to that endpoint device.
And we support many different types of devices now. We've seen more and more cases where not
only are we talking about physical desktops or laptops, but also around how we manage mobile
devices and tablet type devices as well, using mobility and mobile device management solutions.
Gardner: Let’s look at some of these solutions in practice. Sopra Steria has been doing this for,
as you say, some time and across a large marketplace. Do you have any examples that
demonstrate when you can do this well that you get those benefits of self-help, common core
data, more knowledgeable helpdesk, reduce costs, all at the same time?
Laird: One of the solutions we looked at in Poland, certainly around automation, was a really
simple challenge that the operations team had as part of our Polish operation. Every morning,
backups from a particular customer was taking them in the region of one hour to produce a
backup report, look at the backup that had failed, re-run backups as appropriate, and then if
backups had failed maybe consistently for a couple of days, escalating that out to support team.
We automated the whole thing. It’s all automated using HPE Operations Orchestration. The
whole process now takes one of the team about five minutes in the morning, and it’s really a case
of checking the output from the system.
So, we've saved somewhere in the region of just under an hour everyday for one person. It
probably took two or three days to code the solution, but we're saving a significant amount of
time every day. We're getting a much better quality report, and we're able to pass that information
out to our second-line and third-line teams earlier in the day, it gives them much more time to fix
things.
One of the things that we've looked at now is automating the re-run of backups overnight. Rather
than letting them go to maybe two or three days, they're fixed overnight, and we run them within
the backup window. It's improving quality to the customer and a having significant impact on
savings to the operations team.
Page 8
9. Gardner: You mentioned the use of the HPE tools. Are there any other HPE platforms or
approaches that are helping you bring in this common data. We talked about the analysis earlier
that also helps in this equation of doing more with less.
HPE partner
Laird: We're an HPE partner. We have been for over 10 years now, and we have quite a range
of PE tools across the portfolio, whether that’s from things like the Application Lifecycle
Manager, through to HPE Service Manager.
We also have solutions like OMi doing things like event correlation, where we have events
coming in from the monitoring solutions, whether that’s from HPE SiteScope or Operations
Manager or from third party tools, like SCCM and some of the Nagios tools.
OMi is correlating those events and passing through to the service desk and the operations center
the ones that actually need to be looked at. We're filtering out more than 50 percent, 60 percent of
the alerts. It reduces our cost. We're filtering those alerts out at a much earlier point in the chain,
and with that, we're only raising incidents for ones that actually need to be escalated up to the
teams.
We're using tools and technology, to keep costs down and reduce the costs as far as we can.
Gardner: So as we think about being able to future-proof the support services, and by that I
mean being able to adapt to a millennial audience, more distribution points, more types of
helpdesk and automation, and that single portal, we also need to be thinking about being
backwards compatible. Some organizations do want more of that human touch, the interactions,
and perhaps some of the government organizations are interested in that as well.
What is it about the future direction of your services at Sopra Steria, some of the tools and
technologies that you are employing from HPE, that allows you to feel confident about being
both future proof and backwards compatible for your support?
Blackeby: One of the challenges that are coming more to the forefront these days is probably the
adoption of cloud services. It’s a disruptive influence on traditional IT and how IT is delivered.
It’s a challenge for us the service providers to adapt to these. You're talking about environments
that can be built in minutes, bringing a whole new way of working, very fluid environments with
auto-scaling where the number of resources that we are supporting and managing is growing and
shrinking dynamically over time. So that’s really had a big sort of impact on how we deliver
service.
We've recognized this and are looking at how we transform the service delivery. We're becoming
more reliant on the data that supports the service. So it’s very much around how we manage
Page 9
10. what’s out there, with a heavy reliance on things like configuration management systems, and
discovery of IT resources.
As Mark said, there are things like event correlation, looking at patterns, trends and events so
that we can increase the agility and really manage much higher volumes of applications, of
servers and of users with a smaller number of people or with the same number of people.
Gardner: It is very exciting a lot is going on.
Tools and technologies
Blackeby: As a ratio you might have a scenario of a support person looking after an average 40
servers to now having to deal with realms of managing, so there is a 100-plus servers, but it’s
only through the deployment of the tools and technologies that we can do that.
But at the same time we still have a large legacy estate and legacy clients and we still need to
support. So it’s really looking at how come we engineer our processes so that irrespective of
what we are talking about legacy physical server workloads or perhaps on premise virtualized
workloads as well as things that might be spun up inside Amazon Web Services or in Microsoft
Azure public cloud environments that we provide that consistent level of service and service
delivery irrespective of where the service is located or in which format it is delivered back to the
customer or users.
Gardner: When I speak to developer organizations and IT production organizations operations,
they're seeing a compression and a large degree of collaboration between development and
operations. Thus, the DevOps trend.
But when I listen to you, I'm hearing also a compression between operations and helpdesk in
such a way that it benefits the entire IT process in a more automated and the more software-
defined and the more data that’s made available, the tighter that compression seems to get. Am I
perhaps describing seeing this idea of helpdesk, support and operations becoming more
collaborative, more tightly aligned?
Laird: The whole concept of the operations team being hidden away in a back room and the
service desk being the public face is changing. They're becoming much more tightly aligned.
Things that the operations team is doing have an almost immediate impact on what the service
desk is looking at, and the service desk needs to have access to really all the information the
operations team has got.
When the user is on the phone and has a problem with a service, it’s good if the service desk can
actually say, "Yes, we know there's a problem and we know what the problem is. We have an
estimated fix time of 15 minutes." That gives the user the warm feeling that you're in control and
you know what you're doing.
Page 10
11. Gardner: Well great. I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how
automation, self service and analytics are combining to allow IT helpdesks to do more for less.
And we’ve seen how automation and ITSM-driven insights endow helpdesk personnel with more
knowledge and provide a single point of support for end users regardless of their needs, whether
it’s self-service or more of the traditional way of reaching support.
So, join me please in thanking our guests. We've been here today with David Blackeby, Program
Solutions Owner for Cloud Services at Sopra Steria. Thanks so much, David.
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Blackeby: Thank you.
Gardner: And we’ve also been joined by Diana Wosik, Group Program Manager at Sopra Steria
in Poland. Thank you so much, Diana.
Wosik: Thanks to you.
Gardner: And also thanks to Mark Laird, Group Technical Architect at Sopra Steria in the UK.
Thank you, Mark.
Laird: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this IT-support thought
leadership discussion.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back
next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how automation, self service, and analytics are
combining to allow IT helpdesks to do more for less. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2016. All rights reserved.
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