When your team delivers products or services better than the competition, you win. But delivering at scale is a taller order. The speed at which you can scale your operations - while becoming more efficient as you grow - can make the difference between being a flash in the pan and having a lasting, major impact on a global industry. If you’re a disruptive new solution, scaling up while innovating (and without becoming unmanageable) is the name of the game. If you’re facing disruptive new entrants to your established industry, your strategy likely includes taking advantage of the economies of scale; actually extracting economies from your scale is non-optional. Either way, scalability can be your friend or your foe. Ask yourself: will you commit to making scale a competitive advantage?
Excelling at scale is all about mastering the ratios and multipliers. Maybe you need to be “running at one-tenth the staffing ratio” of comparable organizations (as a customer told me last month), or maybe your 2013 revenue goals depend on your team knocking out projects 10x faster than last year. Either way, the good news is that you have options today that you didn’t have yesterday. Today, Zenoss announces the release of new, highly-scalable capabilities - built precisely for the busy IT teams who make good on the disruptive initiatives of the non-complacent businesses, academic institutions, and government organizations that are inventing the way forward. Zenoss Service Dynamics (ZSD) 4.2 will help you scale your operations in several ways:
- Deep familiarity with all the latest & greatest Cisco gear
- Picture that Matrix-like brainstem-download you always wanted; and that’s what we’ve done for ZSD. Got hundreds or thousands of Cisco devices, like most of our customers? Then you’ll enjoy doing something else with your days (or nights) while Zenoss automatically discovers, classifies, and models these devices for you. Is your IT environment changing a lot while you scale? No worries; Zenoss already excels at adjusting to dynamic networks. [If you’re lucky enough to be scaling up by adding Cisco converged infrastructure FlexPods to your Data Center, you’ll want to read part 2 - For Sale: Zenoss Cloud Service Assurance. Contact Your Cisco Sales Rep!]
- 50-90% faster user interface
- We’re big fans of “fast” over here, and we’re betting that’s something we have in common with you. We set ourselves a goal this release of making our user interface 50% faster for our customers’ large installations. And then we beat that, measuring nearly 90% faster instead. And the way we did it – including a new global catalog for all those heterogeneous devices you’ve got – makes more than just your network overview & drill-down screens faster; it also makes searching faster – both when you are searching manually and when the system is performing automated searches (like when it’s consolidating a batch of events and transforming them into 1 automated action). When ZSD can get you from here to there even faster, you’ll have fewer miles (or kilometers) to run before you can sleep.
- A background task engine
- Keep your staff moving down their to-do lists while your complex operational jobs get executed behind the scenes. Get it done in parallel to get it done at scale.
The Great Recession saw a lot of consolidation, deferred growth, and cost-cutting, but now most industries are looking at the new normal and considering the opportunities available in the upswing. Most customers are telling us they are analyzing the usage data that Zenoss collects for them, to plan for how and when they’ll be scaling up their resources. What will you make of this inflection point? Will scalability be on your side, or will the scale of others disrupt you?
We’ll be at both the LISA (Large Installation System Administrator) Conference and the Gartner Data Center Conference next month. We’d love to talk about whether having one tool (ZSD 4.2) to monitor your heterogeneous IT infrastructure would help you scale up for 2013 and beyond.
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