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If You Are Looking to Invest in Advanced Analytics for IT, Exactly What Should You Be Shopping For? Part 1: Cost Advantage

Dennis Drogseth

This is the fourth in my series of blogs inspired by EMA's AIA buyer's guide — directed at helping IT invest in Advanced IT Analytics (AIA), what the industry more commonly calls "Operational Analytics." The goal was to create a "Consumer's Report" approach. And to do that we took it one step further. We created what we called "Shopping Cart Criteria" based on our prior research on AIA adoptions over the past three years.

We divided the sixteen shopping cart criteria into three parts:

■ Cost advantage

■ Environments

■ Scenarios

I will address each of these criteria separately in the next three blogs. In this blog, I'm going to address cost advantage.

Cost, overhead, and time to value are often key challenges in adopting AIA solutions. In the past, these factors have often been especially onerous. But we saw strong levels of improvement among many vendors, and surprising areas of innovation among others. For instance, four of the vendors in our buyer's guide were primarily SaaS. And three had SaaS options as well as on-premise.

For cost, we provided pricing models and maintenance fee percentages. Then we dove into three critical areas:

■ Time to Value

■ Administration and Support

■ Toolset Consolidation

Time to Value

"Time to value" is defined differently by different vendors, which we captured based on the data we were provided as well as phone interviews. We documented factors relevant to ease of deployment, time to learn unique environments, and proof points from deployment interviews, with special weight to documented times for achieving critical strategic results. In our research, we saw valid assessments ranging from meaningful value delivered within a single day, and in fact in two cases within several hours, to more conservative estimates in terms of weeks and months.

Administration and Support

Here we looked at design and upgrade requirements, as well as insights into administrative overhead from deployments, as well as maintenance options and costs. We gave serious weight to the breadth and depth of professional services offered — querying vendors on a list of options ranging from "planning and deployment" (which was provided by all but one vendor) to support for "business activity management" (supported only by two).

Toolset Consolidation

One of the most compelling reasons for investing in AIA is toolset consolidation — which can bring both OpEx and CapEx cost savings. For this criterion, we considered breadth and ease of integrations, breadth of effective stakeholder support, and proof points from commentaries in deployments. The number of fully supported integrations we saw across our thirteen vendors ranged from 10 to more than 100 out-of-the-box. We also noticed a growing trend not only to assimilate data from monitoring and other sources, but also to promote data outward to third-party tools and dashboards, as well as IT service management solutions for workflow, trouble ticketing, and in some cases CMDB/CMS updates.

Read Part 2: Enivornments

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

If You Are Looking to Invest in Advanced Analytics for IT, Exactly What Should You Be Shopping For? Part 1: Cost Advantage

Dennis Drogseth

This is the fourth in my series of blogs inspired by EMA's AIA buyer's guide — directed at helping IT invest in Advanced IT Analytics (AIA), what the industry more commonly calls "Operational Analytics." The goal was to create a "Consumer's Report" approach. And to do that we took it one step further. We created what we called "Shopping Cart Criteria" based on our prior research on AIA adoptions over the past three years.

We divided the sixteen shopping cart criteria into three parts:

■ Cost advantage

■ Environments

■ Scenarios

I will address each of these criteria separately in the next three blogs. In this blog, I'm going to address cost advantage.

Cost, overhead, and time to value are often key challenges in adopting AIA solutions. In the past, these factors have often been especially onerous. But we saw strong levels of improvement among many vendors, and surprising areas of innovation among others. For instance, four of the vendors in our buyer's guide were primarily SaaS. And three had SaaS options as well as on-premise.

For cost, we provided pricing models and maintenance fee percentages. Then we dove into three critical areas:

■ Time to Value

■ Administration and Support

■ Toolset Consolidation

Time to Value

"Time to value" is defined differently by different vendors, which we captured based on the data we were provided as well as phone interviews. We documented factors relevant to ease of deployment, time to learn unique environments, and proof points from deployment interviews, with special weight to documented times for achieving critical strategic results. In our research, we saw valid assessments ranging from meaningful value delivered within a single day, and in fact in two cases within several hours, to more conservative estimates in terms of weeks and months.

Administration and Support

Here we looked at design and upgrade requirements, as well as insights into administrative overhead from deployments, as well as maintenance options and costs. We gave serious weight to the breadth and depth of professional services offered — querying vendors on a list of options ranging from "planning and deployment" (which was provided by all but one vendor) to support for "business activity management" (supported only by two).

Toolset Consolidation

One of the most compelling reasons for investing in AIA is toolset consolidation — which can bring both OpEx and CapEx cost savings. For this criterion, we considered breadth and ease of integrations, breadth of effective stakeholder support, and proof points from commentaries in deployments. The number of fully supported integrations we saw across our thirteen vendors ranged from 10 to more than 100 out-of-the-box. We also noticed a growing trend not only to assimilate data from monitoring and other sources, but also to promote data outward to third-party tools and dashboards, as well as IT service management solutions for workflow, trouble ticketing, and in some cases CMDB/CMS updates.

Read Part 2: Enivornments

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...