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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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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

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...