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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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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

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

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...