Why Advanced IT Analytics Deployments Show Benefits That Are Too Good To Miss

Dennis Drogseth

In my previous blog, I shared why I felt that advanced IT analytics (AIA) is both an area of intense innovation, while at the same time a set of technologies that are truly coming of age. No longer just a technological curiosity, AIA solutions are already transforming many IT organizations for the better.

As I also mentioned in last week's column, for our AIA Buyer's Guide we interviewed more than 20 deployments to help us better assess vendor strengths and limitations. So given the abundance of riches to work with, I've decided to illustrate several of the more prominent AIA benefit categories with actual real-world comments.

Toolset Consolidation and Mean Time to Repair

These are probably the two most preeminent values we saw from the thirteen vendors we evaluated for our buyer's guide. And to be honest this is also what we expected. AIA solutions can deliver impressive value in breaking through siloed introversion, to promote more data sharing — with much enhanced proactive relevance. Moreover, AIA solutions generally do this by providing a common layer of insight that promotes toolset consolidation — either by replacing many redundant or unnecessary siloed tools, or by assimilating leading indicators so that toolsets of secondary value can be dispensed with.

Here are just a few of many quotes to illustrate this:

We are moving to replace all the point solutions in the environment with our AIA toolset. This has the added benefit of saving us money on licenses as we eliminate unneeded, overlapping tools.
Technology company supporting federal health services

We estimate that we will save about $500,000 in toolset consolidation in monitoring. In terms of mean time to resolution (MTTR), we were averaging 2.5 hours per incident before. Now it's down to 38 minutes — a time reduction approaching 500%.
Global digital services company

The move to AIA allowed us to unify our operations team with a single-pane-of-glass view and drill-down so that we could share information more effectively. In the past we caught only 3% of our problems proactively. That percentage went up to 88%. Mean time to repair dropped from hours to as low as 12 minutes, and we are now able to automate resolutions to known issues.
Global provider of Internet-based entertainment 

Unifying IT with Improved Levels of Efficiency

As a corollary to toolset consolidation and improved MTTR, AIA solutions also provide a common fabric for IT teams to work more effectively together. As I pointed out last week, this is not necessarily limited to operations — it can often include other parts of IT and business stakeholders, as well.

Our stakeholders overall are loving [the AIA solution] with dramatic reductions in mean time to repair. This includes our DevOps teams—who are able to consume the data at a quick pace and almost instantaneously make adjustments to the development process. In the future, we're hoping to get more support for SecOps, with more integrated insight across security and operations—as we continue to get more and more of our IT stakeholders engaged.
Large government agency in the Pacific Rim

We are enjoying accelerated levels of correlation, automation, and information integration. We are also able to support more projects and more business opportunities without increasing headcount. It is enabling us to prepare for reaching more effective ways of working as an organization in the future.
Large European telecommunications service provider 

Improved Business Awareness with Improved Business Outcomes

Not all AIA solutions are yet focused on business outcomes and business performance, but a growing number are. EMA believes this is a high growth opportunity for AIA overall, in better aligning IT with business needs and business values, and maximizing both IT and business performance.

With our AIA solution we were able to gain a complete understanding of how all our business transactions were performing at one level and map this to critical business milestones at another level so that we were able to fully correlate business performance with transactional outcomes and requirements for compliance.
Large North American financial services company 

Rather than just looking proactively at different data, which was itself of value, with our new solution we were able to take that up a level and relate what was happening to business outcomes and business objectives. That caught our attention. And it was good for our business because most CIOs we sell to are focused on business outcomes. 
North American managed services provider 

Capacity Insights and Capacity Optimization

This is an example of a more specialized area within the broader AIA arena—at least among the thirteen vendors we examined. While almost all had valuable data and insights that could be applied to capacity planning, fewer than half offered capabilities, either directly or through fully supported integrations, for in-depth capacity optimization, and in some cases even including cost-related concerns.

We are able to gather data like saturation rates on 100% of our virtual machines. The lack of visibility into these services had been a huge problem for us, but now we have not only data but actionable information for managing those critical services. And the list goes on.
US health services company

When we roll up the information into "this product engineering team is running compute resources at 30 percent utilization," then everybody understands how well their money is being spent. I like to say, "We are taking the IT-speak out of the boardroom." For us, CapEx spending on additional compute infrastructure has decreased 25 percent this year. We expect it to go down another 30-40 percent next year.
International shipping company

There are many other benefits to AIA, some of which are implied in the above comments. These range from significant values in assimilating both public and private cloud resources, and support for DevOps, for SecOps (integrated security and operations), and even for the Internet of Things (IoT).

For more insight into what's really going on with leading innovators in AIA, I invite you once again to listen in on my on-demand webinar. And in the meantime, I welcome your comments and questions at drogseth@emausa.com.

Read the third blog in the series about AIA: 10 Points for Succeeding in Advanced IT Analytics (AIA) Adoption

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Why Advanced IT Analytics Deployments Show Benefits That Are Too Good To Miss

Dennis Drogseth

In my previous blog, I shared why I felt that advanced IT analytics (AIA) is both an area of intense innovation, while at the same time a set of technologies that are truly coming of age. No longer just a technological curiosity, AIA solutions are already transforming many IT organizations for the better.

As I also mentioned in last week's column, for our AIA Buyer's Guide we interviewed more than 20 deployments to help us better assess vendor strengths and limitations. So given the abundance of riches to work with, I've decided to illustrate several of the more prominent AIA benefit categories with actual real-world comments.

Toolset Consolidation and Mean Time to Repair

These are probably the two most preeminent values we saw from the thirteen vendors we evaluated for our buyer's guide. And to be honest this is also what we expected. AIA solutions can deliver impressive value in breaking through siloed introversion, to promote more data sharing — with much enhanced proactive relevance. Moreover, AIA solutions generally do this by providing a common layer of insight that promotes toolset consolidation — either by replacing many redundant or unnecessary siloed tools, or by assimilating leading indicators so that toolsets of secondary value can be dispensed with.

Here are just a few of many quotes to illustrate this:

We are moving to replace all the point solutions in the environment with our AIA toolset. This has the added benefit of saving us money on licenses as we eliminate unneeded, overlapping tools.
Technology company supporting federal health services

We estimate that we will save about $500,000 in toolset consolidation in monitoring. In terms of mean time to resolution (MTTR), we were averaging 2.5 hours per incident before. Now it's down to 38 minutes — a time reduction approaching 500%.
Global digital services company

The move to AIA allowed us to unify our operations team with a single-pane-of-glass view and drill-down so that we could share information more effectively. In the past we caught only 3% of our problems proactively. That percentage went up to 88%. Mean time to repair dropped from hours to as low as 12 minutes, and we are now able to automate resolutions to known issues.
Global provider of Internet-based entertainment 

Unifying IT with Improved Levels of Efficiency

As a corollary to toolset consolidation and improved MTTR, AIA solutions also provide a common fabric for IT teams to work more effectively together. As I pointed out last week, this is not necessarily limited to operations — it can often include other parts of IT and business stakeholders, as well.

Our stakeholders overall are loving [the AIA solution] with dramatic reductions in mean time to repair. This includes our DevOps teams—who are able to consume the data at a quick pace and almost instantaneously make adjustments to the development process. In the future, we're hoping to get more support for SecOps, with more integrated insight across security and operations—as we continue to get more and more of our IT stakeholders engaged.
Large government agency in the Pacific Rim

We are enjoying accelerated levels of correlation, automation, and information integration. We are also able to support more projects and more business opportunities without increasing headcount. It is enabling us to prepare for reaching more effective ways of working as an organization in the future.
Large European telecommunications service provider 

Improved Business Awareness with Improved Business Outcomes

Not all AIA solutions are yet focused on business outcomes and business performance, but a growing number are. EMA believes this is a high growth opportunity for AIA overall, in better aligning IT with business needs and business values, and maximizing both IT and business performance.

With our AIA solution we were able to gain a complete understanding of how all our business transactions were performing at one level and map this to critical business milestones at another level so that we were able to fully correlate business performance with transactional outcomes and requirements for compliance.
Large North American financial services company 

Rather than just looking proactively at different data, which was itself of value, with our new solution we were able to take that up a level and relate what was happening to business outcomes and business objectives. That caught our attention. And it was good for our business because most CIOs we sell to are focused on business outcomes. 
North American managed services provider 

Capacity Insights and Capacity Optimization

This is an example of a more specialized area within the broader AIA arena—at least among the thirteen vendors we examined. While almost all had valuable data and insights that could be applied to capacity planning, fewer than half offered capabilities, either directly or through fully supported integrations, for in-depth capacity optimization, and in some cases even including cost-related concerns.

We are able to gather data like saturation rates on 100% of our virtual machines. The lack of visibility into these services had been a huge problem for us, but now we have not only data but actionable information for managing those critical services. And the list goes on.
US health services company

When we roll up the information into "this product engineering team is running compute resources at 30 percent utilization," then everybody understands how well their money is being spent. I like to say, "We are taking the IT-speak out of the boardroom." For us, CapEx spending on additional compute infrastructure has decreased 25 percent this year. We expect it to go down another 30-40 percent next year.
International shipping company

There are many other benefits to AIA, some of which are implied in the above comments. These range from significant values in assimilating both public and private cloud resources, and support for DevOps, for SecOps (integrated security and operations), and even for the Internet of Things (IoT).

For more insight into what's really going on with leading innovators in AIA, I invite you once again to listen in on my on-demand webinar. And in the meantime, I welcome your comments and questions at drogseth@emausa.com.

Read the third blog in the series about AIA: 10 Points for Succeeding in Advanced IT Analytics (AIA) Adoption

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

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Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.