With the depth and breadth of features fault management software offers today it’s often hard to choose between products, but two vendors have separately come out with return on investment figures to convince customers.
US companies Concord and Aprisma (a software spin-off of networking company Cabletron) are both trying to drum up local interest in their fault management suites — a market which is dominated by companies offering the gamut of systems management such as IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter and HP OpenView.
On the face of it, both suites, Concord’s eHealth and Aprisma’s Spectrum, have similar features— end-to-end management of network, systems and applications; scalability; real-time performance tracking and analysis; the ability to predict outages and report them in advance; and the ability to restart systems after an outage. And both claim return on investment is a major factor in persuading customers to buy their products.
“We want to sell to companies that will realise a benefit in less than 12 months,” says Concord Australia and New Zealand manager Peter Alexander. “The aim of these tools is to maximise return on investment [ROI] and reduce wasted resources.”
Concord tracked ROI for five eHealth customers: a telco, a utilities enterprise, an ISP, an insurance company and a retail outlet. On average the companies broke even after 11 months with an ROI of 299% and annual savings of $US839,000. The ISP and insurance company had ROIs of 539% and 526% respectively. Savings were achieved through accurate bandwidth projections, enhanced system reliability, increased application availability and automation of technology management.
Aprisma commissioned market research company IDC in the US to analyse 17 customers. It found that every dollar spent on Spectrum can result in four dollars in operational savings. Across the 17 customers the average ROI over three years was 970%, with average annual operational savings of $US10.7 million. The average break-even period was 37 days.
Asia-Pacific president Alison Higgins-Miller says three things are driving users towards fault management systems: the exceeding users’ service quality expectations, increasing revenue through new services, and return on investment. “In times of downturn people look at how they can reduce operational expenditure. Tools such as these give a better return on existing investment.”
Systems integrator Datacraft has started selling eHealth and has also embedded it into its Insite network management service.
Datacraft general manager of marketing Richard Barnett says the company has several customers using eHealth within Insite. He wouldn’t name any but claims they include large organisations in the financial, government, telecommunications and primary sectors. In Australia Concord services Telstra, ANZ and the Australian Stock Exchange.
Aprisma claims a raft of former Cabletron customers but sites that have recently bought Spectrum tools include Accident Compensation, BNZ, Department of Social Welfare, Health Waikato, CS First Boston, Rayonier, Telecom, Placemakers and BHP.
Aprisma is sold in New Zealand by Unisys, EDS, Compaq, Enterasys, Logical, Marconi and Kinetica.