ManageEngine recently announced its entry into the self-service IT analytics market with the launch of Analytics Plus. Designed for mid- to large-size organizations that want to draw insights from their IT data, Analytics Plus integrates easily with various data sources and tools, analyzes vast data volumes and presents findings with rich visualizations.
Too many organizations use too many IT tools to run their businesses. Those tools may also support IT users, infrastructure and business applications. However, they do not support fast, accurate decisions — for IT or for business. The problem is all the data (and all the data formats) created by the tools is stored in silos that thwart actionable insights and visibility into organizational performance. Solutions exist to analyze all that data, but they typically are too complicated, require too much customization by experts, or are too time-consuming and expensive.
“Most companies want the IT analytics payoff, but few want to pay the steep IT analytics price,” said Sridhar Iyengar, Vice President, ManageEngine. “We’re uniquely positioned to drive the widespread adoption of this powerful technology. We know IT management and how to make it both powerful and simple. We know IT admins, managers, CIOs and CEOs and what they expect in analytics-driven insights. And we know business intelligence and analytics thanks to the 10 years our sister division, Zoho.com, has spent refining those technologies, which we’re leveraging in Analytics Plus.”
Analytics is becoming as essential to organizations today as IT did years back. Analytics Plus meets the growing requirement to put IT analytics within every organization’s reach and provide the insights and visibility needed to make better decisions, faster. Harnessing ManageEngine’s deep experience across the IT management spectrum, Analytics Plus brings together and correlates islands of data to instantly provide insights in the form of rich visualization and interactive dashboards.
The company claims that Analytics Plus can be installed and configured, and visualizations can be created in minutes, with simple to use and offers an intuitive drag-and-drop visual studio to create dashboards easily. It lets users do cross-data analytics and offers a “look up” model to merge different data sets using common fields. It provides pre-built analytical functions and an excel-like formula engine with an extensive library of mathematical and statistical functions.
Users can create reports and dashboards that include charts, widgets, KPI metrics, pivot tables, and tabular view components. The dashboards let users visually slice and dice data, drill down into details, and change the appearance using different chart types and pre-defined templates. It also lets users analyze data from a variety of data sources such as spreadsheets, files and feeds, relational and non-relational databases, applications and Web API, providing a unified view of their entire IT. Users can securely share reports and dashboards with others to reach consensus and make group decisions quickly. Dashboards can be embedded in websites, intranets and other Web apps for wider access with fine-grained control. Analytics Plus is also available as a mobile app for Android and iOS tablets, so users can access and interact with the reports and dashboards already created, on the move.
Another product, Analytics Plus for ITSM is the flagship of the company’s self-service IT analytics offerings. In the last few years, IT service management (ITSM) and the IT service desk have become the cornerstone of IT strategy, enabling organizations to deliver high-quality IT services efficiently. Now, organizations are seeking new ways to improve IT service delivery and efficiency via better ITSM processes. The only way to understand and identify process inefficiencies is to analyze data from service desk tools, and advanced analytics is the preferred way to perform that work.
“We recently researched this space in our report, ‘Advanced IT Analytics: A Look at Real Adoptions in the Real World,’” said Dennis Drogseth, Vice President, Enterprise Management Associates. “We found that ITSM and service desk were the second most-likely factors driving adoption of advanced IT analytics strategies. That’s only three percent down from the first driving factor, which was the IT executive suite. Additionally, 82 percent of the respondents indicated strong ITSM integrations.”
Iyengar said, “Our own ITSM customer surveys concur with EMA’s findings. We believe Analytics Plus for ITSM marks a turning point in analytics — for ITSM and for IT as a whole.”
Currently in beta, Analytics Plus is licensed based on the number of users accessing it and is available in two editions. The Personal edition is free to use, whereas the Professional edition starts at an annual subscription cost of $1,995 per year, which includes two users and comes with a 30-day, free trial.
