Service quality

Cliff Meltzer explains the benefits of service assurance and outlines the ideal service assurance system.

“In the same way consumers muse over how they ever managed without mobile phones, financial institutions look back at pre-service assurance days as the dark ages.”
-Cliff Meltzer

How would you describe the benefits of service assurance in a nutshell?

Cliff Meltzer. Imagine being told by a doctor: You may need a heart transplant, but I’m not quite sure why. This would be similar to a CIO who turns to his company, reports that the IT system is underperforming to the detriment of the business, but can only guess as to the cause, or to when the situation might improve.

In the medical scenario, the patient would say: I need a different cardiologist – but in the financial services industry, the business would say, we need a change of CIO.

Service assurance is a portfolio of management and monitoring capabilities enabling organisations to understand how the infrastructure is supporting application performance, such that services critical to running the business work optimally.

How granular does measurement need to be?

CM. If an organisation is unable to measure the performance of every critical infrastructure component and the dependent applications and business transactions, then they cannot detect where a problem may be, which means flying blind. A quality service assurance solution can pinpoint the root cause of an issue that’s degrading the entire system.

Is this particularly important to the world of financial services?

CM. This is especially critical to financial institutions competing on customer satisfaction, giving rise to a need for products that are granular and precise enough to spot problems before users suffer infuriating inconvenience – and the business loses revenue and customers.

The ideal service assurance solution sets a baseline performance level by monitoring individual transactions. Then, when a downgrade threshold is reached, an alert is triggered and comprehensive information about each component impacting on that transaction becomes instantly available to enable pre-emptive, or at least immediate, corrective action.

Do you find that financial institutions could never go back to the days before automated service assurance?

CM. In the same way consumers muse over how they ever managed without mobile phones, financial institutions look back at pre-service assurance days as the dark ages.

After we install a service assurance solution, clients say they can now see how services are running and where things might be drifting, which they never had before. They tell me it’s like turning on the lights to suddenly see everything that’s critical to them.

How does service assurance help cope with changing levels of end-user interaction?

CM. Visibility of every component in a complex IT environment is crucial to handling upsurges in demand generated by new online products and internal applications. Financial institutions have been victims of their own success by releasing exciting new services without being able to cope with rocketing demand. Service assurance products serve to determine capacity in a system and identify the point at which problems are likely to occur, based on usage trends.

By the same token, a business needs to add or change applications quickly without worrying about negatively impacting on the performance of other applications, transactions or services.

What is the number one issue keeping CIOs awake at night with worry?

CM. The IT management industry is going through a paradigm shift with virtualization, cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service. CIOs need to learn how to leverage new technologies in order to respond to business needs more rapidly – but this takes them out of an established comfort zone of guaranteeing performance and reliability.

Service assurance is designed to enable organisations to make informed decisions and adapt to change, migrate to new technologies when viable, and select the best set of tools to meet dynamic business requirements.

How would you describe general attitude to new IT trends among financial services organisations?

CM. After working with large financial organisations for many years I would say they want evolution, not revolution. However, these and other companies should fight the reluctance to go to cloud, because it offers the ability to respond much more swiftly to a rapidly-changing IT environment. My advice is to start with a private cloud, which will provide experience, firewall comfort and business benefit – then decide on those applications suitable to move to a public cloud, while maintaining a level of performance critical to their business.

Biography

Cliff Meltzer is Corporate Senior Vice President and General Manager for CA’s Assurance Business Unit, focused on delivering products and solutions that provide service assurance for complex IT environments at the system, application and network levels. He joined CA in November 2009 from Apple Computer where he was vice president of CPU software.