Technology Reseller v35

Juan Lyall 01732 759725 38 Q&A problem in terms of readability, particularly for mapping and dashboards, and partly explains why on average only 61% of the entire IT estate is monitored. TR: How does Centreon’s approach differ from other people’s (and why does that matter)? JL: Centreon offers three key differentiating factors: n Holistic IT Monitoring from Cloud-to- Edge. Centreon monitors the complete IT infrastructure from cloud to edge for a clear and comprehensive view; n A Business-aware Approach: Bridging the Gap between IT Operations and Business. Centreon improve business performance by aligning IT operations with business objectives through intuitive monitoring; and n AIOps and Future-Ready Operations. Centreon is AIOps and future-ready, promoting agility, scalability and flexibility in the never ending journey to modern and efficient IT. We originate from an open source environment and our platform combines the best of both worlds: it is highly adaptable and extremely customisable but, importantly, it is also ready to plug and play. Open source solutions still exist on the market, but the costs involved in terms of consultancy are huge – 10:1 or even 20:1 in comparison with the Centreon solution. TR: What are the opportunities for resellers/MSPs? JL: As companies seek out the skills needed to meet the challenges of a digital world in which everything is dependent upon IT, they are increasingly turning to MSPs to help them manage new technologies like AI, edge computing, cloud and IoT. While these technologies make infrastructure management more complex, they are also a source of opportunities for MSPs. Technology Reseller (TR) : What is IT monitoring and what does AIOps add to it? Juan Lyall (JL): IT monitoring consists of monitoring the IT infrastructure of an organisation to assess its level of performance. In the past, the only important factor was to alert the team when an outage occurred. Now, with the development of cloud and edge computing, it is critical to ensure that all applications communicate, and that they do so efficiently and rapidly. Enabling organisations to be ‘always-on’ is the promise of IT monitoring, and this is Centreon’s job. AIOps, the use of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, enhances IT monitoring in three main areas – capacity planning, anomaly detection and predictive analysis. This can help anticipate and prevent problems and outages from occurring, with positive implications for efficiency and costs. TR: What are the problems with existing solutions? JL: What our customers tell us, on the ground and in an exclusive survey recently commissioned by us (The State of IT Monitoring) , is that IT teams experience four kinds of problem in relation to monitoring: 1 Visibility or readability is insufficient; 2 The whole IT infrastructure is rarely 100% monitored; 3 As IT evolves, conventional IT monitoring tools do not follow in an automated way; and 4 Monitoring is often perceived to be too expensive, as it doesn’t contribute enough to cost reduction or revenue generation. Some companies use several solution providers, which generates more complexity, leading to more problems and ultimately higher costs. Among the 600 IT professionals we surveyed, only 27% rated the visibility of IT performance levels provided by their IT monitoring tools as excellent. This is a real Indeed, in a highly competitive market, MSPs have to offer a distinct portfolio of services that goes beyond simple monitoring and managed services, whilst also guaranteeing the availability of those services and IT systems to help clients reach their full performance potential. To do this effectively, MSPs must expand their offering to provide hybrid infrastructures combining legacy, private cloud and public cloud so that they can accompany customers on their digital transformation, connecting people, processes and objects to improve the customer experience from the cloud to the edge. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2021, more than 50% of large enterprises will have one or more edge computing projects, up from less than 5% in 2019. This creates a new growth opportunity for MSPs that are able to manage their customers’ new IT environments. Centreon enables MSPs to deliver the operational excellence required by providing a dedicated solution, tailored to their specific needs. Centreon MSP Edition is a complete package, with a pricing model designed for MSP business models, that monitors the full range of each customer’s IT environment, equipment and applications, from the cloud to the edge, while taking into account the additional factor of a shared monitoring platform for multiple customers. TR: How will Centreon’s new UK&I operations benefit MSPs on this side of the channel? JL: For the first time, Centreon has a dedicated country manager for UK&I, whose sole purpose is to support and help channel partners build a highly profitable revenue stream by providing a solution to a problem at the very top of customers’ lists of concerns. More importantly, this is just the start of Centreon’s investment in the UK&I market, which can only be good news for Channel partners seeking a solid vendor committed to ensuring they receive support and investment and benefit from shared successes. www.centreon.com/uken Technology Reseller quizzes Centreon UK country manager Juan Lyall about the opportunities in IT monitoring and AIOps Business Basics: IT monitoring and AIOps