Technology vendors want you to sell and support analytic software. But surely, you also need to consume analytics software to run your own business. Instead of going the traditional route, it might be wise to take a look at a so-called blended analytics approach. Here's why.
As you manage customer networks and your own infrastructure, you likely use a range of IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) tools. Instead of dealing with all of you IT data -- and your customer's IT data -- in separate silos, blended analytics is about "bringing in, correlating and analyzing data together from multiple data sources," says Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven.
I first stumbled across Gilenson's views while running Information Management, a media site that covers analytics, earlier this year. As part of a contributed article, he mentioned the need to blend analytics across your APM (application performance management), network management, log management and configuration management systems.
"By analyzing this blend of data sources together, behavioral patterns, unusual event occurrences and anomalies can be identified," he wrote. "Analysis methods can include machine learning, statistics algorithms and domain-specific heuristics."
Without necessarily hearing the "blended analytics" term, I'm sure plenty of MSPs and VARs have used the approach to manage data across their PSA (professional services automation), RMM (remote monitoring and management) and BDR (backup and disaster recovery) systems, among many others. But what about finance, HR, web marketing and more?
Are there ways to leverage blended analytics across all of your systems -- to better serve your customers while also increasing your revenue opportunities? I'm all ears.
