Category Archives: IT Management

IT Management, SUMMUS

SUMMUS Software Launches New Release of Cloud-based IT Management Solution

SUMMUS Software, a provider of cost-effective, comprehensive, cloud-based IT operations management solutions, today announced the latest release of Summus IT Management Suite powered by Summit Platform 4.0, an integrated suite of applications for IT service management, IT asset management, and availability management. This latest release delivers the IT contextual dashboard, together with robust enhancements to incident, service level agreement (SLA), change, configuration management database (CMDB), knowledge, event, release, availability and project management.

SUMMUS Software’s new release of Summus IT Management Suite and Summit Platform are designed to support the growing and maturing IT service management, IT asset management and IT availability management requirements of small and midsized businesses (SMB) and managed service providers (MSP). By supporting IT organization’s on-going efforts to optimize their costs, resources and processes, this release ensures customers can better maximize IT management efficiencies.

“Summus IT Management Suite is helping IT organizations to achieve greater cost and operational efficiencies using the power of Summit Platform,” said Wai Wong, president and CEO of SUMMUS Software. “This latest release represents the industry’s most comprehensive cloud-based IT management solution with built-in IT intelligence. SUMMUS is helping customers to better optimize their IT operations, and establish a more productive relationship between IT and business.”

The new release of Summus IT Management Suite is powered by the latest version of SUMMUS Software’s unified and integrated IT operations management platform, Summit Platform 4.0. Based on extensive work with customers, key IT industry experts and standards organizations, this release delivers features representing key IT management technology advances in the areas of Incident Management, SLA Management, Knowledge Management, Change Management, CMDB, Availability Management, Event Management, Release Management and Project Management.

Key features of the new release of Summus IT Management Suite include:

Summus Service Management

Incident Management: Fine-grained per-incident cost management, and
simplified end-user request management via templates
SLA Management: Fine-grained control and monitoring of customer SLAs,
vendor SLAs and operations level agreements (OLA)
Knowledge Management: Enhanced knowledge relevance and effectiveness
management
Change Management: Enhanced reliability and availability with powerful
change control and configuration
CMDB: Increased high availability with version control management,
faster and easier implementation and simplified integration with other
IT management systems via open Web Services APIs
Release Management: Comprehensive management of release costs,
versions, builds, and workflows

Summus Availability Management

Server & Network Monitoring: Flexible and fine-grained monitoring,
reporting and alerts based on multiple thresholds, and utilization
trends
Event Management: Automatic, event correlation management

IT Intelligence

IT Contextual Dashboard: Holistic side-by-side, contextually
comparative view of the entire IT operations environment


IT Management, Load Balancing, Microsoft, Partnerships, System Center, Tools, Windows Server

F5 Showcases its BIG-IP Solutions for System Center 2012 and Private Cloud

F5 Networks, Inc is demonstrating its F5 BIG-IP solutions for Microsoft private cloud deployments at the Microsoft Management Summit 2012, held this week in Las Vegas. During the event, F5 is emphasizing BIG-IP compatibility with System Center 2012 to help organizations maximize cloud benefits and productivity.

“F5 cloud computing solutions provide customers with a flexible foundation to dynamically provision services and tap the full value of cloud deployments,” says Calvin Rowland, VP, Technology and ISV Alliances at F5. “We’re excited to connect with customers at this event and share our cloud vision and products, which are key building blocks for private cloud environments. For over a decade, F5 and Microsoft have worked together to bring superior IT solutions to our customers. And with our close collaboration on Microsoft private cloud solutions, we’ve extended the value of this relationship.”

Using the BIG-IP system, customers can build dynamic data centers that eliminate deployment barriers and lay the framework for long-term, sustained efficiencies. For the Microsoft private cloud, F5 solutions help organizations unify their network architectures and consolidate their management environments. Together, BIG-IP products and System Center 2012 provide a clear view into how applications are performing over the network. This gives customers the ability to update and optimize configurations to increase performance, scale, automation, flexibility, and security.

Further, the updated F5® Monitoring Pack for System Center helps customers optimize resource utilization by discovering available BIG-IP devices and surfacing health statistics within System Center 2012. As administrators shift the allocation of resources, the BIG-IP system is automatically updated to ensure that the network is in sync with changes to computing and storage resources.

“System Center 2012 enables the private cloud, and the F5 Monitoring Pack for System Center gives customers the added strengths of F5’s BIG-IP solutions,” said Mike Schutz, General Manager, Product Marketing, Windows Server and Management at Microsoft. “Customers need the key components of their private cloud infrastructure to work well with each other, and the deep compatibility of System Center 2012 with F5’s BIG-IP platform can help increase efficiency and reliability while helping reduce operational expenses.”

Cost Effective, Automated, Flexible Cloud Control

BIG-IP solutions for Microsoft private cloud take advantage of key features and technologies in BIG-IP version 11.1, including F5’s virtual Clustered MultiprocessingTM (vCMP™) technology, iControl®, F5’s web services-enabled open application programming interface (API), administrative partitioning and server name indication (SNI). Together, these features help reduce the cost and complexity of managing cloud infrastructures in multi-tenant environments. With BIG-IP v11.1, organizations reap the maximum benefits of conducting IT operations and application delivery services in the private cloud.

BIG-IP solutions for Microsoft private cloud also include:

  • F5 Monitoring Pack for System Center, which provides two-way
    communication between BIG-IP devices and the System Center management
    console. Health monitoring, failover, and configuration
    synchronization of BIG-IP devices, along with customized alerting,
    Maintenance Mode, and Live Migration, occur within the Operations
    Manager component of System Center.
  • The F5 Load Balancing Provider for System Center, which enables
    one-step, automated deployment of load balancing services through
    direct interoperability between the Virtual Machine Manager component
    of System Center 2012 and BIG-IP devices. BIG-IP devices are managed
    through the System Center user interface, and administrators can
    custom-define load balancing services.
  • The Orchestrator component of System Center 2012, which provides
    F5 traffic management capabilities, takes advantage of workflows
    designed using the Orchestrator Runbook Designer. These custom
    workflows can then be published directly into System Center 2012
    service catalogs and presented as a standard offering to the
    organization. This is made possible using the F5 iControl SDK, which
    gives customers the flexibility to choose a familiar development
    environment such as the Microsoft .NET Framework programming model or
    Windows PowerShell scripting.

Availability

The F5 Monitoring Pack for System Center and the F5 PRO-enabled Monitoring Pack for System Center are now available. The F5 Load Balancing Provider for System Center is available as a free download from the F5 DevCentral website. The Orchestrator component of System Center 2012 is based on F5 iControl and Windows PowerShell, and is also free.


Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, IT Management, Private Cloud, Saas, Software as a service

New AWS Marketplace Offers Pre-Configured Software for the AWS Cloud

Image representing Amazon Web Services as depi...

Amazon Web Services today launched AWS Marketplace, an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, compare, and immediately start using the software and technical services they need to build products and run their businesses. Visitors to AWS Marketplace can use 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured software and pay only for what they use, by the hour or month, while benefiting from the scalable, flexible and on-demand features of AWS. With AWS Marketplace, software and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers with offerings that run on the AWS Cloud can benefit from increased customer awareness, simplified deployment, and automated billing. AWS Marketplace features a wide selection of commercial and free IT and business software, including software infrastructure such as databases and application servers, developer tools, and business applications – available from popular vendors such as 10gen, CA, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point Software, IBM, Microsoft, SAP AG, and Zend, as well as many widely used open source offerings including Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress. To get started with AWS Marketplace please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.

AWS Marketplace simplifies many of the traditional challenges software and SaaS companies face, such as acquiring customers, developing distribution channels, and billing for their software. With AWS Marketplace, a simple listing process makes it quick and easy to add products and expose them to AWS’s hundreds of thousands of active customers. Product prices are clearly stated and charges appear on the same bill as a customer’s other AWS services. Customers can quickly deploy products found in the marketplace and software providers can easily add billing to their products by specifying hourly or monthly charges, without undertaking costly code changes. Billing is managed by AWS Marketplace, relieving sellers of the responsibility of managing customer accounts and processing payments, and leaving software developers more time to focus on building great software.

“AWS Marketplace brings the same simple, trusted, and secure online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com’s retail website to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, AWS. “AWS Marketplace makes it even easier to run software on AWS because you can find a wide variety of AWS ecosystem providers’ solutions, in one place, where much of the work involved in building and deploying solutions on top of AWS has already been done for you by these solutions providers.”

AWS is the leading cloud platform with a fast growing ecosystem of providers building solutions on top of the platform.

“Zend Application Fabric enables developers to confidently deploy fast, elastic and dependable PHP applications,” said Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. “AWS Marketplace makes it simple for our customers to access Zend on the AWS cloud and pay only for the infrastructure needed to run their applications. By providing customers a single invoice for combined software and server capacity, businesses can operate more effectively than ever before.”

“AWS Marketplace provides companies like ours an opportunity to easily reach new customers,” said Carolee Gearhart, SAP’s National Vice President of OEM & Strategic Partner Group for North America. “We expect our customers will benefit from SAP’s robust BI functionality, while taking advantage of the quick deployment capabilities provided by AWS Marketplace.”

Customers can browse AWS Marketplace or learn more details about its features and benefits of AWS Marketplace by visiting https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.


Business Processes, Content Management, ECM, Enterprise content management, Guest Post, IT Management, Legal, Workflow

Benefits of Cloud Based ECM Systems

Guest Post by Steve Williams

Smart businesses everywhere have begun to take advantage of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). This system helps companies organize, store and retrieve eDocuments. Encompassing a variety of different programs, ECM helps businesses to organize their work flow and be prepared in case of any future litigation. Moving the ECM to the cloud presents even greater benefits.

Benefits of the Cloud

  • Security. Prevent the loss of critical data with regular backups of infrastructure hardware and more.
  • Cost. A cloud solution costs a fraction of an on-premise ECM solution. The pay-as-you go nature of cloud services also make it scalable to your needs.
  • Reliability. Cloud solutions can offer high uptime and keep planned downtimes at a minimum Access. Access all your content remotely through any device (mobile, desktop etc.)

Top 3 Benefits of ECM:

1. Improve Organization

Without an ECM system, employees may find it difficult to access records held by coworkers or find older documents. With an ECM system, the business can reduce its volume of content up to 50%. In the event of litigation, having fewer documents to search through and a more organized system helps employees and lawyers to prepare. The ECM system manages all of the data throughout its lifecycle and keeps it in one central place.

The Advantages:

  • One central location to retrieve all content.
  • Ensures compliance with new standards and policies.

For larger companies, having a central location means lawyers do not have to rush around various locations and can easily carry out the discovery process. To facilitate the legal team’s work, employees should be trained on policies regarding the various regulatory requirements or the company’s internal policies.

Prior to having an ECM system, a company would have to go through files by hand to check and see if workers were complying with the regulations. In the case of a hospital, new policies may get missed by workers. A proper ECM system could alleviate the problem by electronically tracking which employees signed new policy forms and ensure that everyone at the company is on the same page. Numerous state and federal regulations exist—each business must ensure that their employees are complying completely. Without an ECM system to track employee training and policy updates, employers are left without the safeguard they need to make sure that everyone is kept up-to-date on new regulations.

2. Prepare for Litigation

No business plans on having court battles, but in the event that it happens, being prepared early on makes litigation easier. Various regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley require that eDocuments be kept for a certain length of time. The ECM can be set to automatically put documents on hold and store them for a defined period of time. This aspect protects the documents from being deleted on purpose or by accident.

Instead of hiring out help, companies can handle litigation internally and reduce their overall cost. The system seamlessly integrates real-time updates and records prior versions of the file. Although no one intends to have a court case, preparing in advance saves the company valuable time and money.

3. Save Money

Having double copies of a file makes it more difficult for employees to access, change and use data. An ECM system works to prevent this by organizing the volumes of information in one location and with an easily searchable system. A user merely has to type in a keyword in the search box to have their file and related documents popup. Instead of having to search through documents by hand or go to different networks to find data, users have one location that they can access. Overall, this saves the company time and money spent on wages.

The Bottom Line:

Creating an ECM will require some initial spending, but overall the company will see immense savings on labor and IT infrastructure costs by moving to the cloud. If any litigation takes place, the company will save even more money on lawyers’ fees and throughout the discovery process. By being able to easily access old files, the company is protected from any allegations that they violated regulations. This protects them legally and financially.

This system also gets employees out of low-value tasks and into a role that makes the company more money. No more faxing over documents or hand-picking through old files. With a cloud-based ECM system, the program is intended to do all the work so the company does not have to hire an employee to do it.

Across the board, having a cloud-based ECM saves the company money and makes doing business more efficient. It improves the company’s ability to manage information and comply with federal regulations.