Rubik solutions and Westbury join forces in delivering high quality IT Service Management solutions in the Benelux and Nordics region.
Rubik Solutions and Westbury have signed an agreement to further strengthen their partnership in delivering high quality IT Service Management solutions and services in the Benelux and Nordic Region.

As part of the agreement , Rubik will offer its broad portfolio of services based on the HP Software solutions, including the migration to HP Service Manager, to the Westbury customers running HP Service Desk software.

Over the past years, Rubik solutions and Westbury have cooperated on many occasions, sharing both knowledge and experience. In addition to offering its proven expertise to Westbury’s customers, Rubik Solutions will actively promote and sell Westbury’s Service Management Intelligence Suite (SMI Suite).

“Rubik Solutions is a highly skilled and knowledgeable partner with years of IT Service Management expertise. We have full confidence that they will perform the migrations to the complete satisfaction of our customers. In addition, this partnership enables us to exploit the market for SMI Suite to its full potential in both the Benelux and Nordics region ”, says Floris Verschoor, CEO of Westbury.

“I am happy both Rubik and Westbury can continue to focus and build our core businesses, and this agreement helps us both in doing just that. It is a clear win-win situation”, says Erik Larsen, CEO of Rubik Solutions. “By including the operational reporting capabilities of Westbury SMI Suite we are able to complement our end to end Service Management solution and help our customers in maximizing the efficiency of their Service Management processes.”
About Rubik
Rubik Solutions is a leading provider of solutions for enterprise architecture and IT management in the Nordics and Benelux. Rubik has a solid background in delivering solutions to large and medium enterprises in different industries. The company offers solutions for IT management, project and portfolio management tools and solutions for enterprise architecture and strategic IT planning.

Additionally Rubik develops and markets its own Information Consolidation Manager software, an application that collects and combines data from various data sources and tailors this data for HP Service Manager and for the uCMDB (universal configuration management database). Rubik Solutions is headquartered in Oslo, and has 12 branch offices in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and Belgium. The company has 130 employees.
About Westbury
The Westbury advantage.
Westbury Service Management Intelligence empowers organizations to prove IT’s value to the business.

Our Service Management Intelligence Suite helps you gain Insight, Improve quality of delivered services and Impress your customers. Established in 1998, Westbury has offices near Amsterdam (NL) and in Cambridge (MA,USA) servicing mid & enterprise size customers. The global team of highly professional Service Management Intelligence experts combines over a decade of ITSM and Business Intelligence expertise. Westbury is an HP Software Platinum Business Partner, honored with multiple achievement awards. Westbury is founder of Service Management Intelligence.

Press contact:
Rubik Solutions, Erik Larsen
CEO +47 91 75 52 63
Rubik Solutions, Pieter Spilling
Corporate Marketing Manager +47 93 05 57 31, psp@rubiksolutions.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Westbury, Suzanne Glorie
Marketing Manager +31-646217033, suzanne.glorie@westbury-it.com

The video is all about architecture, and as a companion piece to the video I wanted to write a blog entry about the same topic, just so the messages from the video are clear. After all, you might find it hard to focus on what I’m saying when you’re confronted with my boyish good looks in all their glory…

Sometimes we find it a little difficult to sum up neatly just how clever SMI Suite is, but we often find that when we get the chance to talk to experienced ITSM professionals in depth – and explain what’s going on behind the scenes, both with SM7 and with SMI Suite, that we almost always get a ‘gasp moment’ from whomever it is we’re talking to. It’s that moment when something suddenly makes sense and it usually falls into one of two camps. Either the person we’re talking to has just spent a month trying to understand why reporting from SM7 is so difficult, or they know precisely why reporting is so difficult, but were convinced that there was no possible solution. Remember the first time someone showed you the Rubik’s Cube? You probably thought that either there was no way a stupid toy could out-fox you, or you took one look and declared that even the greatest minds of our time could never crack such an intellectual nut. If I was going to stretch the analogy any further, I would tell you that SMI Suite is David Singmaster.

So we wanted to take some time to explain in some depth the key concepts around the architecture of SM7 and what SMI Suite does to solve the issues that the architecture raises.

First up is the simple fact that where Service Desk used a fixed, relational database to store its data, Service Manager uses a flat database structure. One of the upshots, from a reporting point of view, is the changeability of field names. So, say you have a field in Service Desk called “Priority”, the corresponding field in the SD database might be called “Priority”, or “Prty”, or “isd3y7j23hh2″ or whatever, but that back-end name would not change once it was set. Not so in Service Manager – everything is subject to change, even after initial setup. So if you were writing a SQL query to call that data, you would need to reference the field name, which might have changed since last month or last week or two minutes ago, and might change again in two minutes time. Also there’s a key difference in the way custom fields are handled – in SD they were custom only in the front end, so no matter how you renamed them in SD, the back-end fields were still called “CustomField1″, “CustomField2″, and so on. In SM7 custom names can be applied to the back-end as well.

SM7 also makes pretty extensive use of CLOBs, BLOBs and comma-delimited array fields, all of which are efficient ways for an application to store its data, but also efficient ways of making that data unintelligible to anyone or anything other than the application that wrote the data. You can think of it like a journalist who has developed his or her own form of shorthand to use when conducting interviews. It works great when the journalist wants to write up the article and can refer to the shorthand notes and quote the subject verbatim, but if the journalist’s editor wants to fact check the article and make sure the subject wasn’t quoted out of context, everything suddenly becomes very difficult, because the shorthand is gibberish.

If we accept that all of these factors make reporting from SM7 very difficult, then we’re going to need to see something pretty special from SMI Suite to solve these problems.

Well, actually, what makes SMI Suite so special is that it is designed, from the ground up, to deal with the particular challenges of SM7 – something that no other (and certainly no one-size-fits-all) application can boast. We already had a solid base in the sense that we had developed a robust, fully featured reporting solution for Service Desk – which, as you’ll remember, uses a fixed, relational database – so the challenge was really to get the SM7 data into a similar format as the SD data that we were used to reporting from.

So included with SMI Suite is a powerful ETL layer that parses the SM7 data into a separate, relational reporting database. And this isn’t just a straight dump, there are some pretty clever things going on, like data cleansing and translation of those BLOBs, CLOBs and array fields into a human-readable format. The mapping of data is based on the standard SM7 configuration, meaning that customers who make minimal customization to the SM7 implementation need only make minimal customization to the SMI Suite implementation. And for larger, more complex organizations with lots of SM7 customization, there’s a user-friendly, drag-and-drop GUI so the data mapping customizations can be easily and quickly without too much technical knowledge.

All of which basically gets us to the point where we started off with Service Desk, which is with good-quality data in a dedicated, relational reporting database, allowing us to bring in our years of experience in this kind of thing, which means standardized reporting universes, out-of-the-box reports and all the benefits of the market-leading BI software.

Which, when you think about where we were just four short paragraphs ago, is pretty awesome. Not only is it possible to run reports out of SM7, but it is possible for staff with no SQL query-writing experience, no database experience – in fact, no technical experience whatsoever – to write reports, refresh them, distribute them and so on. Which is really where SMI Suite sits head and shoulders above products like Crystal Reports or Cognos, which require you to directly query the SM7 database (potentially affecting performance), and to do so in the peculiar, techie way that the SM7 database understands. SMI Suite is all about dragging and dropping, it’s about using obvious and familiar terminology rather than interminable strings of code and it’s about adapting to the changing SM7 structure without you, the end-user, ever having to be aware of it.

This is the bit where you gasp.

Tom

For example, the report identified the four top hidden costs of Business Intelligence as:

1. Year-after-year budget increases: The typical best-in-class company sees a drop in year-after-year BI budgetary costs. Average and laggard companies, however, can witness increases in BI expenses that range from 2 percent to 9 percent.
2. Cost per user: Best-in-class companies lower per-user costs by 4.3 percent whereas average performers and laggards often see increases ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent.
3. Time to complete projects: Best-in-class achievers complete BI projects, on average, within 14 days. Average performers take nearly three times as long (approximately 39 days) to complete a project, and the typical laggard company takes more than 12 times as long (177 days).
4. Modifications to BI software: Altering a BI program takes less than a day for best-in-class companies; three days for average performers; and up to eight days for laggard organizations.

Or as author David Hatch put it:

“The overall cost of ownership is not about the costs of purchasing the software,” Hatch says. “The real cost factors are the hidden or the soft ones that have to do with indirect and ongoing factors.” Hatch contends that a justifiable fear of such factors hinders adoption. “People are finding [that] the resources the company needs to acquire to properly implement, deploy, support, and maintain a BI solution are far greater than the solution providers lead [users] to believe or that [users] assume on their own.”

Interesting, because that is what Westbury has seen over the last years in dealing with BI projects for HP Service Management. But a report of the Aberdeen Group isn’t complete without some recommendations. On what areas should companies focus in order to improve the success rate of their BI projects?

Aberdeen suggests that investments in the following areas will maximize results from a BI initiative:

• Data integration and cleansing: “Companies are finding it difficult to bring data together from multiple, disparate sources,” Hatch says. Investing in tools for data management can be of help in this regard. Best-in-class companies are twice as likely as their counterparts are to institute data integration and cleansing capabilities.

Westbury recommends: make sure the back end of your BI environment can be used by non-technical people

• End-user requirements: “You really have to stop and think about why…so many companies have deployed tools that so many aren’t able to use,” Hatch says. Companies must understand that end-users — especially nontechnical, non-data-guru types — may need different approaches. Hatch advises companies to focus on end-user needs before deploying a solution.

Westbury recommends: make sure you talk the same language as your end-users

• Training: Top performers are 37 percent more likely to invest in extensive user training on BI solutions and 40 percent are more likely to have formed formal user committees to encourage adoption. Additionally, best-in-class companies are twice as likely as laggards and average performers are to sign up for vendor-provided services.

Westbury recommends: the more accessible your BI solution is for the end-users, the better your processes should be around training

• Operational BI: Successful users of BI use the technology on an everyday basis rather than merely getting a summarized spreadsheet version of performance and high-level trends. Hatch says that operational BI seems to be gaining traction as companies look to make comparisons over shorter time spans rather than just examine large-scale trends.

Westbury recommends: integrate your BI solution with the supported applications, so it is readily accessible for your end-users

Great to see our own own experiences in working with the HP Service Management software backed up with a solid research like this one from The Aberdeen Group.

Floris