Impending Chaos in Corporate IT Demands New Thinking by Software Providers, Says Blazent CEO
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 2004--As information technology budgets in global enterprises skyrocket -- in some cases to as much as 50% of annual capital spending -- IT departments are on the verge of chaos, requiring new thinking and new approaches by leading enterprise software providers, said Gary Oliver, president and CEO of San Mateo, CA based Blazent. This crisis, he said, is a result of a dramatically increased level of complexity of IT -- occurring across multiple dimensions -- and as a consequence of IT's significantly-increased importance to the top line in today's enterprises. Oliver's comments were delivered today at the Enterprise Outlook Conference taking place in Redwood City, CA.
"Today's CIOs now have many business imperatives to address -- all at the same time," said Oliver. "These range from global organizations that must react in real time, increasing demand to tightly manage costs based upon benefits, a variety of regulatory and compliance issues, to the growing strategic importance of IT to individual companies."
According to Oliver, in terms of resources under management -- people, machines, software, projects, vendors, contractors, and so forth -- the complexity of IT has grown over 1000-fold in only a few decades, to where there may be hundreds of unique factors to consider at any one time. The now-common multi-billion dollar IT budgets in the largest companies exceed the total revenues of more than half of the companies in the Fortune 1000, he pointed out. "This makes IT accountable on a day-to-day basis to the CEO and CFO of any well-run company," he stated.
"CIOs know that managing IT now demands that they can analyze, understand, and control this multi-dimensional environment in real-time," said Oliver. "But the analytical tools available to IT executives are simply not up to what the complexity requires." IT executives are very capable, he asserted, but, using existing enterprise software, today they can unearth only the most rudimentary, single-dimensional data about what is occurring within their organizations, and they have only the most limited tools to influence it, or to make critical strategic decisions in real time." It's no wonder, he said, that the Gartner Group recently reported that as much as $540 billion of the $2.7 trillion spent on IT annually is wasted. "This cannot continue," he argued.
Oliver explained that there are tools today to manage hardware resources across the enterprise, or tools to manage software licenses; each of these is a single dimension of the 'IT problem.' "What's missing, asserted Oliver, "is the ability to aggregate all the relevant information from different perspectives -- say a departmental view, a project view, or a strategic-initiative view -- and give management real decision-making power based upon previously-unavailable insights." He added, "There are a vast number of variables and problem dimensions that must be reconciled and optimized, simultaneously, and in real time."
The solution, Oliver suggested, is a new, multi-dimensional analytical foundation for conceiving, managing, and optimizing an IT organization, its assets and resources, around the world. He calls it "a new math for IT," and likens its increased analytical scope to that of the calculus, when compared to simple arithmetic. Although the latter served mankind adequately for thousands of years, Oliver said, the emergence of quantum physics, space flight, or simply GPS (global positioning system) receivers in the family car, demanded a higher math. And so it is with IT; new generations of enterprise software must be designed to handle the profoundly new levels of complexity in IT.
With the new math, Oliver asserted, CIOs will have the required analytical foundation to achieve business-driven management and optimization of their organizations. Oliver indicated that his company has introduced a new suite "IT Intelligence" software that achieves these goals. "IT Intelligence provides decision makers with 'a closed-loop' IT optimization process that combines real-time visibility into all relevant variables; fact-based IT analytics; and decision making capabilities, operational directives, and continuous performance measurement," he said.
The results to date have been significant, Oliver reported. "Some of our customers have recognized multi-million dollar sources of waste and duplication, shortly after we turned the software on," he said.
The annual Enterprise Outlook conference, presented by Dow Jones VentureWire, is designed to give investors, analysts, and business executives a perspective on trends in the software industry, by introducing them to the CEOs and the business directions of nearly 80 emerging companies with innovative approaches to delivering business value. The extremely well-attended conference, now in its 11th year, is considered a seminal annual event by the investment community.
About Blazent
Blazent is the pioneer of a "new math" for IT, a sophisticated, analytical foundation that gives Global 2000-class IT organizations an unprecedented ability to conceptualize, manage, and optimize IT in the 21st century enterprise. Against a backdrop of IT as an increasingly complex ecosystem with far reaching strategic implications for business, Blazent is the first business-intelligence software to be truly rationalized to the dynamic, multi-dimensional complexity of the IT equation today.
Blazent's IT Intelligence software, provides decision makers with a closed-loop IT optimization process that combines real-time visibility into all relevant variables, broad-based analytics and decisioning support, actionable directives, and continuous performance measurements. The result is that CIOs can quickly optimize their entire IT operation to meet widespread, changing business demands, and can operate with unparalleled efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, IT Intelligence integrates easily with -- and can substantially magnify the benefits of -- an IT organization's pre-existing tools. This has the impact of immediately lifting the veil of complexity from an IT operation, rather than adding to it.
Blazent software has been designed for the most complex IT deployments typical of global enterprises, and Blazent's customers include a growing list of high-profile companies including Andrew Corporation, EFW, New York Life, Qwest Communications, RR Donnelley & Sons, Warner Bros., and others. Blazent is located in San Mateo, California. Investors include Bain Capital, Benchmark Capital, Dali Hook Partners, Pequot Ventures and StarVest Partners. Additional information is available online at www.Blazent.com.
Editors' Note: All trademarks and registered trademarks are those of their respective companies
Additional background information is available at www.roeder-johnson.com.
Contacts
Blazent
Customer Information, 650-286-5500
info@Blazent.com
or
Roeder-Johnson Corporation
Paul Michelson, 650-802-1850 (Press)
Abigail Johnson, 650-802-1850 (Press)
http://email.roeder-johnson.com
[ Comment, Edit or Article Submission ]
