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March 31, 2008
Stemming the Tide in Out-of-Control Datacenters
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In this executive Q&A, Tideway Systems Founder and CEO Richard Muirhead discusses how complexity is spiraling out of control in today's datacenters and explains how his company's solutions help to map datacenter interdependencies, automate processes and, generally, reduce the costs of datacenter management.
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GRIDtoday: Tell me a little about Tideway Systems. What is the company's value proposition to customers, and what kinds of products/solutions does it offer?
RICHARD MUIRHEAD: Tideway's solutions enable business application change control, standardization and compliance in today's datacenters. We help our customers achieve cost savings faster, drive business agility and manage operational risk -- delivering true IT and business service optimization.
Software applications for both work and leisure are more critical than ever today. The hearts of these applications run in datacenters that require more highly qualified technologists than ever before to manage them properly. The problem? Paying these technologists can now amount to more than half the running costs, hiring them is a brake on the business, and they are far from infallible -- proven by the fact that most IT outages are caused by errant change (read: human error). Tideway's core invention is an automation technology that makes the change and configuration management of these applications efficient and effective.
Our flagship product, Tideway Foundation, gets control of business applications and their entire underlying IT infrastructure, including virtual components, connecting all technology layers -- from business applications to switches and all the dependencies in between. This allows companies to:
- Cut datacenter costs in software, hardware and people.
- Establish IT cost allocation.
- Reduce the frequency and duration of business downtime caused by IT.
- Support new products and processes through better, faster, safer change management.
- Automate the levels of operational risk audit and compliance now mandatory.
Tideway Foundation is built as a user-centric platform that pushes relevant information and knowledge to end-users according to their profile, providing them direct access to the tools and interfaces they need to act on that intelligence in a timely fashion. In this way, Tideway's user experience more closely resembles a consumer utility, like Google or Wikipedia, than a traditional enterprise IT Service Management (ITSM) tool.
Gt: What is going on in today's datacenters that requires these kinds of solutions? What IT practices are creating real problems in terms of complexity?
MUIRHEAD: A business' competitive advantage today is more dependent than ever on IT. IT has responded with a range of technologies and initiatives that can add multiple levels of complexity and, when improperly managed, severely exacerbate the problems they were intended to correct. Virtual machines, SOA, high availability architectures, EAI, virtualized storage, BPM, outsourcing initiatives -- there are so many from which to choose. Couple this with the fact that IT organizations need to simultaneously address the requirements of security, internal and regulatory audit, procurement, and cost transparency as part of their every day operations, and it's easy to understand the real problems that can be created in terms of complexity.
As obvious a goal as it might seem, attempting to run IT operations from the perspective of a business service can further complicate things. Why? Because it requires the involvement of experts across multiple technology and vendor silos in a culture that's systemically averse to sharing tribal knowledge and often poorly trained and supported when it comes to effective collaboration.
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