Minutes

v This meeting was held at the Denali office in Bellevue.

v Presentation – Cohesiant. Kelly Deaver http://www.cohesiant.com/home/index.html

Ø Gartner people say that Cohesiant may be on the cutting edge of an entirely new category of Asset Management and Utilization.

Ø More than 20% of 1.6 Trillion annual IT spending is wasted each year because senior IT executives do not have automated visibility and control of IT resources once deployed.

Ø Continuously identifies and measures the real time utilization of ALL enterprise hardware and software assets. Benefits include:

§ Cost Control

§ Operational efficiencies

§ Software license compliance

§ Application usage

§ Business continuity

§ Hardware lease management

§ Head count reduction

Ø Can help with diagnosis of Help Desk issues as well as CM and Asset management.

Ø Enables tailoring of PCs and servers to actual need, by gathering actual usage statistics from people doing the same type of work.

Ø SMS, LANDesk, Infratools do the low end stuff, but can’t do any of the high end optimization work.

Ø Can tell usage and license installation. One customer saved over $60,000 on a 300 desktop system, not counting what MS would have charged in penalties for non-compliance.

Ø Version control of various software packages is also possible, i.e. matching up XP apps with XP Operating Systems, Win2K with Office 2K, etc. Not keeping these up to date is also a violation of MS copyright.

Ø Server consolidation: Server growth by companies who just buy new ones for each project instead of optimizing their usage of existing hardware. Warner Brothers estimates that this will save them $500,000/yr in manual inventory expense.

Ø Integration with Remedy is based on the Enterprise Integration Engine (EIE), using the Oracle Adapter. Uses the AST:Asset and AST:Component forms as primary repositories, but it can integrate with custom-built Remedy systems as well.

Ø Can be used to monitor the progress of basic asset tasks.

§ System standardization

§ Software and hardware upgrades

§ System redeployment

Ø Software Acquisition planning, by determining whether hardware is sufficient to run the software.

Ø Report Builder (from Micro Strategies) is the reporting engine; over 150 reports are included with the software.

Ø Only runs on Oracle 8i, either on a Solaris or Win2K platform. Will be porting to AIX soon.

Ø Can use existing software remote installation methodologies to push the client tool out, or they can provide a tool of their own.

Ø Will replicate the SMS/LANDesk-type asset discovery functionality for companies that do not currently have one.

v Presentation – RevX. Ki Choi and Dave Watts http://www.revx.com/

Ø Is an easier way to construct Web Services than using Remedy Administrator.

Ø Originally developed as a bug tracker years ago, but is now a full-fledged Business Process Management system.

Ø Augments Remedy engine for consumption of Web Services, and as a data provider.

Ø Lives outside the Remedy workflow.

Ø Infrastructure is that of providing specific services.

Ø Preferred method is to use XML as the driver, which can be generated by Remedy Web Services.

Ø Comprehensive reporting capability that integrates with Crystal, BO, Cognos, etc. Uses Active X as part of its engine.

Ø Has a degree of portability in how it can use the Web Services; i.e. it isn’t tied to one technology (like Remedy) for how it is used or consumed.

Ø Core strength is touching end users with technology.

Ø Visio-like interface – drag and drop to link steps into a process that builds the business rules and the XML.

Ø You build a customer interface with whatever other end point you plan to use, with the process you built being in the middle.

Ø Automated notifications can be done,too. Can read Remedy data changes as triggers for those, or they can be time-based.

Ø Can be used to look into a process (like a ticket) to see (in color-coded objects) what parts have executed and which are waiting for data or other functions.

Ø Can be used to integrate with MS Outlook and Project.

v Hot Topics

Ø Meeting Schedule:

§ Next meeting: TBD, 6:00 – 8:00.

§ Subjects – TBD

For comments or questions on this Northwest Remedy User Group website
please email Geoff Endresen at nwrug@geoffe.com