BMC's advent in predictive intelligence

MUMBAI, INDIA: BMC Software - the global IT and business service management solutions provider, had acquired ProactiveNet Incorporation, an analytics firm, in 2007.

The acquisition aimed to boost BMC’s business service management (BSM) solutions with ProactiveNet’s real time analytics technology – a predictive intelligence (PI) tool.

While talking to CyberMedia News, BMC’s Atul Garg, product line executive, ECA Service Assurance said that the company plans to add PI tool across its product portfolio.

“The event management and monitoring market as well as the application management market both worth about one billion dollars each. We have strong position in the BSM market and with addition of PI, we will gain major market share,” Garg said.

“PI mainly works by learning the past behavior patterns and then using them for making predictions. It’s highly applicable and beneficial to critical areas and processes that affects business and revenue such as online booking, financial trading sites and many more areas,” Garg explained.

Further, Garg differentiated data mining and predictive intelligence, where the former is based on past patterns, while the latter is a real time analysis and predictions.

Time factor remains prominent in PI. With E*Trade Financial’s example Garg explained that this US based monetary firm makes a two second trade guarantee to its online customers and in case the applications slows down, the firm loose the commission.

In addition, the firm used various monitoring tools with different interface, which made data integration very difficult and time consuming.

"But with the BMC ProactiveNet solution, the firm is able to monitor over 500 servers including Solaris, Linux and NT servers along with other applications. It also generates daily reports automatically as well as on a real time performance management console,” added Garg.

About functionality, PI can be easily integrated with an existing system or IT infrastructure of enterprises. It works with Adaptor mechanism that links all the existing data and database to understand the patterns.

Using the algorithms, PI monitors the data and accordingly it finds out normal and abnormal behavior patterns within IT environment caused by usage. Subsequently, it triggers actions to cutoff the root cause of future threats, and take corrective actions before services are impacted.

Interestingly, Garg explained how the technical problems occurs in any IT system.

“With multiple access of server applications, large base of online users and so forth, leads to exhaustive usage causing the technical snags in IT environment,” he said.

In terms of India, he stressed that the providers of financial, telecom services and managed services can largely utilize PI and gain benefits.

 “Since we are into software development, the managed service providers will offer are solutions and can lead to a new segment of ‘technology enabled services’ to cater techno based services,” Garg concluded.