I got a chance to sit down this afternoon with Brian Smits, director of marketing, Americas at Integrated Research, i.e., the Prognosis company, and he told me, among other noteworthy things, that IR/Prognosis has had a great year--sales are "way up" and profits hit a record when the company closed its fiscal year at the end of June.
Why is diagnostics and monitoring suddenly the place to go to make money in this business? Brian Smits said, "Wat I keep hearing is 'visibility and control.' Everybody at this conference wants visibility and control over their enterprise."
Another factor may be, ironically, the slowing of large-scale voice system rollouts due to the slow economy. "They're still working on the rollouts of the systems they've already bought," Smits said.
Ironically, one of Prognosis's traditionally strong verticals, financial services, has remained a source of revenue despite--or maybe because of--the turmoil in that sector. Smits explained that with banks consolidating, they're having to meld infrastructures that include a little bit of all vendors' gear--"they have everything in house," Smits said. So Prognosis's ability to work with Cisco, Nortel, Microsoft and Avaya systems makes it a good choice for these enterprises. One credit card company saved $1 million by consolidating its tool set with Prognosis, according to Smits.
Besides the good financial news, Prognosis is also starting to look toward the monitoring and diagnostic side of some of the new technology trends that are emerging around voice. Its extensibility via APIs allows Prognosis to monitor integrations of applications with communications systems--so when you finally do that Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) integration and need to actually report on its performance, Prognosis may be able to help you do that. Likewise for performance of communications systems running as SaaS/cloud-based systems.
Network management always seems to be the afterthought in IT, so enterprises, which are admittedly a long way from really implementing CEBP or cloud at any scale, are probably even farther from thinking about how to monitor and manage performance. But assuming those trends take off, it'll become an issue.
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