|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Release - May 13, 2009
iFountain, an innovative independent software vendor specializing in IT Operations Management announced that its RapidOSS product is the winner of the EMC® Velocity² Technology & ISV Program “2008 EMC Partner Solution Award: Offering of the Year for EMC Smarts®.” read more »
Handling of the planned/unplanned maintenance of IT infrastructure is an essential event management activity, yet it seems to be an after thought in most tools. The accuracy of the information presented to users is essential. Users need to know what it truly a problem that requires immediate action and what is not. read more »
Stop the presses! We've been notified by EMC Smarts that our RapidOSS product has been awarded “2008 Offering of the Year Award”
As you can imagine we're thrilled about this! iFountain has been an EMC development partner for several years now and we have developed number of solutions that complement the EMC Smarts production suite. It is very nice to get some recognition and appreciated by everyone in the company.
In my conversations with potential customers and in documentation, I often state that RapidOSS makes it easy to work with external systems. Since "easy" is a relative concept, without some concrete examples this may not mean much to folks who don't have first hand experience working with RapidOSS.
Integration with external systems very often require in-depth understanding of the APIs provided by the external systems. Even when the external system provides standard APIs (SOAP, database etc.) it is not easy to master the variations from the standards, and figure out the structure of the data, how to use it.
In RapidOSS, we use a simple data structure consistently for all external systems. If the data is a single object (record, line, etc.) it is represented as name value pairs, referred to as “Map”. For example, if we want to represent employee information, we could use the following structure:
When learning about new products, I often find myself trying to understand what problem the product is trying to solve and often without much success. It is crucial for vendors to express this clearly, yet it's not so easy. We sometimes get lost talking the jargon, the features, etc. and forget about the fundamental question. What is this product good for?
So I remind myself not to loose track of where we (iFountain) have started. RapidOSS is a direct result of number of problems we have run into repeatedly in the field. It's our attempt to have a repeatable solution to common problems that are typically solved as ad-hoc custom projects or by forcing product to perform “unnatural acts”.
So in this series of posts. I'll discuss the problems we have encountered in the field. The problems we are trying to solve with RapidOSS.
Problem: The client is broken read more »
Fault management, performance management and event management trio of tools are typically at the heart of network management solutions. Although there are some integrated solutions that do offer components for all these management disciplines, organizations with large or mission critical networks often choose to use combination of tools that have the best functionality at each area . As a result, integration among these tools becomes crucial for the overall solution to be effective is supporting IT operations. read more »
OK I admit that only a few people would use the words "IT management" and "cool" at the same sentence, but here I go! You can now work with your managements systems from your IM client. The latest release of RapidInformer now supports AOL IM, Google Talk, Jabber and IBM Sametime. You no longer have to be glued to the glass to stay informed or have a console running to interact with your management systems. Via the bidirectional IM interface, notification come to where you are and you can execute commands directly from your IM client or email. "ESM via IM" so to speak.
Let's review what this thing can do:
Notifications: Notifications can be send via email, SMS, instant messaging, or any system that has an API or command line interface. Not much new here other than Sametime support, moving right along. read more »
RapidOSS is designed to integrate disparate management systems, databases etc. with its flexible scripting support in the server side, and AJAX UI in the client side. We have demonstrated with Google Maps integration, how it supports mashups in a previous post. Recently, we have added a timeline component, a DHTML-AJAX based widget for visualizing time based events, which makes use of SIMILE Timeline widget. Now we will go through a scenario how you can use this new UI component in the RapidOSS context. read more »
RapidOSS is typically used to integrate data from different systems in the presentation level, hence data exchange between UI components in the browser is core functionality. In the live RapidOSS demo implementation available on this site, devices are organized in a tree. When the user clicks an object on the tree, the object data is passed to chart and the events grid components. Events grid show the events related to the object selected by user, and the pie chart updates based on the severities of the events for that objects. Which data should be exhanged between which components is specified in a configuration file. This functionality enables mashup of data from different data sources. Data from inventory, event, change management, ticketing, etc. can be presented to the users in context, in an integrated manner. RapidOSS data stores just enough data to facilitate the integration of the data and the communications with multiple backend systems. read more »
*** UPDATE ***
This is an old post. The information and screenshots in this post refers to an older version of RapidInsight. More up to date information on RapidInsight and Netcool can be found here.
*************
Netcool is one of the most popular (if not the most) manager of managers in the market, and it has been for quite some time. I still remember the first time I started using it 8 years ago. I was hooked at once. I could not believe how much better than Unicenter and TEC it was. read more »
