User:Interlink
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Interlink Software - www.interlinksoftware.com
1.1 Company Overview Founded in 1996, Interlink Software is an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) fully owned by its founders and employees currently self-financing its growth with the proceeds from its operations. Having built up an impressive list of more than 40 blue chip clients around the globe the Interlink Software management team are seeking external funding to take Interlink’s industry leading Business Service Management (BSM) and Service Configuration Management (CMDB) offerings to the mainstream market.
1.1.1 Purpose of Company
To deliver best-in-class Event Management, Correlation, Automation, Service Level Management, Business Service Management and Service Configuration Management software products, consulting services and customer support.
Interlink’s technology breakthrough of producing the worlds first commercially available IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice based Business Service Management (BSM) solution has enabled organisations such as British Airways, Visa, HSBC, Nationwide, Wipro Technologies and numerous others to align their IT operations with business priorities.
1.1.2 Vision and Values
Built on a foundation of innovation and technical excellence Interlink Software fully supports an entrepreneurial spirit among its employees and believes its highly skilled team have been and will continue to be vital in creating the highest levels of customer satisfaction.
A strong emphasis on the best-of-breed approach has enabled Interlink Software to develop leading edge solutions that add value to the existing 3rd party software products already deployed by the customer. This approach is in direct contrast with the “framework” approach that many of our competitors are promoting, offering a complete suite of systems management tools branded as a “BSM suite”. Our best-of-breed approach has been proven to leverage existing investment in tools such as network management systems, agents and Help Desk tools allowing the customer to utilise the best in class products in each area rather than locking them into a single vendor “framework”.
Interlink Software has built up an impressive portfolio of industry leading software offerings that have already proven their quality and customer value. It is now felt that a larger sales force is desirable to fully benefit from the investment in research and development over the past ten years and to take full advantage of our valuable reference sites around the world.
1.1.3 Core Competencies
• Technically superior products in Business Service Management (BSM) and Service Configuration Management (SCM) markets.
• Proven customer satisfaction at large implementations across a variety of industry sectors worldwide. Including Financial Services, Airlines, Retailers, Outsourcers, Utilities and Manufacturers.
• A continuing investment into research and development of products keeping our technology ahead of the competition.
1.1.4 Technology Description
The Interlink Software product suite delivers:
An Enterprise Console. In addition to delivering a graphical web-based service dashboard, the Business Enterprise Server (BES) offers support staff a method for actually resolving faults from a service perspective.
A low maintenance (ITIL) process-driven approach to the delivery of real-time service views. Web-based service views are created and updated automatically based on service models driven from a virtual, federated CMDB – it is usual for competitive solutions to require the customer to create and maintain service views manually.
We believe our historical service reporting to be unique in the industry; our ITIL process driven approach has been extended to historical service reporting as well as the real-time views. Updates to the history reporting data warehouse are pushed dynamically via our publish/subscribe cloud, rather than a time based export/import. Business service impacts and changes to service structures, service hours, or business impacts stored in the CMDB are all pushed automatically to the historical service reporting data warehouse.
A true, role-based Web Client supporting a high volume of alerts based on a highly scaleable publish/subscribe architecture applicable to all categories of users ranging from read-only views of a subsection of a service for business users to full command-and-control of all services for data centre operations staff.
An extensible architecture with options for the customer to easily create custom service dashboard views without the need for coding / development of HTML and/or Java.
Early warnings before Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are breached.
1.1.5 Why Business Enterprise Server (BES) is cost effective BES aligns IT management with the business needs, prioritising the recovery of faults based on their impact to the business. BES provides early warning before Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are breached. BES can help reduce or eliminate downtime while reducing the cost of delivering business services that rely on IT. Building a BSM product around a CMDB allows the maintenance (1000’s of day to day IT infrastructure changes in large environments) to be externalised from the BSM product and reduces the need for skilled technical staff to administer and maintain the BSM product, saving a considerable amount in staffing costs. BES has been demonstrated to provide a rapid Return on Investment (ROI) deploying in days to weeks rather than months and has been shown to have a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to non-CMDB driven BSM tools. Our customers have used BES to: • Move from managing from a technology perspective to a single global vision of business services • Reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) due to a move away from managing separate technology silos within the enterprise, to end-to-end service views. • Visualise the impact of IT issues on the customers and the business, e.g. cost of downtime, %availability, degradation, number of users affected, etc. • Swiftly determine the cause of service impacting issues. • Provide the Service Desk with access to service visualisation tools and documentation to resolve calls first time. • Enable the transition from technology based SLA reporting to real-time service level reporting. • Automate Operating Level Agreement (OLA) and Service Level Agreement (SLA) tracking – enabling IT Operations to measure and report on the value IT provides to the business.
1.1.6 Why Service Configuration Manager (SCM) is cost effective The adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices has dramatically increased over the past 5 years. The itSMF (of which Interlink Software is a member) has been instrumental in the widespread global acceptance of ITIL. Interlink Software customers such as Visa and British Airways have invested heavily in aligning their IT operations with ITIL best practices and are extremely vocal about the benefits of this strategy, presenting at major industry events in conjunction with Interlink Software. At the backbone of the ITIL Service Delivery best practices is the provision of a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). ITIL states that “Configuration Management is an integral part of all other Service Management processes” – Best Practice for Service Delivery , Office of Government Commerce. The provision of a corporate-wide CMDB in a fortune 1000 organisation is not a trivial task, most organisations have grown through mergers and acquisitions and accumulated configuration data in a multitude of tools such as Help Desk ITSM products, software audit products, databases, spreadsheets and directory services. Rather than require the customer to transfer the data and maintenance of this data away from these existing data sources, the Interlink Software solution allows the customer to create a federated CMDB, automatically extracting data and updates to that data from the originating sources and populating a central, federated CMDB. This approach allows the customer to exploit the benefits of a central, corporate-wide CMDB without the pain (and expense) of a massive “big bang” migration. The federated CMDB can be unlocked to provide benefits including: • Low-to-no-maintenance Business Service Management – change to the CMDB drives the BES. • The ability to analyse the risk of and schedule the implementation of IT changes from a business perspective. • The ability to report on the cost of delivering business services identifying technology, people and real estate required to deliver services. • The ability to create IT compliance reports by business service.
1.2 Industry Analyst Recognition
1.2.1 Gartner, www.gartner.com
Featured as an “Example Vendor” in the BSM section of the “Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2005”, 20th July 2005, Debra Curtis and Milind Govekar
Featured as an “Example Vendor” in the report “Business Service Management Software, SLA Monitoring and Reporting Tools Likely to Merge”, 14th October 2005, Debra Curtis
Contacts -
Milind Govekar, mailto:milind.govekar@gartner.com, +44 1784 267597 Debra Curtis, mailto:debra.curtis@gartner.com, +1 203 964 0096
1.2.2 Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), www.emausa.com
SLM Solutions: An Online Buyer’s Guide
Contact –
Lisa Erickson-Harris, mailto:lericksonharris@enterprisemanagement.com, +1 303 543 9500
1.3 Customer References
Visits to customer data centre’s or telephone reference calls will be provided following signature of a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the interested party.
Available references include, but are not limited to –
• Avon Products, Inc – USA
• British Airways - UK
• HSBC - UK
• IKEA - Sweden
• Nationwide- UK
• Visa - USA
• Voca (aka BACS) - UK
• Wipro Technologies - India
