Gartner picks literally dozens of companies each year, but a minority is in the MSP space. IPsoft is one of the exceptions, having garnered the Gartner honor as a Cool Vendor in IT Operations Management.
Other cool vendors in this category are Evolven, GrandSLA, iQuate and ITinvolve.
IPsoft’s hook is autonomic IT services. The goal of this approach is to replace manual IT labor with automation, particularly repetitive tasks that are well understood, having something akin to a robot performing these functions.
The autonomics are based on a form of artificial intelligence, expert systems that teach themselves based on what they encounter and use this intelligence to help damaged systems heal themselves.
Many vendors, such as IBM, are pushing this technique to help systems repair and configure themselves.
IPsoft applies the same approach to managing operations.
IPsoft was founed in 1998 by Chetan Dube, who remains CEO. Dube believes that expert systems and automation will allow IT infrastructure to be managed by these intelligent robots rather than human administrators.
Today IPsoft that is can solve more than half of its customers’ problems through automation.
“We believe Gartner has recognized the potential of advanced automation to help IT operations leaders drive down labor and personnel costs and free up human resources for more meaningful activities,” said Dube. “Our vision has been that the effective use of autonomics in service management will shorten resolution and execution times, improve consistency and service availability, and mitigate risks in IT infrastructure. We are excited to be delivering that vision to customers across the globe and are honored to have had this capability recognized by Gartner in this report.”
So why does Gartner think IPsoft is cool? “More than 90 percent of IT service desk costs are actually personnel-related costs. Following the ITIL v3 framework, IPsoft automates repetitive, structured activities of IT service delivery and management so that valuable human resources can be freed up for more creative, innovative and people-focused tasks,” Gartner argued.
IPsoft’s tool for this mission is IPcenter v3, “which is founded on autonomic Turing-compatible state-space operations. IPcenter eliminates manual operations with virtual engineers (automata) capable of remediating exceptions, escalating to the best available resource for higher-level resolution, carrying out interactive voice response (IVR)-based interactions with customers and IT suppliers and provisioning virtual instances,” Gartner explained.
Gartner believes the expert systems can truly learn the work of administration. “IPcenter's virtual engineers have the ability to "learn" from the L2/L3 human engineers and subject-matter experts about the technical incidents or issues that are not already scripted in the knowledgebase of the tool,” Gartner said. “Using machine-learning algorithms, the automatons observe a human engineer taking specific steps to investigate and resolve an incident that has not yet been captured in the automaton's knowledgebase. This way, the automaton enhances its knowledgebase and classifies the learning, so that the resolution techniques are available for future use.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
