Listen to this article
* – This article has been archived and is no longer updated by our editorial team –
Below is our recent interview with Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO of eG Innovations:
Q: Can you tell us about your company eG Innovations and what it does?
A: At eG Innovations, we develop and market solutions for IT application and performance monitoring. Our focus is to simplify the work of IT managers and other operations staff who are responsible for ensuring that their key IT business services are available and performing well, so their users can be happy and productive.
When IT infrastructures supported client-server applications, troubleshooting problems was relatively easy. Today’s business applications involve several tiers of software and hardware, and a problem anywhere can make your application slow. This is where our solutions come in. By taking a 360-degree view of the IT infrastructure and monitoring your networks, servers, applications, databases, cloud and virtual infrastructure, our solutions help quickly determine where performance bottlenecks lie. Our solutions have broad applicability. We support monitoring of several hundred different IT technologies from legacy business applications – SAP, Oracle, Citrix etc. to modern technologies like Java, .NET, Node.js, SharePoint, Office 365, AWS, Azure, Docker, Nutanix, and more.
Q: There are many other monitoring tools available in the market today. How are your solutions differentiated from them?
A: Yes, there are hundreds of IT monitoring tools out there. In fact, the term “YAM” has been used to refer to “yet another monitoring” tool. Many of these tools are point-solutions – that is, they are specialized for monitoring networks, or databases, or virtualization and so on. These tools are used by domain experts – e.g., the database admin, network manager, etc.
Our eG Enterprise solution is positioned as a general practitioner for your IT infrastructure. When you are not well, you go to the general practitioner. Most problems are solved by the general practitioner themselves, while more complex issues are referred to the specialists. This is the same role that eG Enterprise performs in the IT domain.
While the specialized tools are good for deep-dives into the different tiers, IT managers often have to spend several hours trying to determine when a problem happens, where is the root cause: is it in the network? database? application? storage? cloud? This is where eG Enterprise helps. From the eG Enterprise console, IT managers can see what is happening at every layer, every tier of the infrastructure. Service topology views provide an overview of the state of the infrastructure supporting each business service. Automatic root-cause diagnosis technology embedded in the solution helps determine where the cause of a problem lies and where its effects are.
Recommended: An Interview With Founder & CEO Of Stride Consulting, Debbie Madden
Q: What is the biggest problem or market need that eG Innovations addresses?
A: IT performance monitoring is no longer about monitoring CPU, memory or disk resources. The toughest issue that IT teams face on a daily basis is when a user calls and complains that their application is slow. As new application technologies have evolved, cloud adoption has increased, and IT infrastructures have become more heterogeneous, finding a solution for this problem has gotten more difficult. What makes the problem more difficult is the large number of diverse monitoring tools that organizations have. Often, diagnosing a problem involves long war room sessions where different domain experts spend hours determining where the problem lies.
Our eG Enterprise solution tackles this very problem and it does so for different types of applications – web applications, Citrix/VDI applications, enterprise applications like SAP, PeopleSoft, and so on.
Q: Do you provide a software product or offer a SaaS service?
A: We offer both. An organization can deploy our software on-premises. For organizations that do not want to take on the overhead of maintaining yet another monitoring tool, we offer our solution as SaaS.
Q: Who is your typical customer? What size organization do you serve?
A: Any organization that cares about IT applications – their availability and performance – is a potential customer for us. We have customers in various domains: banking and finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, energy, education, media, government, and so on. Our licensing model scales very well – it is based on the number of servers being monitored. So even small organizations with just a few servers can use our solution without having to break the bank.
Q: Who are the typical users of your solution and what kind of benefits do they typically get?
A: Different stakeholders in an organization can benefit from the monitoring, diagnosis and reporting capabilities that our solution offers. IT managers and operations teams use the solution to ensure service uptime and performance and to reduce mean time to repair. Architects use the metrics collected by the solution for optimizing the infrastructure and getting more out of their current IT investments. Helpdesk personnel use the solution to triage problems faster and more accurately. Domain experts get insights into how the performance of their IT domains impacts the overall business service performance. Capacity planners use analytics and trends provided by the tool to make investments wisely.
Q: Is your monitoring solution only for internal use in an organization, or can a service provider or system integrator offer it as a service to their end customers?
A: The wide range of technology platforms we support make it ideal for a service provider, who may have to support customers with different types of applications. Our pay-per-use licensing model makes it possible for service providers to get started with our solution without any upfront cost. In that sense, it’s a true win/win partnership that we have with service providers. The licensing model of our solution also offers service providers unique benefits. Our licenses are not tied to specific operating systems, applications or hardware – so they are truly transportable, across servers of an organization and even across organizations. While the primary use case of our product is to monitor IT applications and infrastructure on a continuous basis, service providers and system integrators can also use our solution for on-demand performance audits for their customers.
Recommended: Interview With Winnipeg’s Tom Haughton Of My Place Realty
Q: What are some of your new product enhancements and market announcements? And what is the future roadmap for eG Innovations?
A: Our product evolution has to address three major areas: breadth of monitoring, depth of monitoring and speed to resolution. As new technologies evolve, customers expect us to support these technologies. Over the last year, we’ve added support for modern technologies such as containers, microservices, hyper-converged infrastructures, DevOps tools, NoSQL databases, and so on. At the same time, we realize that for a monitoring solution to be effective, its telemetry has to be effective and accurate. Our domain experts are constantly adding new capabilities to allow our products to detect problems better. One of the key enhancements in this area has been our focus on application code level visibility for Java and Microsoft .NET applications. This allows us to highlight code issues that may be affecting user experience. Finally, most organizations are having to “do more with less” and monitoring tools are going to have to be intelligent, automated and self-healing. The machine learning and analytics capabilities we are incorporating in our solution is aimed to address this need. Over the next year, we will be delivering more capabilities in each one of these areas.
If you want to learn more about eG Innovations, you can visit www.eginnovations.com. We also offer a free trial of eG Enterprise, if you are interested in seeing first-hand, how this general practitioner for your IT infrastructure can make problem detection, diagnosis and rectification easy.
Activate Social Media:
