ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, has announced its entry into the self-service IT analytics market with the launch of Analytics Plus. Designed for mid- to large-size organisations that want to draw insights from their IT data, Analytics Plus integrates easily with various data sources and tools, analyses vast data volumes and presents findings with rich visualisations.

Too many organisations use too many IT tools to run their businesses. Those tools may also support IT users, infrastructure and business applications. However, they do not support fast, accurate decisions — for IT or for business. The basic problem is that all the data (and all the data formats) created by the many tools is stored in silos that limit actionable insights and visibility into organisational performance.

“Most companies want the IT analytics payoff, but few want to pay the steep IT analytics price,” said Sridhar Iyengar, vice president, ManageEngine. “We’re uniquely positioned to drive the widespread adoption of this powerful technology. We know IT management and how to make it both powerful and simple. We know IT admins, managers, CIOs and CEOs and what they expect in analytics-driven insights. And we know business intelligence and analytics thanks to the 10 years our sister division, Zoho.com, has spent refining those technologies, which we’re leveraging in Analytics Plus.”

Key Benefits of Using Analytics Plus

Analytics Plus meets the growing requirement to put IT analytics within every organisation’s reach and provide the insights and visibility needed to make better decisions, faster. Harnessing ManageEngine’s deep experience across the IT management spectrum, Analytics Plus brings together and correlates islands of data to instantly provide insights in the form of rich visualisation and interactive dashboards. Highlights include:

• Fast to set up and easy to use: In minutes, Analytics Plus can be installed and configured, and visualisations can be created. Unlike other analytics tools, Analytics Plus is simple to use and offers an intuitive drag-and-drop visual studio to create dashboards easily.
• Powerful data blending, analytics and statistics: Analytics Plus lets users do cross-data analytics and offers a “look up” model to merge different data sets using common fields. It provides pre-built analytical functions and an excel-like formula engine with an extensive library of mathematical and statistical functions.
• Rich visual presentation and analysis: Users can create reports and dashboards that include charts, widgets, KPI metrics, pivot tables, and tabular view components. The dashboards let users visually slice and dice data, drill down into details, and change the appearance using different chart types and pre-defined templates.
• One tool to unify insights from various data sources: The Analytics Plus architecture lets users analyse data from a variety of data sources such as spreadsheets, files and feeds, relational and non-relational databases, applications and Web API, providing a unified view of their entire IT.
• Sharing and collaborative working: With Analytics Plus, users can securely share reports and dashboards with others to reach consensus and make group decisions quickly. Dashboards can be embedded in websites, intranets and other Web apps for wider access with fine-grained control.
• Work seamlessly across Web and mobile devices: Analytics Plus is also available as a mobile app for Android and iOS tablets, so users can access and interact with the reports and dashboards already created, on the move.
• Lower Total cost of Ownership (TCO): Analytics Plus saves organisations up to 50 percent in total costs compared to leading IT analytics tools offering similar functionality.

In the last few years, IT service management (ITSM) and the IT service desk have become the cornerstone of IT strategy, enabling organisations to deliver high-quality IT services efficiently. Now, organisations are seeking new ways to improve IT service delivery and efficiency via better ITSM processes. The only way to understand and identify process inefficiencies is to analyse data from service desk tools, and advanced analytics is the preferred way to perform that work.

“We recently researched this space in our report, ‘Advanced IT Analytics: A Look at Real Adoptions in the Real World,’” said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. “We found that ITSM and service desk were the second most-likely factors driving adoption of advanced IT analytics strategies. That’s only three percent down from the first driving factor, which was the IT executive suite. Additionally, 82 percent of the respondents indicated strong ITSM integrations.”

Iyengar said, “Our own ITSM customer surveys concur with EMA’s findings. We believe Analytics Plus for ITSM marks a turning point in analytics — for ITSM and for IT as a whole.”

Pricing and Availability

Currently in beta, Analytics Plus is licensed based on the number of users accessing it and is available in two editions. The Personal edition is free to use, whereas the Professional edition starts at an annual subscription cost of US$1,995 per year, which includes two users and comes with a 30-day, free trial. Additional users are priced under US$200 per user per year. Perpetual buyout license and OEM white-labelling options are also available.