Rove Mobile Admin can generate enormous cost savings by enabling organizations to respond more efficiently when IT issues occur.  Mobile Admin provides system administrators with access over 500 distinct functions across dozens of different types of servers and services from their mobile devices, which enables an immediate response when something goes wrong.  When issues occur at inconvenient times, system administrators can avoid the need to boot up a laptop or travel to the office.  Mobile Admin enables them to examine the log files and other diagnostic information, determine the cause of the issue and take immediate corrective action, wherever they happen to be when they receive the alert.  This increased responsiveness leads directly to faster recovery from the outage.  Given the enormous cost of downtime in today’s electronically-driven environments, the resulting savings are substantial.

Rove has developed a cost savings model that enables our customers to estimate the downtime reduction that can be generated by Mobile Admin, and the associated cost savings.  Essentially, the methodology of the model is:

• Start with a very small company of 100 employees and 2 system administrators;
• Apply industry analyst estimates of the average availability of corporate IT infrastructure to estimate the average number of outages each year;
• Using reasonable assumptions about the behavior of system administrators, estimate the probability that neither system administrator will be at a desk or a console when these issues occur;
• Based on proven Mobile Admin use cases, project the time savings that can be realized across all of these outages;
• Using industry analyst estimates of the cost of downtime, determine the cost savings that are generated by this enhanced responsiveness;
• Apply a “size and complexity” factor to extrapolate these savings for larger organizations.

Based on this model using industry averages, a 100 person company with 2 system administrators can eliminate over 2 hours of downtime each year, generating savings of at least $100,000 annually.  The extrapolation of these savings for larger organizations is based on the recognition that as organizations grow larger, their IT teams grow proportionally, and also become increasingly specialized, with distinct groups responsible for different parts of the infrastructure, such as messaging, networking and ecommerce.  Applying conservative multipliers for both the number and size of these groups yields cost savings estimates for organizations of any size.

While many Mobile Admin customers are already enjoying these cost-savings benefits today, other customers are only using Mobile Admin for a small subset of its potential use cases.  These customers are missing out on the opportunity to reduce their costs substantially.  If you would like to explore the potential for expanding your use of Mobile Admin and taking full advantage of its cost-saving potential, please visit the web site and download the new white paper that describes our cost savings model in greater detail.  You may also wish to request a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, which will enable you to plug in some of your own numbers and estimate the savings that Mobile Admin can generate for your organization.

On Wednesday, June 17, we held the fourth  installment of our newest Webinar Series, which focuses on Mobile Admin 4.2. During this webinar, we took a look at the integration between Mobile Admin and Nagios.

Jason Gallaugher, Rove’s Product Manager, gave an interesting presentation on Mobile Admin, while Kelly Fortin, Rove’s product specialist, gave a great demo of the product and how you can monitor your Infrastructure with Nagios from a smartphone using Mobile Admin and then use Mobile Admin to resolve the issues. 

This webinar is coming hot off the heels of a very successful beta program and launch of the Nagios Integration. This release generated many positive reviews from the Nagios community. In this newest release, users can view host and service details or acknowledge events raised by Nagios, and then use Mobile Admin to rapidly address the issue.

I want to say thank you to all who were able to attend. There were great questions asked and we received some great feedback. All in all – I think the webinar was another great success!

If you weren’t able to attend the live webinar you can review the presentation on-demand. Just click the button below to download the video.

NOTE: If you don’t have GoToWebinar or GoToMeeting installed on your system, you may need to download the GoToMeeting Codec in order to watch the video.

I’ve been doing some work lately on an ROI model.  Our product, Mobile Admin, generates savings by increasing an IT organization’s responsiveness when something needs attention.  It could be a service outage, a performance degradation, a locked account or any one of a hundred other issues.  The basic concept is that system and network managers are not always at their desks or near a console, and so enabling them to respond through a smartphone (which is always conveniently available) saves time and money.  But how much?  That is the question I’ve been grappling with. 

One of the key parameters here is the size of the infrastructure.  How many servers?  How many services?  How many different platforms?  Routers?  As I dig into this, I’m struck by the immense complexity of our modern technological environment.  Today’s companies don’t dabble in IT – they are fundamentally built on it.  From email to supply chain management; from shopping carts to software libraries; from accounting systems to patient records, today’s organizations work electronically, and the infrastructure that supports them is mind-bogglingly big, when you stop and think about. 

A long time ago I learned that moving parts become vulnerable over time.  The more moving parts a device has, the more likely it is to fail at some point.  How many moving parts are there in a typical 5,000 person company?  To start with, there are dozens of applications, each with complicated user interfaces, preferences and options, security models and innumerable configurable parameters.  Supporting those applications are hundreds of servers of different sizes, chugging away 24 hours a day in the climate controlled server rooms (which themselves depend upon uninterruptable power supplies, air conditioning units, surge protectors and other pieces of gear).  If it’s a manufacturing company, there are probably robotics systems to contend with.  If it’s a communications company, the infrastructure might extend into a space where an increasing number of satellites are endlessly circling the globe.  It’s all interconnected with miles of cabling and banks of switches and routers.  All of these devices have cooling fans whirling, disks spinning, screens glowing and lights flashing continuously.  It’s amazing that these things all work as well as they do – enabling, for example, me to jot down these thoughts and post them to our blog, and enabling you to find them and read them.  Unless of course your browser just crashed, in which case you won’t have gotten this far.

 And when things do go wrong, what usually causes it?  It turns out that it is the most complex element of all – the human.  Configuration errors and user mistakes cause more downtime than anything else.  Luckily, Mobile Admin is there to help you recover quickly.  And soon we’ll have a model that you can use to estimate just how much you’ll save!

On Wednesday, May 27, we held the third  installment of our newest Webinar Series, which focuses on Mobile Admin 4.2. During this webinar, we took a look at the integration between Mobile Admin and VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

Jason Gallaugher, Rove’s Product Manager, gave an interesting presentation on Mobile Admin, while Kelly Fortin, Rove’s product specialist, gave a great demo of the product and how you can manage your VMware Infrastructure from a smartphone with Mobile Admin.

Based on all the reviews and feedback we have received regarding our VMware plug - in, we knew we would have alot of interest in this webinar. Judging by the number of attendees, we were right!

I want to say thank you to all who were able to attend. There were great questions asked and we received some great feedback. All in all – I think the webinar was a great success!

If you weren’t able to attend the live webinar you can review the presentation on-demand. Just click the button below to download the video.

NOTE: If you don’t have GoToWebinar or GoToMeeting installed on your system, you may need to download the GoToMeeting Codec in order to watch the video.

Next month, join us on Wednesday,  June 17 for an exclusive look at Mobile Admin’s Nagios Integration.

On Wednesday, April 29, we held the second installment of our newest Webinar Series, which focuses on Mobile Admin 4.2. During this webinar, we took a look at the integration between Mobile Admin and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager.

System Center Operation Manager is an end-to-end service-management solution that allows IT management teams to address issues affecting the health of their distributed IT services. Although System Center Operation Manager is not restricted to Windows-based IT environments, it seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft software and applications to provide IT professionals with greater control over their Microsoft-centric infrastructures. Mobile Admin users can view and filter on events raised by System Center Operation Manager, as well as take proactive actions to resolve critical situations.

Here is a link to the recorded version of the webinar, so that if you weren’t able to attend live you can review the presentation on-demand. Just click the button below to download the video.

NOTE: If you don’t have GoToWebinar or GoToMeeting installed on your system, you may need to download the GoToMeeting Codec in order to watch the video.

This month, join us on Wednesday, May 27 for an exclusive look at the way you can manage your VMware Virtual Infrastructure using Mobile Admin 4.2.