The prospects for outsourcing systems and enterprise management functions have never looked stronger. As the facilities for automation and remote management improve and skills become more scarce, the business case is strengthened by the availability of cheap operations centres on the Indian sub-continent.
Complex enterprise and service provider solutions, however, need broader support for business processes. Motive is a supplier of that support.
Motive supplies software products and solutions that build upon traditional management technology to provide high value managed services for remote users. Typical applications include service providers supporting individual customers and IT departments looking after internal users.
The added value comes from the way that Motive uses event information to trigger and then control business processes.
The events themselves can come from a whole range of sources. Existing management agents, open standards and proprietary APIs can all be used to spot important events. In this way, existing investments in management technology are preserved.
The key is to understand which events are important and Motive uses a workflow approach that can tie complex multi-step processes to captured events.
This is not targeted at complete automation but, instead, seeks to create an appropriate interaction between people and technology to ensure highest possible quality of service. Motive solutions are sold on their ability to deliver service improvements and cost savings - all in a 16 week timeframe that gets the solution configured and users trained to carry out further developments for themselves.
This might sound a little far fetched to the cynical amongst us. However, take into account the fact that most monitor interfaces are already in place as are many basic process templates. Thus we can see that customer service centres with event management, problem diagnosis, remote control and trouble-ticketing could be easy to get up and running. The amount of customisation is relatively small.
This is not to trivialise Motive's achievements in any way. It has in place all of the elements required to take a standard bottom-up management approach and turn it into a full top-down service delivery solution.
Motive is pressing all the right buttons in terms of linking key technology events to business controls - a fact that is reflected in its strong performance. Financially, the company is showing annual revenue growth of around 100% with six quarters of continuous profitability.
It has its technology embedded in millions of PC systems, several business applications and a large number of domestic broadband installations. The aim is to allow end users to solve their own problems or for customer service desks to fix a high percentage of issues on the first call simply by matching events to remedial processes.
