Keeping It Simple

For the most part, the attendees endorsed the idea that we're all in this together. But what they're really looking for is someone to help them manage their respective messes. In other words, just keep it simple. To wit, when attendees were asked by conference host Pete Busam, COO of Decisive Business Systems, Pennsauken, N.J., to define "reliability," one IT manager responded, "It just goes on." Simple request, certainly, but a very tall order.

Consider that another attendee from a New Jersey country club with whom I chatted later in the day has only recently made the shift from a highly reliable DOS system to a solution based on Windows. If you stop to think about what all the restaurant and other hospitality-industry applications out there look like, you'll realize she's far from alone.

Sometimes, I think the industry gets ahead of itself when it starts throwing around terms like "on demand" or "adaptive enterprise." Certainly, these philosophies embrace the right spirit: the idea that information technology is a service that supports business needs. But the focus needs to be on the here and now. And that's why managed services providers such as Totality, which provides a means of managing existing applications to certain guaranteed performance levels, are quietly building impressive customer followings. The San Francisco-based company has actually increased its recurring fees for customers such as American Airlines as its relationship gets deeper, and it also has doubled its revenue in the past year, while staff only grew about 25 percent, says Totality CEO Kelly Rodriques. It's also the motivation behind the dozens of product introductions we've seen in recent months for application performance management technology from vendors ranging from Mercury Interactive to Veritas Software.

As corporate IT departments become more liable for managing to achieve certain service levels, you can bet they'll expect their solution providers to respond in kind. It's only logical.

How are you improving service levels? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, welcomes comments at [email protected].