Digital transformation is creating a sea of ‘operational silos’ where companies are struggling to keep an eye on all the local and cloud-based IT systems that run their business, according to a European firm called Centreon that announced its expansion into North America on Wednesday.
Based in Paris, Centreon offers an open source event monitoring system called Centreon EMS that is already adopted by more than 200,000 users overseas. The company will serve customers in the U.S. and Canada from an office in Toronto, with company co-founder Romain Le Merlus acting as CEO of North American operations and CTO Julien Mathis taking on the CEO role for Europe.
According to Le Merlus, while many organizations are pursuing some kind of digital transformation (DX) initiative or another, they are investing in an array of different tools to make sure systems don’t fail. That makes it more difficult to get what he calls a “single-pane” view of the organization, which can make it harder for firms to innovate or even meet existing customer expectations.
“You can’t improve what you can’t see,” he told B2B News Network. “Unfortunately, the drive to digital is creating gaps.”
Companies that are able to get a consolidated view of how the various technologies in their DX projects are performing are able to save costs because they’re using fewer tools — Le Merlus said it’s not uncommon for a single organization to be using 10 different products for this purpose. There also tend to be savings from having fewer outages.
“In our experience, as much as one million euros of losses per hour can be on the line if, for example, an airline system is down,” he said. “And when a system is down, it typically takes a few hours or days before full recovery is realized. You can see how devastating this is to business.”
Other IT infrastructure monitoring vendors include Nagios, Zabbix and Pulseway. However Le Merlus said Centreon is focused on helping share information about IT infrastructure across the entire organization, and thereby encourage collaboration between both IT and non-IT functions.
“North America is a mature and established IT market with forward-looking organizations,” he said. What’s changed, he suggested, is the increased opportunity to enhance customer experiences across many different channels. “The need for organizations to digitally transform has never been greater — and that’s not limited to Europe.”
Centreon’s track record has spanned everything from Fortune 1,000 firms to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Le Merlus said, including companies in financial services, transport and logistics and retail. They all face similar challenges in terms of complexity.
“If they keep adding tools, operational and data management silos will just continue to increase, as will the deluge of data coming from them.”
Centreon already works with a number of managed service providers and system integrators, Le Merlus said, and its North American expansion will include a channel program whereby partners can earn incremental revenues by addressing those gaps in IT monitoring. Centreon will also offer on the ground technical expertise and support, plus training certification options, he said.
