Staying in control with SilverBack's InfoCare

The growth of outsourced managed services has been more of a stumble forward than a forward march. Some of the reasons behind this stumbling are an expectation gap between users and providers, peek-a-boo service-level agreements (in other words, SLAs disguised more for duck-and-cover than for real service delivery), and the dramatically changing requirements of management solutions to address business service guarantees.

A host of other factors, some of which were addressed in last week's column on e-services, also contribute to the struggle.

Enter SilverBack, with an announcement several weeks ago of a new service called InfoCare. In a cluttered market, InfoCare offers a unique approach to monitoring and reporting network, server and (in the future) even application problems. InfoCare today should appeal to network administrators in small to midsize companies, and to network-centric e-business managers and service providers. InfoCare is also targeting competitive local exchange carriers, incumbent local exchange carriers and a variety of co-locators.

What makes the SilverBack solution distinctive is that it's not primarily outsourced management per se, but rather an outsourced monitoring and reporting system for use by in-house experts. Much of InfoCare resides on the customer premise. It goes beyond tool sets that are shared between providers and customers; it's essentially a customized management tool delivered as a service.

InfoCare draws from an amalgam of off-the-shelf management software tools. For the near term, these include Network Associates' CyberCop for intrusion detection that probes for denial of service and other attacks, AdventNet for performance and asset management, and Riversoft for root-cause analysis. This software resides on customer premise equipment (CPE), the SilverBack's InfoNest 650. InfoCare monitors and reports on activity, communicating to a central Sybase database through an encrypted virtual private network. Part of the value of this strong CPE presence is performance - you can rely on the Internet, rather than a dedicated T-1 line, without inviting significant degradation or delay.

At the central database, customers can get immediate insight into trends, benchmarks and other correlated management data through the SilverBack Information Portal. SilverBack uses XML and its own "business logic" - made-up thresholds and rules-based logic, along with stored procedures - to correlate information across its different data sources.

As SilverBack's offering matures and grows in function, it can also expect an expanding market base. The premise is certainly a good one - inviting not abdication of responsibility but improved efficiency. Largely because of this, it's a refreshing alternative to either throwing in the towel to often expensive and inflexible services, or else investing in complex software management software that too often becomes shelfware. Because of its clean focus and benefits, SilverBack should expect some imitators to its management service provider model - which will of course be a good thing for the customer.

As an aside, I should mention that EMA is embarking on some research directed specifically at an emerging model for selecting outsourced managed services. In this model, companies both large and small are making significant investments in outsourced services to jumpstart business goals - in instances where business performance and IT performance coincide. There's a new breadth of solutions on the market to make this more possible than ever. And partly because of this breadth, there's a greater chance of confusion. How users do and should prioritize among all these services is a valid question with far-from-obvious answers.