Luminate's knowledge-base service adds intelligence

Luminate cut its teeth on managing enterprise resource planning applications with an SAP management tool that competes directly with Envive's management suite, and to some extent, BMC Patrol and SAP's CCMS. With many years experience in SAP management, along with the practical knowledge that comes from experience, Luminate has begun a transformation that could provide significant benefits for users - SAP and otherwise.

Envive and Luminate have recently announced products that incorporate their knowledge, expertise and best practices into their respective products. With practical suggestions, rules of thumb and the intelligence to call out useful information for specific situations, both products act as "senior advisors" to the IT staff. The benefit is particularly significant to the less senior, less experienced staff members who have responsibility for SAP management but may not understand the meaning, much less the nuances, behind the information displayed by a management tool. With a broad knowledge base as a foundation, these management tools can not only call out the exceptions and problems but also give advice on what to do about them.

Luminate takes the idea several steps further. First, Luminate has taken the position that their "value-add" is in the intelligence, not the reporting. As part of this position, they assert the following:

• Management data is and should be free. Most vendors agree with this. The data is created by all the infrastructure components as part of what they do and is freely available for others to mine.

• Tools to manipulate and report on the data should be free. This is one assertion that many would dispute, since this is the major revenue stream for most management vendors. Nonetheless, Luminate, with its MAMBA products, provides a free tool with a good user interface to interpret management information. Its MAMBA product for SAP has been available since last November and has received a strong positive reaction from early users. MAMBA for Windows NT was released in March.

• The value-add should come from the knowledge base and is best provided as a service. (Note there has been a subtle name change from Luminate Software to Luminate, reflecting the new service orientation.)

Luminate recently announced it would provide a management service called Luminate.Net. Customers of this new service collect their own data, run MAMBA for free real-time information and then connect to Luminate's service to leverage the central knowledge base (Intelligence Center). This adds intelligence into the customer's management process, including a daily e-mail with a hot list and relevant information from the knowledge base. Luminate provides the tools for free, charges for the knowledge base as a service, and "advises" the customer on how to manage and address the problems called out by the tools. As with SilverBack, this is not a completely outsourced managed service - the actual management is not provided for the customer. Luminate's focus is on using its knowledge base to add intelligence and act as the senior advisor to a potentially junior person within the customer organization who does the management.

The other interesting part of Luminate's repositioning is that it is now going beyond SAP. The MAMBA interface, which got high marks from users of SAP, was released for NT in March and announced for Oracle (scheduled to ship in May). Luminate.Net for NT is scheduled for July, and Luminate.Net for Oracle is slated for September. While it may take time to get all the NT and Oracle nuances down, Luminate's graphical user interface features have been strong in the past and should move well to other environments. Likewise, the knowledge base will take time to catch up with the SAP intelligence.

Overall, Luminate's approach offers a lot of possibilities. If well executed, the approach could position Luminate as a strong contender in the systems and applications MSP space. Clearly, this is a new area, and like network outsourced managed services, there is the potential for lots of heavyweights to join in. In the meantime, Luminate has made it easy to test the waters. MAMBA is available for free, and the Luminate.Net service comes with an easy price tag (per managed device per month).