Nimsoft, a subsidiary of CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) provides leading IT Management-as-a-Service solutions within the CA Technologies portfolio. Companies and service providers of all sizes use Nimsoft to rapidly and easily implement essential monitoring and service desk capabilities necessary to manage today’s dynamic computing environments.Nimsoft solutions provide the visibility and control you need to realize maximum business advantage from your IT services and investments. They offer the capabilities and expertise you need to enjoy a unified view of all your business services, whether they’re based in the cloud, in the data center, or a mix of the two. Nimsoft’s ITIL-based IT management as a service (MaaS) solution includes comprehensive monitoring and IT service management functionality (ITSM)—integrated capabilities that enable continual infrastructure optimization and accelerated problem resolution. Gijo Mathew, Vice President – Product management, investigates into the major trends and challenges that Nimsoft has been witnessing through their development portfolio.

There are quite a few trends that we see and this helps us in seeing how people want to do IT management today. Nimsoft helps organizations manage their IT infrastructures better which as a result monitors IT lifecycle and process. As things have changed economically, people are trying to innovate new ways of managing the IT infrastructure. We focus on five mega trends in the industry and they are Mobile, Social, Cloud, Consumerization and Big data. These trends show a significant impact on how people would want to manage IT in their organization and how they expect IT to be managed in their organization.

Major Trends

Nimsoft has tracked five major trends that have helped us change the way we deliver products and services.

Mobile: It is not just about delivery of applications on mobile devices but, it is really about doing things from anywhere at any time, anyhow. This is a significant change of how product design actually works and how we deliver technology. We relooked at the whole scenario and changed our applications in order to take advantage of this new platform available. That led to a lot of changes on how we deliver our solutions making it more modular than anything that has been out there before. This not only made it easier for us to create more mobile apps, but also allowed us to become a part of the fabric of what an organization does to provide services to the end users or clients. These solutions not being managed based on the products but actually from the business outcome.

Social: It was not just about products integrated with Facebook or Twitter but rather than looked at it in a more holistic way. We took concepts from social to see how people wanted to integrate and leverage with systems. We then embedded these concepts with our solutions. These concepts really allowed interaction and user experience with our solution to be used from a more social perspective. It makes customers use and leverage the product better from the solution to get their jobs done.

Cloud: For us, cloud equated to "ease of use for our technology" and value. It is really about getting customers to our solutions in a way by which they get maximum value out of it as quickly as possible. The cloud delivery mechanism really allows us to do that.

Consumerization: Consumers generally tend to think and need solutions to be user friendly. Our customers would want their IT management solutions simple and easy. This is a big revelation and this is what we are driving towards. It becomes important for all the organizations to keep the same level of service to their end customers and because of that IT management needs to get simpler and easier. This was a mind shift for a lot of people. It is not just about the products that they sell, but also the entire user experience they provide. Being able to implement it, start it and press "go", all the way till we get value out of the products and solutions.

Big Data: It defines the problem that needs to be solved. It is all about how we harness Big Data to make our applications better and to provide right solutions to our customers. This is extremely relevant in IT management because the IT manager produces a host of data second by second basis. Unlike what it used to be earlier, leveraging data concepts now is different and easier. We can do a lot of analytics and we always do not have to ask the questions in the device or solution. Now, we can collect a lot of Big Data and do a lot of free form of these questions. With everything changing and data coming in from so many systems, Big Data will play a huge role in everything that we do from an IT manager perspective by taking the data and make the appropriate divisions within our own solution. We would then leverage this and help the organizations pull out that knowledge from the data.

Challenges

The biggest challenge is - the way people address the problem is changing. When we are presented with problems, we tend to leverage the processes and mindsets to solve that problem. We as a team did not settle down with the old ways of doing things. Instead, we always came up with something fresh to the table. With a team of experienced developers and IT managers, we adjusted the problems by keeping today’s technology in mind. The biggest element is in the execution of any new strategy that we may come up with.

Vision ahead

We all push to be innovative in what we do, especially in a world where technology is changing so rapidly. We have got to be innovative in order to stay relevant. The second important aspect we think about improving is the operational excellence. It is about the name Nimsoft which says "I help deliver a particular product/service". We would want to be a part of something people admire. Although excellence matters individually, it matters more when it is regarded as a team. We foster the cycle of innovation and operational excellence which in turn helps us in building world class technology. More importantly world class people!