Released in March 2013, MetriX Dashboards 4.0 dramatically simplifies how customers access and visualize their data, making it easy to share and interact with real-time information. The pre-defined ServiceNow metrics provide customers the ability to leverage data from ServiceNow’s APIs and web services to provide real-time visibility into their ITSM environment. In addition, customers can leverage MetriX’s powerful designer platform and multi-vendor data connectors to quickly and easily consolidate data from virtually any data source in a single dashboard.

ServiceNow Change Management Template for MetriX Dashboards 4.0

MetriX Dashboards’ ServiceNow metric packs are based on best-practice ITIL KPIs that can be easily customized based on the unique needs of the organization by means of a GUI-based query builder. Dashboard templates for change management and incident management allow customers to begin realizing an immediate return on investment by abbreviating time to deployment and minimizing the cost and complexity usually associated with BI implementations.

“We’re excited to provide our customers with the ability to compare Service Management information from ServiceNow with data generated by their other systems management tools, providing more mature problem management and the ability to mitigate the impact to end users and the service desk,” said Francis Sherk, Vice President of Technology Services at XCEND. “An example might include a dashboard with side-by-side metrics looking at viral infections within the network found by existing anti-virus technology, and a concurrent spike in service desk incidents as identified by ServiceNow. This gives exceptional visibility into overall Problem Management and allows IT managers to correlate incidents with root causes.”

Additional features of MetriX Dashboards include:

• Secure, role-based access from any web-enabled device
• Drill-through capabilities that allow seamless movement from web-based reports to the ServiceNow platform
• The “My Dashboards” portal, a single point of secure access for all of a user’s assigned dashboards
• A centralized Metric Repository that enables sharing of KPIs and dashboards
• An affordable license model with the lowest total cost of ownership on the market

The MetriX development team will continue to roll out additional pre-authored content for ServiceNow in addition to other leading technology vendors including Symantec, Microsoft, EMC, and VMware. To receive instant notifications of new content as it is released, follow MetriX on Twitter (@MetriXDashboard), Facebook, or Google+. Learn more about MetriX Dashboards 4.0 at http://www.xcendgroup.com/metrix.

MetriX Dashboards will be exhibiting at Interop Las Vegas this year and we want to see you there. We’ll be unveiling our brand-new dashboards and KPIs for VMware, ServiceNow, Microsoft SCCM, and others. Our subject matter experts will be on hand to demonstrate the exciting new updates in MetriX 4.0 and how quick and easy it is to create a functional real-time dashboard on the spot.

Request your personalized 15-minute demo

Interop is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences and exhibitions designed to empower information technology professionals to make smart business decisions. Interop gave us a discount code to send to our VIPs. Register with priority code CME3LV208 to save 25% on Conference or Workshop passes or for a FREE Expo Pass.

Tues., May 7, 4:30-7:30pm | Wed., May 8, 10:30am-6:00pm | Thurs., May 9, 10:30am-5:00pm

Don’t miss out on your chance to win our limited-edition t-shirt!
Stop by booth 550 early for the best selection.

Organizations of all type are virtualizing their server environments to reduce hardware costs, decrease their carbon footprint, and increase fail-over capabilities. One of the biggest challenges in managing these environments is ensuring that appropriate resources are made available to all of these virtual machines. Lack of visibility or insight into this highly complex environment can have dramatic negative consequences on system performance and availability.

VMware Dashboard Template for MetriX Dashboards 4.0

XCEND has developed pre-built KPIs that allow MetriX users to view critical information at the VM, host, cluster, data center and enterprise level.  MetriX Dashboard customers can rely on these KPIs and templates to provide out-of-the-box visibility into ‘trouble’ VMs or servers, allowing administrators and managers to better manage and allocate resources to over- or under-utilized hardware. Additional custom KPIs allow clients to proactively monitor and manage, utilization, processors, ram and network activity.

XCEND continues to develop custom metrics and dashboard templates for leading technology solutions, significantly ramping up time-to-deployment and providing customers with immediate return on investment. The company has developed hundreds of KPIs for vendors like Symantec, Microsoft, VMware, and ServiceNow.  MetriX Dashboards is the only real-time analytics solution on the market that comes with pre-authored content that will allow decision makers at all levels the visibility they need to make more timely and informed decisions.

For more information, visit MetriX at http://www.xcendgroup.com/metrix.

Learn more about ServiceNow

XCEND has successfully assisted organizations in establishing, re-defining and automating their IT business processes since 2004, with hundreds of successful Service Desk and related ITSM implementations. As a channel and implementation partner for ServiceNow, XCEND is enabled to provide an ITIL-compliant, SaaS solution for IT. In addition, XCEND offers ServiceNow customers a key differentiator: the means to extend ServiceNow’s reporting capabilities with MetriX Dashboards 4.0. XCEND’s cost-effective data analytics platform dramatically simplifies how customers access and visualize their data, making it easy to share and interact with real-time, consolidated information on any web-enabled device.

MetriX will provide ServiceNow customers the ability to easily create real-time ITSM dashboards that leverage data from ServiceNow’s APIs and web services. MetriX comes out of the box with a comprehensive library of deep, actionable key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboard templates for ServiceNow, allowing users to gain real-time visibility into their ITSM environment immediately. Customers are also able to create custom KPIs that connect to virtually any data source with the MetriX Query Builder.

“As our clients continue to move more of their infrastructure into the cloud, and their workforces continue to become more mobile, I’m very excited to partner with the market leader in cloud-based IT service management and automation,” said Francis Sherk, VP of Technical Services for XCEND. “ServiceNow is a fast-growing company, dedicated to innovating and improving customer experience and removing the hurdles of traditional on-premise ITSM solutions. We’re proud to enter into this partnership with a proven record in IT service management and process automation, in addition to providing customers with true real-time visibility into the state of their service organization with our MetriX Dashboard solution.”

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow helps organizations transform the way IT delivers business value to end-users. Born in the cloud in 2004, Service-now.com was the first to offer IT Management software as a service (SaaS). The company continues to turn the $14 billion IT operations market on its head with ongoing product and services innovations. Today, ServiceNow is recognized as the fastest growing vendor in its market offering intuitive, social and flexible IT management services at a fraction of the price of the legacy software players. For more information, visit www.servicenow.com.

About XCEND

XCEND was founded in 2004 on the passion of IT industry veterans who were committed to the underlying mission of helping IT organizations run better. We’ve since worked with thousands of customers across the country to create and deliver multi-vendor strategies and solutions that help companies better manage and secure their IT environments. XCEND has channeled this unique expertise into the development of MetriX Dashboards 4.0, an award-winning, enterprise-class data analytics and visualization tool. In 2012 MetriX was recognized by Frost & Sullivan with the Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Business Intelligence Dashboard Management for enabling organizations to embrace real-time analytics without the costs and complexities that typically hinder business intelligence initiatives. For more information, visit us at www.xcendgroup.com.

Presenter: Ron Schoenherr, President & CEO, XCEND

You’re invited to the official launch of MetriX 4.0 to learn how our innovative platform can help you achieve big data visualizations without the big costs and complexity of traditional BI solutions. We’re excited to share how the major enhancements to this release will dramatically change how you access and visualize your real-time information, making it easy to share and interact with the data that matters most.

Join us on March 26th at 2:00PM ET for a detailed look into MetriX 4.0 and its key enhancements, including:

• Our powerful and intuitive desktop client that makes it easier than ever to create and customize real-time dashboards
• The innovative “My Dashboards” Portal that provides a single point of access from which to visualize, share, and secure your dashboards
• The centralized inline Metric Repository that allows you to instantly access, organize, and share your pre-built metrics, dashboards, and formats

We’ll also be discussing how our flexible and straight-forward license model coupled with low implementation and maintenance costs has helped us achieve the lowest total cost of ownership of any like solution in the marketplace today.

Presenter: Francis Sherk, VP Technical Services, XCEND

Healthcare organizations today manage a tremendous amount of electronically stored, personally identifiable sensitive information. Protecting confidential data from all types of threats is an increasing challenge under an ever-evolving threat landscape. Consider these little-known examples:

• With more than 50 million people in the US without health insurance, a new surge of medical identify theft has emerged as a means of obtaining medical care, affecting an estimated 1.5 million people in the U.S. at a cost of $41.3 billion last year.
• Health information has proven to be more valuable than other types of personal data, with records being sold on the black market for as much as $14-25 per record.
• The age of data is generally irrelevant in the healthcare industry; patient information from 2005 poses similar risks to data released today.

You’re invited to join XCEND, a national Platinum Symantec partner, to learn how Symantec Data Loss Prevention makes it easier than ever to find and protect confidential patient health information, monitor and protect confidential data contained in patient medical histories or diagnostic results, and track who is looking at sensitive data and how often they are looking at it.

In this 45-minute webcast, we’ll be demonstrating how leading healthcare companies have benefited from a unified DLP solution that offers exclusive technologies such as Workflow & Remediation, which can reduce individual and departmental pain and ensure overall success of a project, and integrated Real-Time Dashboards, which helps organizations gain instant visibility into their data loss activity and violations to enable proactive decision making.

“Big Data” is the latest, next big thing on the horizon for the IT Industry, requiring organizations to aggregate their unstructured data in order to gain insight into the health of the business or the buying habits of their customers. This approach, however, does not work well for IT, specifically given the vast amount of data that is generated by all of the various management and monitoring tools.  Most of the enterprise and large enterprise customers that I have talked to have anywhere from 25 to 100 or more different tools that they employ for all aspects of running IT.  The data that IT needs to tap into in order to make proactive and strategic decisions exists in siloed systems and groups, making it incredibly difficult for IT executives and managers to access and make any sense of this data.  Correlations cannot be made across the board given the varied types of data that exist.

In the CIO magazine article titled 5 Things You Need to Know about Big Data, the author states that “big data doesn’t require organization beforehand.”  It suggests that you collect the data and worry about how you will use it later.  Furthermore, it recommends using a “big-data repository as a dumping ground” and worry about creating relationships after the fact.  This is a luxury that IT cannot afford, most importantly because it would only serve to add layers of complexity from a technology perspective, while generating all kinds of issues around data ownership and security.

The data and information that IT executives are looking for already exists in the databases of their existing IT management platforms.  There is little or no reason for an IT organization to go through the herculean task of moving their data to a data warehouse just to report against the data.   Outside of complexity, cost should certainly be a concern.  Implementing and leveraging Big Data solutions will be cost-prohibitive for IT organizations to adopt across their various departments.

Instead, IT needs to simplify their approach and  focus on identifying best-practice key performance indicators that will truly allow them to accomplish cost reduction, increase compliancy, and minimize risk.  IT organizations have become so accustomed to fighting fires and reacting to demands of end-users and customers that they have not slowed up long enough to assess what they should measure and monitor.

I say leave the data where it is and where it belongs. Spend the time and resources to develop a comprehensive and strategic approach to building the measurements that remove the disconnect between technology and business value.  Implement and leverage an analytics platform that will allow you to build the appropriate reports and dashboards across the IT enterprise without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a massive data warehouse.

Let’s face it, IT would never get funded for such a project and even if they did, I suspect they would fail to deliver any significant ROI. Unfortunately, it is in our nature to over-complicate everything, especially in the world of IT and technology.

If any of these questions remind you of your typical Monday meeting, join us on Thursday, February 28th for a 30-minute webcast to learn about Managed Services & Managed Implementations from XCEND. Our Remote Managed Service helps customers reduce the loaded costs and risks associated with managing IT applications in-house. XCEND’s award-winning software experts have a proven record helping customers eliminate cumbersome and redundant IT functions, reduce costs, and respond more effeciently to users.

We’ll also be discussing how we work with our customers to guarantee the success of their Symantec software purchases. You’ll learn how managed implementation services can help your organization keep your best players working on top priority projects and achieve best-in-class, expert implementation management for significantly less than it would cost for a full-time employee.

Details:

Webcast: Realize the Full Value of your IT Investments with Managed Services & Implementations

Date: Thursday, February 28th, 2013, 2:00-2:30 pm ET

Presenter: Bill Johnson, COO, XCEND

The SymEd Value: Protect, Manage, Secure 

SymEd provides standardization across the academic institution while providing the flexibility to select additional Symantec solutions. SymEd offers the means to secure and manage the PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones of both faculty and students, whether they are school-issued or personal.

Register today and learn how SymEd delivers:

• Reduced infrastructure and operational costs
• Secured e-learning environment for physical, virtual and cloud platforms
• Centralized standards with central management
• Simplified license compliance
• Critical data protection with advanced local backup and recovery for Windows desktops and laptops

Details:

Date: Wednesday, December 5th, 2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Presenters: Caroline Rinker, Practice Manager, Symantec; Kawika Takayama, Manager, System Engineering, Symantec; Bill Johnson, COO, XCEND