Expert Systems, Autonomics - How IPsoft Remains Competitive Over a Decade Later

More than a decade ago, Chetan Dube had a vision: to have IT infrastructure be managed not by people but by expert systems. In this vision, humans would have more time to focus on creative and business strategies as mundane, everyday tasks that typically bog down individuals would be automated. So in 1998, Dube founded IPsoft, a company that touts itself for resolving about 56 percent of client problems without relying on human intervention.

“The foundation of IPsoft came out of a sense that there was a different way to do managed services and in a way that was much more focused on expert systems then it was on what was then the predominant method of managed services which was labor arbitrage in two flavors,” Jonathan Crane, CCO at IPsoft, told TMCnet. The first type of labor arbitrage, according to Crane, is offshore labor arbitrage, or outsourcing functions to India, and the second form of arbitrage is aggregating work in a data center and spreading employees thin.

“What IPsoft looked at was whether there is a better way to manage environments and that is what we call remote infrastructure management,” Crane said. “Remote infrastructure management says anywhere your devices are and any element of an information services platform can be monitored and managed by IPsoft.”

With remote infrastructure management, IPsoft is able to integrate about 40 different functions on one integrated platform that provides everything from monitoring to discovery to change management to event correlation to the management of personnel resources.

Simply put, with IPsoft the IT infrastructure of tomorrow is managed by expert systems as opposed to people. And by remediating issues in environments without relying on human intervention, companies can enjoy a lower cost than even outsourcing and can escape the challenges associated with outsourcing labor.

With IPsoft’s automation platform, companies are able to leave level zero and level one functions and tasks –such as those trivial, albeit important tasks that are non-strategic – for expert systems. This frees up employees’ time so that they can focus more on level two or level three tasks, or the problem solving tasks.

Its approach to automation has garnered a lot of interest from the industry, particularly from the large, complex customer such as a financial corporation. In fact, 30 percent of IPsoft’s revenue comes from sophisticated financial institutions, another 25 percent comes from entertainment industries, and the remainder comes from the telco space.

So far in 2012, IPsoft has celebrated a few milestones, including building a BSS layer into its autonomic OSS. With this addition, IPsoft’s basic IP center operating framework now has a provisioning capability associated with it. But even that inclusion hasn’t been enough for IPsoft wheni t comes to innovation.

“If you look at where industry is going, someone has to help the CIOs manage an environment where they are able to take various capabilities from the cloud world and integrate them into their usage portfolio,” Crane said.

“What we have done is evolved our remote operations to really build now a capability to do cloud services brokerage,” he added. “For example, I now have the ability for my business units to deliver on demand the kinds of services that are resonate with me under my management or I have procured them from a public cloud or a community cloud or some hybrid mixture.”

When asked what sets IPsoft apart in the marketplace, Crane said it’s the fact that the company introduced autonomics, as a counter to scripted automation. With autonomics, instances that happen in the environment can be solved in seconds as opposed to script automation which can take days.

Moreover, IPsoft has been casting an eye toward the service desk and help desk and helping quell customer frustration and complexity. According to IPsoft, the solution is to introduce an avatar to the help desk that can have a conversation with a customer, determine what it is the problem is, have access to the same type of database a company has for resolution of problems and be able to direct that inquiry. This once again takes the human equation out IT and greatly reduces costs associated with managing the help desk, Crane said.

“That’s how we keep vibrant; we keep looking for ways to take automation,” he said. “Everything we have done so far has been focused upon the IT environment. It’s a big pool, and there’s a lot to be done there and there’s a lot of money to be spent, but with this newest capability and with our understanding of expert systems and how to deal with repetitive tasks we are beginning to think about why can’t we move to the BPO space and start attacking business functions that have a repetitive nature to them.”

So what’s next for IPsoft as we look ahead to the rest of 2012?

“What we are looking to do is take our cloud strategy and really enable some of the players out there that are service providers,” Crane said. “You will see us more and more as an enabler – provisioning technology to players out there who are looking to bring automation as a service. We see this as a growing quadrant.”

“We have the ability to enable some of the key service providers out there with our technology and they then could offer to their client base automation as a service,” he added. 


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