ScienceLogic Helps Channel Get In the Business Game

In the world of digital transformation, line-of-business executives (LOBs) get excited about emerging business-software services that promise to deliver real business outcomes, new customer experiences and actionable data insights. They’re adopting these apps at a furious pace.

LOBs don’t care how IT departments and managed services providers (MSPs) deploy and maintain these increasingly critical business apps, but they’ll raise a fuss when they suddenly become unavailable.

To this end, ScienceLogic, an IT monitoring software provider, announced on Tuesday SL1, a tool that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning – namely, IBM Watson – to help MSPs ensure the availability and performance of business applications.

SL1 connects the dots between the business-application layer and the underlying infrastructure, such as clouds, microservices and containers, through topology maps and real-time dashboard views. SL1 collects, analyzes and trains on systems data in order to flag potential problems before they lead to downtime. Think predictive maintenance for business software services.

The bigger impact, though, is that SL1 helps channel partners move up the proverbial value chain and into the realm of business software services, which allows them to engage with LOBs — the new shot-callers in tech.

“We’re enabling an MSP to develop managed application services or managed business services, as opposed to managed infrastructure services,” says Peter Luff, director of MSP business development at ScienceLogic. “It’s a different conversation with the executive level on how to improve their business, their journey toward digital transformation — not selling a monitoring tool.”

Peter Luff

Peter Luff

Lots of MSPs stand to benefit, too. ScienceLogic has 175 resellers and several hundred MSPs using its platform to create recurring-revenue services for customers. The company claims to have grown 500 percent over the last four years.

“A lot of the growth has come on the backs of these MSPs,” says ScienceLogic CMO Murali Nemani. “Our MSP customers are some of the biggest in the world.”

With SL1, ScienceLogic hopes to fill a gap in digital transformation and business software services; that is, the gap between data gathering and analytics.

In a new study from Digital Enterprise Journal, a media and research firm, 71 percent of organizations reported that their IT performance data isn’t actionable. That’s because infrastructures have become so complex and are throwing off so much data that it’s hard to process and apply analytics to the business application layer.

Meanwhile, LOBs need assurances that their business apps won’t go dark.

“The SL1 launch allows ScienceLogic to be the first vendor to do both data collection and analytics,” says Bojan Simic, founder of Digital Enterprise Journal. “It also takes traditional IT practices to something that the head of marketing or head of sales will understand and say, ‘I can do something with this.’”