Dashboards Can Steer Users in Wrong ...

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July 5, 2004 (Computerworld) -- ... direction without "taking a painful exploration of underlying business processes." Sober thoughts, especially given that they come from Colin Dover, product marketing manager at Hyperion Solutions Corp., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based business intelligence concern that supplies BI dashboards. "The technology is the easy part," he says. Dover estimates that 60% of the success or failure of dashboard implementations depends on "getting to the nub of what your business truly is." That may sound like a cinch, but "common points of alignment" among various business units aren't that easy to quantify in ways that are useful for dashboard users, he says. In other words, prepare for a truckload of meetings between your various dashboard constituencies to create meaningful business metrics. Drive carefully.
No Need for James Bond ...
... with SpyCatcher 3.0, available later this month in retail outlets. But don't let the commercial release deter you from evaluating the spyware elimination tool. "It was designed with corporations in mind," says CEO Joshua Blanchfield of Tenebril Inc. in Boston, which created the software. It uses a remote console so an administrator can manage thousands of clients. SpyCatcher comes with a library of "spyware fingerprints" that's regularly updated. And if you work in a place that discourages fun, you can suppress unwanted applications, such as games, by adding them to its database. SpyCatcher 3.0 uses an aggressive reinstall-prevention shield that keeps the malware from returning to the PC. Cost? Depends on how many copies you get. A recent contract for 40,000 users went for $2 a copy, says Blanchfield.
Discipline Application Behavior ...

nLayers' InSight

... with new appliance. This week a San Jose start-up, nLayers Inc., ships its first product, InSight, which creates an "application behavior model through deep packet analysis," says CEO Gili Raanan. He argues that most performance management tools are devoted to watching infrastructure activity such as routers and switches and not the applications, which Forrester Research Inc. estimates cause 54% of unscheduled downtime. Raanan theorizes that in a world of Web services and distributed software, "questions like, 'What is my application?' and 'Where is my application?' have become metaphysical questions and not engineering ones." To know the health of a given application means knowing more about the condition of a machine or even a set of machines. You need to look at the overall behavior of the application. That, he says, is what InSight does, by passively detecting and then observing packaged and custom applications on your network. InSight displays the complex interdependencies and behavior of programs, then simplifies the view so managers can, say, streamline their distribution to improve performance. You can buy a subscription for $2,438

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