Riverbed Fosters IT Management Collaboration

Five Common Customer Service Pain Points to Avoid

When it comes to managing IT, all too often the IT department winds up playing a blame game where the objective is to determine the innocence of a particular group within the IT department versus actually solving the problem. This isn’t necessarily because IT people care more about their jobs than solving the actual problem. Rather, the simple issue is that most of them only have visibility into the set of technologies and services that they are specifically responsible for managing.

To address that issue, Riverbed Technology came up with the SteelCentral platform, which gives IT organizations visibility into both applications and the IT infrastructure they depend on via a common console. Riverbed via an update to SteelCentral is now making it simpler for IT teams to collaborate on solving specific problems right down to the transaction level.

Nik Koutsoukos, vice president of product marketing for Riverbed, says SteelCentral essentially enables a new class of “super administrators” to emerge—ones capable of more holistically addressing IT problems because they correlate issues more quickly than organizations that rely on teams of IT professionals to manage various silos of IT technologies.

Koutsoukos says that means rather than having to wait for the storage, networking, servers and application teams to verify that a particular issue has nothing to do with them, IT administrators who make use of SteelCentral can identify and resolve issues without having to convene a “war room” meeting just to let everyone know there is an actual problem. Of course, the biggest challenge, concedes Koutsoukos, is often convincing IT teams to give up their existing tools, many of which came with the products they manage at the time they were acquired.

As IT environments become more complex, it’s clear that far too many organizations are spending more time trying to figure out what a problem may be rather than fixing it. Given that those efforts clearly don’t represent the best use of perennially short-handed IT staffs, maybe it’s time to rethink how IT is managed altogether.