"AI-the time has come." This is the slogan that accompanied the Perform Summit organized by Dynatrace in Barcelona, an occasion when the company took stock of its advanced network management solutions. Solutions that have won over customers, judging by the results, that have grown impressively since 2014, as has their turnover.
What is Dynatrace doing?
Founded in Austria in 2005, Dynatrace immediately focused on developing a solution to monitor and optimize the performance of network applications. His entire system has been basically a set of servers for about ten years that had to be installed in the company to support the IT department in managing infrastructure and its critical applications, such as flight and cruise booking systems, banking systems, telephone support for telephony giants, and so on. But there was a fundamental change in 2014.
John Van Siclen, CEO of the company, brought together his development team and asked him to take the time to think about how IT systems would evolve over the next few years, anticipate needs and still offer a more evolved product capable of meeting the growing demands of its customers, mostly companies that are part of the Fortune 500.
But he was surprised by the answer when he met his team again. It was predictable that everything moved towards the cloud, that the software developed over years of work should be completely rewritten in order to adapt to the change, a little less. However, John accepted the challenge and today the numbers give him reason: since Dynatrace has been converted from an on-site system to a cloud solution, customers and turnover have exponentially increased. Similarly, the infrastructure complexity that administrators now manage to collect and organize a quantity of unimaginable data has increased until a few years before.
Installing Dynatrace today is an almost trivial operation: a few lines of code and software, OneAgent, corporate system interfaces, scanning the network for active services and applications and analyzing their status and performance. At that point, administrators can use a convenient dashboard to view the status of the entire network infrastructure.
Dynatrace is not the only platform capable of offering such a service but, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, manages to simplify the work of IT considerably, avoiding hammering it with an infinite number of reports and errors, as with other solutions, limiting itself to indicating the fundamental errors which all subsequent "warnings" derive from.
Once errors are raised, a self-managed OneAgent network will not only report problems. It can send alerts as soon as it detects some anomalous behaviour, an indicator of some hardware or software problem and, more importantly, it can automatically resolve several flaws, get the containers and dockers, clone them and "fix them" if necessary, significantly limiting human intervention.
Is it time and money saving? "No!"-says Bernd Greifeneder, CTO and Dynatrace's founder-" It serves to manage the ever-increasing complexity. Nearly all the companies that have integrated our solution have had to increase the size of the IT department to be able to deal with the market. OneAgent greatly simplifies monitoring and management, allowing engineers to focus on the most important aspects and omit the long and repeated operations of maintenance and analysis that can be easily entrusted to a machine.
It is an ideal solution for managing very complex systems based on heterogeneous hardware and software solutions where cloud, mainframe, IoT and on-site servers coexist. As we had the opportunity to highlight on Edge9, Dynatrace is constantly evolving: 25 major updates, practically two a month, have been seen in the last year.
Dynatrace as a digital transformation enabler Dynatrace took on stage some of its most important customers during the Perform Summit, including Italian companies like Alitalia and Docebo. Roberto Tundo, Chief Information and Technology Officer of Alitalia, explained how Dynatrace's adoption has enabled the national airline to make huge progress in managing their flight plans. "Alitalia was known abroad with the slogan Always Late In Takeoff, Always Late in Arrival"-says Tundo from the Perform Summit stage-" Today we succeeded in becoming the most timely company. This is not a public promotion shot, but real data, certified by FlightStats, an independent company.
Even Royal Caribbean, a giant who manages the world's largest cruise ships, has relied on Dynatrace, a solution that is used for managing cruise bookings as well as providing services on ships and ensuring a personalized service to its customers. "We manage ships with more than 6,000 guests on board"-Carlos Gutierrez-Menoyo, Senior Operation Manager of Royal Caribbean told us-" we must ensure that everything works perfectly. The next objective? "Capable of reducing boarding times, possibly eliminating all expectations."
We also had the opportunity to speak to Andrea Spoldi, Infrastructure Architect of the Docebo E-learning platform, during the summit. Andrea explained to us that Dynatrace's collaboration was born almost by chance, but they failed to go back further once the solution was tried. Among the reasons for the choice he also highlights the understandable payment model "We also evaluated solutions from other companies"-explains Andrea-" But when we went to ask exactly how much we would have spent, they failed to make a reliable estimate, as the costs depended on too many factors that were not easily estimated at the start, unlike Dynatrace.
What's going to happen in Dynatrace's future 5 years ago Dynatrace decided to change its platform to anticipate market needs. A goal has been achieved, but for a moment the company does not seem willing to stop. During the interview with the founder, Bernd, we asked if he intended to extend the platform's use fields and the answer was yes: by the end of the year, Dynatrace will expand its solution to offer cybersecurity services and business automation as well, areas where the company's algorithms can be particularly effective.