Ensuring continuing success through futuristic technology: gen-E

Data analytics is a fundamental part of any kind of IT service. Corporations often store all of their information in large data centers, some of which are as big as small towns. Additionally, companies need to collect and manage real-time streams of information, collated with existing information generated throughout the organization in order to discern valuable business intelligence. That’s where data analysis and service management solution providers come into the picture. One of the world’s leading companies to provide service management solutions is gen-E.

The founders of gen-E recognized an opportunity to help large companies with cumbersome, yet mission-critical systems laden with repetitive, manual tasks to become more efficient, provide better service to end users, and better control their operating expenses.

Early Stages

The company was founded with a vision to help businesses collect, process, store and leverage the growing volumes of data that were being generated by the network and adjacent systems. Although straightforward in theory, in reality, it is a whole different ballgame. That’s because data is of two types; structured and unstructured. In simple terms, structured data is data that is modeled and organized in a specific manner and unstructured data is its opposite. While traditional data analysis methods are suitable for large sets of structured data, handling unstructured data is extremely difficult and time-consuming. As a result, numerous companies simply choose not to bother with it. But the founders of gen-E sensed hidden opportunities in the vast caches of cumbersome unstructured data.

gen-E began its journey by helping companies navigate the IT Operations maturity model from beginning to end, starting with improving upon existing methods of collecting and processing all kinds of data. Through over 250 event and fault management implementations, gen-E discovered that clients needed a central data collection and processing engine to collect and manage their large volumes of critical network and situational data for multiple protocols into a single data lake. A more modern solution architecture was required, to ingest far greater quantities of data in less time, thereby improving the flow of data between various Network/IT Operations Systems and other OSS/BSS environments.

Strategic Growth

While these techniques are suitable for existing data, aggregating the fault, performance, and configuration data through all of the various operations is another task entirely. In order for the data processing algorithms to work their magic, the said data needs to be organized in a specific manner, typically resulting in high amounts of manual work. But gen-E found a way to consolidate and optimize this process. After years of steady growth, gen-E was acquired by St. Cloud Capital, LLC. This acquisition enabled gen-E to develop OpsCenter AIOps. OpsCenter AIOps leverages an aggregated data lake to automatically learn “normal” behavior and identify anomalies amidst time series data, event patterns, population algorithms, and more. Furthermore, it learns insights from the data lake with machine learning and artificial intelligence before it reaches the operations team.

What’s remarkable is the fact that the AIOps is powered by industry and domain-specific configurations and industry-leading technology including IBM Netcool, Apache Kafka, and Elastic, reducing the length of the runway to ROI.

This was done in part to build upon current systems used by gen-E’s clients, instead of replacing their entire existing infrastructure. This proved to be a win-win situation for gen-E as well as its clients since the clients did not have to spend extra money on redevelopment and gen-E could cater to its clients’ requirements in a more inclusive manner. By capturing data in real time and correlating and analyzing this data against historical patterns, companies are able to quickly conduct post-mortem analysis of events, proactively identify potential issues, and isolate areas of the system that are ideal for automation.

Furthermore, OpsCenter also serves as a consolidated platform for business intelligence. It enables corporations to collect, organize, analyze and automate their structured and unstructured data to derive better insights into their business performance, predict critical points of failure, and automate repetitive tasks to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

The goal of implementing any type of artificial intelligence based system is to automate those portions of a company’s operations that take up valuable employee time and other resources. AIOps is no different. It has allowed the automation of IT operations, freeing employees’ time and resources to be channelized into mission-critical projects. Like any AI system, it automates actions based on insights from advanced analytics, leveraging machine learning and AI insights and turning them into action to automatically resolve problems.

Although gen-E considers automation as its ultimate goal, the company begins engagements by investigating its clients’ existing systems and infrastructure. Years of experience in the industry has led gen-E to focus on each stage of the process individually, instead of just going about setting things up for automation. This decision has paid off splendidly, as the implementation of automation without first laying the foundation for the collection, organization, and analysis of data efficiently results in wasted effort and misguided insights. gen-E’s approach has resulted in massive customer retention and helped to maintain an excellent rapport between the company and its clients.

Meet the driving force behind gen-E’s staggering success, Mike Henderson

With more than 30 years of global leadership experience in the communications, media, high-technology, and cyber security markets, Mr. Henderson is a recognized leader with the vision and discipline to drive sustainable growth through the innovative solutions grounded in the needs of the market. He is known for his strength in solving customers’ challenges through an emphasis on advanced product development, strategic channel management, and expansion of key vertical markets, as well as his exceptional ability to forge customer and alliance relationships.

Prior to his role as CEO at gen-E LLC, Mr. Henderson most recently served as President of CSG Invotas, a global cyber security solutions business which he internally developed, launched, and was responsible for day-to-day operations. Prior to Invotas, Mike served as Executive Vice President of sales and marketing, CSG International, overseeing worldwide business development, marketing, and account management.

Mr. Henderson was also a co-founder and CEO of PCI, a private equity-backed software company that pioneered IP-based interactive voice service application platforms. Mr. Henderson has additionally served on the Board of TM Forum. He holds an M.B.A. in Marketing and Finance from the University of Rochester and a B.S. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona.

“gen-E has deep industry knowledge and extensive experience servicing regional and Fortune 500 companies across the North America.”