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xMatters, inc., a provider of communication-enabled business processes, have recently announced a major new release of one of the industry’s most advanced communications systems for managing, deploying and rapidly resolving IT incidents.

The xMatters On-Demand platform is award-winning technology that automates pinpointing and alerting for the individuals, IT teams and external service providers who need to work together to quickly rectify critical business disruptions.

The communications market is undergoing a seismic shift. After decades of declining revenue and stagnant innovation, a new market is ascendant. This market is being driven in part by cloud economics. IDC forecasts the cloud communications platforms market will grow from global revenue of $123.4 million in 2013 to reach $7.5 billion in 2018 at a 127.5% CAGR[1].

New IDC Vendor Spotlight Report

According to a new IDC Vendor Spotlight report by xMatters and titled “New Approaches to Optimising Business Operations With Cloud Communications,” cloud communications platforms are on a course to undermine telephony system equipment markets which will significantly devalue traditional carrier voice and messaging markets as well. These platforms are changing ideas about how customers, end users and subscribers can communicate with enterprises. A simpler, more flexible platform approach is fuelling a new convergence of communications and business processes. This makes it easy to blend real-time communications into business-critical workflows.

The report states a new cloud communications approach, layered with the flexibility of a software-defined architecture, solves traditional business communications problems by delivering personalisation, timeliness, multi-channel use and integration and automation.

For companies to assure their environment and business operations in the event of disruptions, a new communications approach that automates the directory and staff schedule to simplify stakeholder whereabouts, ensures multi-modal communications to reach stakeholders via preferred channels and integrates easily with other systems for coordinated efficient and agile operations is needed. To the extent that xMatters technology can address the challenges described in this paper, IDC believes the company is well positioned for success.

 

“In the event of an interruption to the business, which is inevitable at some point, companies need to keep ahead of the game to assure their business operations run smoothly and downtime is minimised. We’re pleased to offer the market a modern and intelligent cloud communications platform that automates the directory and staff schedule to ensure communications reach stakeholders via preferred channels and also integrates easily with other systems for coordinated efficient and agile operations,” said Troy McAlpin, CEO of xMatters. “IDC is aware of today’s communications challenges in the marketplace and we’re thrilled they recognise xMatters is well-positioned for success.”


New xMatters On-Demand ReleaseFeatures

Highlighted new features and functionality for the latest xMatters On-Demand cloud release, available today, include:

Vastly Improved Scheduling: The new On-Call Scheduling module and associated functionality make it easier to automatically manage all facets of scheduling, such as schedule recurrences, holiday schedules, automated rotations and temporary replacements. The xMatters On-Demand technology also proactively reveals “hollow shifts” – those lacking on-call resources – and dynamically resolves rotations, temporary replacements and holiday schedules to immediately show on-call information.

Group Overview: The new Group Overview is the 'home page' for the assigned group. It allows users to quickly identify on-call gaps, to understand who is currently on call, the escalation process in place, identifies the group supervisors and also includes full team contact information.

Improved Calendaring: The new calendar function shows a complete view of team shifts and supports adding new shifts and changing existing ones with drag-and-drop interactions based on common calendaring tools, such as Outlook and Mac Calendar. Users can easily view the scheduled shifts for the week and click on them to see the team members scheduled on duty and their contact information, the escalation process in place for the shift and other key details.

Improved Roster: The redesigned, single view of resources can more easily pinpoint for team’s who is available and move them into shifts.

Enhanced Conferencing: Conference bridges remain an effective mechanism to mobilise multiple people for sharing information and deciding on action steps. The new On-Demand release includes a redesigned conferencing report, which makes it easier to identify all of the attendees on the call. Also, the conference administrator now has the ability to edit phone numbers to people’s names to ensure everyone is accounted for. This new ability makes for easier reporting after the incident has been closed.

Strengthened Mobility Capabilities: The new release also brings multi-login support, allowing those users that are responsible for different use cases or multiple xMatters environments to be able to log into all of them via their iOS device.

 

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With the growing reliance on digital business processes in most companies today, the IT department has more responsibility than ever. But, according to new research, businesses are disrupted within the first few minutes of an IT outage and poor communications management means finding the right person to investigate the issue can take as long as, or longer than resolving it.

Forty-five percent of IT professionals reported their business is impacted if IT is down just 15 minutes or less, and 17 percent said disruption occurs the instant an IT outage develops, according to new research from Dimensional Research. The “Business Impact of IT Incident Communications: A Global Survey of IT Professionals” report was commissioned by xMatters, inc., a leader in communication-enabled business processes.

However, 60 percent of respondents said it takes that same 15 minutes or more just to identify the right individual to respond to an issue. Nearly half of the IT professionals surveyed said it takes as long as or longer to identify the person as it does to resolve the problem.

Showing strong agreement that improved IT alerting systems benefit the business, 91 percent of those surveyed said poor incident communication increases downtime. Eighty-seven percent indicated that guaranteed alert delivery would accelerate issue resolution, and 85 percent said issue resolution would be accelerated by a response system that initiates steps with a single click on a mobile device.

[quote float="left"]Eighty percent of respondents said loss of digital data would have a more significant effect on the business than loss of buildings, vehicles or goods.

Eighty percent of respondents said loss of digital data would have a more significant effect on the business than loss of buildings, vehicles or goods. That illustrates the extreme importance of IT responsiveness to issues, yet a surprising 41 percent of the IT pros said they have ignored IT alerts and communications.

 

According to the report, part of the challenge with IT alerts and notifications is that often those notified had personal events that may compromise their responsiveness. A dynamic and automated system that could be updated based on team availability could generate better response by IT professionals, leading to better accountability and faster resolutions and minimised business impact.

In recent years, IT’s role has expanded from basic system support to enabling the business to facilitating online business, while supporting employees’ numerous devices.

The IT professionals indicated they are willing to do more. Ninety percent said IT can offer more strategic services to the business; 74 percent indicated IT expertise should be leveraged for other automated systems; and 77 percent acknowledged that the business thinks IT is too slow in resolving key issues.

The report concluded, “Businesses trust IT to keep critical systems running smoothly while securing highly valued data. But, when issues arise business stakeholders overwhelmingly feel that IT isn’t resolving them fast enough. Fast issue remediation will require that the right people be contacted efficiently based on availability and expertise.  This may indicate that the communications management alerting systems that have served IT in the past may simply not be able to support IT’s growing role and that a new solution is required.”

The survey polled over 300 IT professionals from the United States, Europe and Mexico. Participant companies came from a mix of sizes – from large enterprises with over 10,000 employees to medium-sized businesses with 1,000 employees – and from a variety of industries, including technology, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and more.

 

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xMatters, a company specialising in communications-enabled business processes, has announced its cloud-based, automated messaging and communications platform is now fully certified for integration with the latest version of ServiceNow, the enterprise IT cloud company.

This latest version, known as Dublin, delivers enhancements to accelerate innovation, mobility, consolidation and automation within IT and across the entire enterprise.

With this cloud-to-cloud integration, joint customers can seamlessly integrate the full power of xMatters’ enterprise-grade, multi-modal communications with ServiceNow’s IT management solutions.

The Dublin release adds IT alerting based on rules such as on-call schedules, escalations and device preference as well as proactive subscription-based notifications to impacts or ‘in the know’ individuals throughout the enterprise.

In addition, xMatters’ on-demand platform offers full support for its iOS, Android and Blackberry mobile application, enabling users to take advantage of two-way notifications and the ability to respond from anywhere.

“Our customers operate in a rapid-pace environment and this continued integration with ServiceNow is a testament to providing them with the most efficient communications platform for critical moments,” said Troy McAlpin, CEO of xMatters.

“The added functionality available with this new release will continue to support users as unexpected incidents occur, managing all the message content and handling through our notifications.” He concluded

We live in an increasingly mobile world – how often you are at your desk when a crisis occurs? Where are your colleagues? Do they work in different offices and do they support your business continuity efforts? Teon Rosandic, VP EMEA, xMatters takes a look at then need for a virtual team strategy in modern business... 

Disasters can occur anytime and everyone may not be able to get to a physical location to manage the incident.  When an emergency occurs, we need to pull together teams, assess the incident, develop a plan of action and work the plan.  The team’s role is to manage and monitor the response, as well as the recovery of the business.

The primary function of any Incident Management Team is to establish and manage the Six Cs: Control, Command, Communication, Collaboration, Coordination, and Consistency.

Why do you need a Virtual Team and Process?

Primarily, because the world is mobile and employees may be dispersed, so there’s a threat of a pandemic or transportation is difficult.

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Virtual Team

1. No waiting – A virtual team allows you to manage the event immediately rather than waiting for the team to assemble in a location.
2. Flexibility – Plans, teams, and processes can be changed easily in a virtual world and meet the fast changing demands of a disaster.
3. Location – Team members can participate regardless of where they are, as long as they have access to a tool.
4. Redundancy – If your facility is damaged or not available, response is not delayed.
5. Cost effective – The cost of being mobile may be less than maintaining a physical space.
6. Efficient communication – Relevant teams can get updates in real time, view “live” status boards and hear or participate in briefings.
7. Timely resource deployment – Resources can be deployed quickly and efficiently, reducing response time, making recovery faster.
8. Safe - If there’s a disease outbreak

So if virtual centres are so great, why doesn’t everyone have one? Often, utilities are affected after a major disaster.  A virtual team is dependent on power, phones, computers, networks and the company’s data centre.

Processes and procedures

For any process to be effective, you need to have a plan.  If your processes and procedures are not thought-out, the virtual road will be full of obstacles. So, if the current team is a train-wreck, the virtual one will be a nightmare!

Virtual or physical, it is essential to carefully craft the following processes:

1. Roles and responsibilities – You need discipline and clearly identified processes. Everyone should know what he or she should do, and what other team members are responsible for. Using team checklists is useful for this. Think carefully about team organisation and use a well-honed methodology, such as the Incident Command System.
2. A well-defined process and criteria for incident assessment and activation. Have a team including facilities, security, and technology with key leadership showing in responsibility matrix.  We advocate the team discuss issues related to: Life safety, Facilities, Technology, Mission-critical business and Reputation.
3. Incident Action Planning meetings are essential and include documentation of current situation status, development of strategic objectives, assignment of objectives to a team owner, and the time and duration of the operational period. They are shared with those working on the issues and/or in senior management using mobile technology.
4. Ability to track status so you don’t overlook necessary tasks. Depending on the tool or platform you use, you could use virtual status boards giving privileges to team members or update the boards with current status and action steps.
5. During an incident, it is critical to gain awareness from multiple sources including: Employees, News sources and Social Media.
6. Team Notification, including timely and efficient notification of team members and business unit recovery staff is important and might be worth considering emergency notification system.
7. Integration of maps, floor plans, and real-time images must be easily found and available in a mobile/virtual setting.
8. Resource deployment and logistics tracking of physical equipment such as laptops, mobile phones, and office space and personnel.

What Type of Technology Do You Need?

It takes more than one phone-bridge to be successful.  One bridge per team should be created for the Initial Assessment Team, Incident Management Team, and senior management.  Where possible, this should also include Command, Operations, Logistics, Planning & Intelligence and Finance.

Tools are needed to facilitate online communication and include:

• Instant messaging  – On the company’s network or products such as Skype, instant messaging allows teams to talk in real time, allowing instant communication, coordination, and collaboration.
• Project management tools – Products such as SharePoint allows teams to work virtually, track actions, and document progress.
• Web-enabled meeting tools – Products including NetMeeting and WebEx can assist in facilitating virtual briefings and team organisation.

Many smartphones have advanced the state-of the- art of mobile incident management with apps that can: Store and recall plans, team definitions, roles and responsibilities, task lists, contact information.  They can also enable communication and collaboration processes leveraging hosted services and native smartphone capabilities for redundancy.

A virtual team, whether stand-alone or with an existing physical team and Command Centre, offers many advantages. If you can design a virtual process that embraces the Six Cs: Control, Command, Communication, Collaboration, Coordination, and Consistency, you’re almost there. Time to jump in and go mobile!