2009 Deployment Excellence Award Winner:
Cardinal Health - Clinical and Medical Products Group
Pictured: Denny Simmons (Cardinal Health-CMP), Dale Calder (Axeda), Ed Anthony (Cardinal Health -CMP)

It's always really interesting to talk to customers and hear how they measure the success of their smart service programs.  At the recent 6^th Annual Remote Device Monitoring & Management Summit in Boston, I had a chance to speak with a number of our current customers to understand the progression of their programs.  We talked about how they view program success and there were many common themes from customer to customer regarding success metrics. Here's a look at some of the most common:

• Reducing Service Costs - most customers are looking to minimize the number of truck rolls by their field engineers.  Many of the presenters at the Summit highlighted the cost of a truck roll, which most estimated to be $300 per event.
  
• Reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) - remote access provides our customers' support teams with the ability to accelerate resolution time to resolve a customer's field issue. 
  
• Shifting the Paradigm - there was a lot of discussion around continuing to move from proactive to predictive and ultimately self-healing.
  
• Improved Customer Satisfaction - our customer base is always looking for ways to drive greater loyalty within their install base, from a retention and future wallet share perspective.

All of these are spot on, but what every discussion always came around to was "how many devices/assets are you actively monitoring?"  This is the Big Kahuna metric for everyone involved in a smart service program - hands down.  You could say "connected devices" is the leading indicator metric, and drives all of the other metrics.

Since Axeda believes deployment success is such a critical part of the overall success of a smart service program, we recognized one of our customers with our first "Deployment Excellence Award".  The spirit of this award was to highlight a customer who has demonstrated unprecedented levels of deployment success.

The 2009 Axeda Deployment Excellence Award was awarded to one of our On-Demand Hosted customers; Cardinal Health - Clinical and Medical Products Group.  The Cardinal Health Support Connect solution is deployed on systems across 4,000 hospitals worldwide.  These deployments happen in highly secure and regulated environments, making this achievement even more noteworthy. Congratulations to Ed Anthony, Denny Simmons and the Cardinal-CMP team who have been on the leading edge from a sheer volume standpoint, while driving tremendous levels of internal adoption, as well as continued deployment growth rates.

Will you make a run for the 2010 Axeda Deployment Excellence Award?

2009 Remote Service Leadership Award Winner:
Diebold, Inc. - OpteView® Remote Services
Pictured: Paul Mercina (Diebold), Dale Calder (Axeda)




We invited Sumair Dutta, Senior Research Analyst - Service Management from Aberdeen to provide his perspectives on our 2009 Remote Service Leadership Award winner - here is what he had to say:

After reviewing a number of very compelling success stories tied to the use of remote service, Aberdeen selected Diebold Incorporated as the winner of the 2009 Axeda Remote Service Leadership Award - recognizing excellence in the implementation and use of remote service to drive enterprise and customer value.

Diebold's remote service journey mirrors that of a number of Best-in-Class service and manufacturing companies that Aberdeen has surveyed over the last couple of years. The company has followed an extremely aggressive implementation path in regards to the percentage of ATMs equipped with remote service capabilities.

Diebold introduced OpteView^® Remote Services in April 2006 with the aim of maximum ATM availability and enhancing service delivery efficiency. OpteView^® connects remote ATMs in real-time to the people and systems responsible for service and support and turning the data received about the ATM into actionable information. Diebold has experienced explosive growth in connected ATMs - with a 400% growth rate over the last 17 months alone.  This is far in excess of most companies surveyed by Aberdeen.

Rapid deployment isn't the sole hallmark of the Best-in-Class, but with the assistance of the aggressive roll out cycle, Diebold's service performance levels reflect those exhibited by the Best-in-Class in several KPIs. Some key results include:

• 20 percent increase in ATM availability (a key driver for customer satisfaction)
• 20 percent of total issues resolved remotely
• 19 percent reduction in field service visits - resulting in field service mileage reductions of 175 miles per ATM annually
• Issue resolution time reduced to 30 minutes or less (from an average of 1-3 hours)

The company also serves as a leader in innovation with regards to the use of remotely captured data. For instance, in the case of service issues that cannot be resolved remotely, Diebold ensures that root cause and recommended repair actions are communicated to the service technician prior to arrival so as to ensure faster resolution and higher first-time fix rates.  Forty-Eight percent (48%) of Best-in-Class companies in Aberdeen's 2009 Remote Service research indicated this level of maturity with the use of remotely captured data.

The company has also taken a lead in leveraging the value of captured performance data beyond the service organization. With the use of real-time performance data, Diebold looks to its engineering and product development teams to enable the development of a better ATM with better software and service/support solutions. This organization-wide sharing of data is a hallmark of the Best-in-Class companies that are surveyed by Aberdeen.

With access to performance data, the company is also looking to build new service offerings tied to asset or inventory management, software configuration or stack management to enhance the opportunities for service or services-based revenue flows. As the popularity of remote service technology grows among service and manufacturing firms, the provision of these revenue-generating services is a key differentiating node on the technology deployment roadmap of Best-in-Class companies.


Sumair Dutta is a Senior Research Analyst on the Service Management team at Aberdeen. He can be reached at sumair.dutta@aberdeen.com  - some of his work is available at http://www.aberdeen.com/channel/svc.asp

Purchase price isn't everything.  

Total Cost of Ownership, or TCO, is a common method used to evaluate the expected lifetime or ongoing costs of several alternative approaches. Pioneered by Gartner more than 20 years ago, the Gartner TCO model takes into account four broad categories of cost: capital, IT operations, administrative, and user operation.

A recent Gartner press release provides the following example. "For a large company, the cost of purchasing a desktop PC may be only $1,200, but, kept for four years, the total cost of ownership (TCO) could be as much as $5,867 per year..."  Note how the operational costs can accumulate over years and overwhelm acquisition costs.  Calculating TCO can help you better understand and compare the costs beyond the initial purchase.

For this discussion, I am going to simplify the Gartner model and focus on acquisition costs, implementation, and operation.

Acquisition
Acquisition costs include everything it takes to purchase the solution components. This will include buying the software license, infrastructure hardware (e.g., servers, storage, load balancers, routers, etc.), and infrastructure software (e.g., application servers, database servers, backup and recovery tools). These items are often where all the focus goes during the decision and purchasing process, and they are important, but they may represent less than 30% of the TCO.

Implementation
Implementation costs cover the wide range of expertise necessary to assemble the components into an operational solution. This starts with the solution design process in collaboration with all of the players that will be involved. Once the plan is in place, there may be internal and external resources required for the software development necessary to configure or customize the software to the field devices.  It will also include the IT experts necessary to set up the equipment in the data center, configure it, and then test.  There may be subtle, but significant, differences in the implementation and assembly costs for each solution so pay attention to the details.

There is another set of costs that is similar across any of the solutions being evaluated.  These include the end-to-end testing (and validation for some regulated industries), marketing and promotional costs, and internal adoption programs. You should account for these in your budget, but they only need to be included in the TCO comparison if you believe there is a significant difference between the options being evaluated.

Operation
Operating the solution over time can represent a cost that is many times the initial investment.  Operating costs may include any of the following:

• Hardware and software maintenance fees
• Infrastructure operations costs
• Floor space costs
• Electricity and cooling.
• Internet connection and bandwidth
• Server hardware and software costs
• IT personnel costs (you may need portions of networking, server, security, and database resources)
• Upgrade costs (for hardware and software)
• Scaling costs (more infrastructure needed as the number of assets or users expands)
• Backup and Recovery Process costs
• Costs associated with failure or outage
• Technology training costs of IT support staff
• Training for application users

One of the major drivers for Axeda to offer its platform and applications under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model was to help customers reduce their TCO.  Use of on-demand delivery removes the need for customers to purchase server infrastructure, train IT staff to manage the solution, and handle the process of version upgrades. An added benefit is that the hosted environment has proven to have higher uptime than our customers were experiencing in their own data centers.

Don't forget about the cost of feature requests or enhancements over time. Give some consideration to how much effort will be required to develop customizations and then to deploy them (both at the Server and Agent levels).  This can be a huge impact when considering internal development as one of the options. Is it core to your business to take on the cost of development or can you take advantage of the shared costs a purchased solution provides?

Once you have your estimates for each category, you should be able to assemble a TCO over the first 3 to 5 years. The totals are important, but also use this exercise to help understand when costs will occur. This information and insight will be extremely valuable when you are finalizing your business justification for the project and presenting the program to management.

Read the related articles for Randy's 10-Step Series:
10 Steps to a Successful Remote Service Evaluation
Step 1. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Have a Vision of What Success Looks Like
Step 2. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Work with Cross Functional Teams
Step 3. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Answer What's in it For Your Customers! 
Step 4. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Agree on a Scoring Matrix and an Evaluation Process
Step 5. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Security Matters
Step 6. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Scalability is More Than Just Multiplication
Step 7. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Usability is the Key to User Acceptance

 

when your assets lost
wireless helps you find them fast
and know where stuff's at

Does intelligent asset management make you wax poetic?  Send us your own haiku.

Design patterns are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems. When an engineer or designer is solving a design problem, many small decisions must be made. A design pattern is a collection of these small decisions, orchestrated into a whole solution. Patterns originated as an architectural concept by architect Christopher Alexander as a way to organize key principles and best practices for the design of living spaces. These design patterns were given names, such as "A Place to Wait", which addresses the architectural design of bus stops, surgery waiting rooms, and bank queues. A pattern is abstract enough to apply to many problems which share a common shape, yet concrete enough to be actionable.

In the course of developing this idea for architectural design, Alexander hit upon a powerful and beautiful concept for all engineering and design disciplines, and this meme has taken hold most notably in the area of software engineering.

When Axeda approaches the "design problem" of helping a customer apply our platform to their business objectives, our professional services and consulting teams look for what I call Solution Patterns. In this context, a solution pattern is a way to describe a collection of those many small design decisions that build towards a solution to a customer's smart service or asset management problem. Some examples of Solution Patterns using Axeda products include:

• Early Warning System - monitor key indicators for equipment failure, based on previously determined heuristics, and produce an alarm condition to warn of impending system failure
• Flight Recorder - gather detailed telemetry data from equipment but do not report unless there is an alarm condition, or if requested
• Push for Help- allow an end-customer to request service from the equipment itself, producing alerts to remote service technicians
• Remote Control - remotely control equipment, interactively
• Self Heal - automatically take corrective measures to common problem situations
• Software Update - publish updated software for your systems

These are just a few, but illustrate the idea and power of this concept on a couple of levels. These patterns provide a launching pad for thinking about what shape a service initiative will take, how best to provide value to end customers, and get the creative juices flowing. When it comes time to implement, aligning with these established patterns can lend speed to the implementation, reduce trial-and-error, and organizes both Axeda and our customer's teams.

This line of thinking also gets everyone in the right frame of mind - solving problems. All too often, IT projects focus on tools, and consequently the solution takes shape around those tools and what they do, while the original problem is partially forgotten, and therefore only partially addressed. In software design, this is what is called an anti-pattern - a recurring pattern of behavior that is ineffective. The methodology of looking for solution patterns inverts this anti-pattern by elevating the problem as the locus of attention, using tools as a means to an end.

For many of our customers, just one pattern can completely satisfy their needs. For others, a synthesis of these patterns come together for a comprehensive program. I like to think of the Axeda product family as being a set of tools that can realize solution patterns. This perspective can be used to understand our product road-map. Our Axeda SmartLink Platform packs a powerful set of new tools, but the goal is not to create new tools - the goal is to facilitate new and powerful solution patterns that help our customers solve their problems in elegant and effective ways.

In the coming weeks, I'll be detailing specific solution patterns, with real-world examples from our customers, and also describing some of the new solution patterns that will be realized by our product road-map.

 

I'm at the M2M Connected World show this week, which is focused on wireless solutions. This year the user presentations have been very impressive, showing how the market is maturing. One of the presentations I sat in on was from AGCO, an $8B manufacturer of agricultural equipment. They did an excellent analysis of all the constituents that will benefit from making their products "Smart".  Here are some examples:

• Customers can track which fields have been treated, schedules for service based on usage, and reports on equipment productivity.
• Dealers are able to provide proactive service, and condition based maintenance, with current location information so they know exactly where the equipment is when service is require.
• AGCO engineers can do remote diagnostics to troubleshoot problems and understand usage patterns to improve product reliability.
• AGCO sales gets information on demo unit usage to help dealers sell the product more effectively.
• AGCO finance uses geofences to be notified when equipment leaves the area where it was leased, indicating a possible theft.
  

Wireless connectivity opens up new categories of products to Smart Services - who would have thought a farm tractor would become a Smart Product?

Jeff who?  Bezos, of course.  

Recently, I purchased an Amazon Kindle for my wife, who is one of the world's great technophobes! (seems like a common trend - techies and non-techies joining forces)

Anyway, to my surprise she loved her new gadget and within 15-minutes had mastered it.  The device never ran out of battery, it was easy to read, took almost no setup, and best of all had a library of books ready to be acquired and read without the hassle of going to the book store. She was hooked!

Now while I am sure that all of you are thrilled by my excellent gift choice, there is a moral to the story if we dig a little deeper.  Let's start by decomposing the Kindle.

When I look at a Kindle I see the following:
1) Slickly packaged device
2) Excellent web user interface
3) Seamless integration with Amazon's billing infrastructure
4) And a whole bunch of stuff that tethers the Kindle, its users, and Amazon together

Looking a little deeper at item #4, we find the ability to:
1) Register the device
2) Communicated with it wirelessly
3) Send it files
4) Upgrade it, and
5) Receive orders from it

To my wife, the technology in #4 is invisible (as it should be).  I, on the other hand, marvel at its simplicity and fully appreciate the complexity of managing millions of the assets over a large area and seamlessly integrating that capability into a global business infrastructure.

Which leads me to my primary point!   The trend of "Smart Products", products that combine a field device with a web presence is here to stay.   If the experience of this type of product can be made to win my wife over, then the approach is for sure ready for the EVERYONE!  

THE PRIMARY CHALLENGE -> managing millions of devices over many modes of communications - daunting!    Just to manage the global network operations center to deal with this volume is big and expensive.   Even the Amazon solution has holes, their network coverage only works in the US and if you are in Montana and Alaska - you are out of luck -> NO KINDLE FOR YOU.

Now to the shameless plug of the day - Axeda has been in the business for solving these types of problems for over 10-years and some of the worlds leading brands depend of us to connect them with their global deployment of assets.   Yesterday, we announced the Axeda SmartLink Platform.   The world's first and most capable platform for building "Smart Products" and for enabling "Smart Operations and Services."  (More on these topics in my next blog)   Delivered as a "Cloud Service" our telco-grade platform and infrastructure is capable of managing millions of assets, connecting them with tens of thousands users, and hundreds of business systems.   Axeda delivers an open platform that works with any communication network, any edge device or chip partner, and can communicate with any business system - all using our patented, VeriSign approved, technology.   We provide the plumbing and operation of the water plant, you add your value on top and take the money and glory.

PRODUCTS, "DELIVERED AS SERVICES" IS THE FUTURE.   Join industry leaders, such as Deloitte, IBM, and Amazon in delivering the next generation of products and services.   In a mere 10 more years, everything we touch will have a value added component to it that will enhance its utility through deliver of value added content. 

To borrow a tag line from Home Depot - You can do it - We can help!

Yesterday, we announced the Axeda SmartLink Platform and the Axeda Wireless Partner Ecosystem. These announcements expand our market beyond remote services to a larger market we are calling "intelligent asset management." In this market, we enable our customers and partners to create solutions for Smart Services, Smart Products, and Smart Operations (more to come on these topics soon). I encourage you to read the detail in the releases, but here are 3 key features that make this announcement big:

• Wireless. Axeda is the leader in remote services for wired assets, now by adding wireless we expand our opportunities to new markets. 24 million cellular communication modules for machine-to-machine (M2M) applications will ship in 2009 alone. While many conferences are struggling to get people to attend, the M2M Connected World conference, where we will exhibit next week, has seen 30% growth in registrations - unheard of in the economic downturn.
  
• Platform. We have always had a platform independent of applications which customers like EMC have used to develop new applications, but our focus has been on selling a complete solution for remote service. By promoting the platform separately, we enable partners to build new solutions that cover many more markets.
  
• Partners. We have a host of new partners driving our wireless ecosystem, and intend to add more. For edge devices, we have Enfora, Morey, Bug Labs, Janus Communications, and Telit. For cellular communication we have Wyless and Kore. These partners fill out our solution for wireless, and together we will reach new customers that each of us alone could not have served.
  

We will continue to provide solutions for remote service (smart services), that remains our core offering, but Wireless + Platform + Partners = expanded opportunity for Axeda, our customers, and our partners!

IBM recently published a study on the Smarter Global Supply Chain of the Future, which outlines the top five challenges faced by supply chain managers and CSCOs (Chief Supply Chain Officers). The article also outlines the landscape for intelligent supply chain management.

Some takeaways: five key challenges that supply chain managers reported are cost containment, supply chain visibility, supply chain risk management, customer intimacy/requirements, and globalization.

Key characteristics of a smarter supply chain: Instrumented (sensors, process detectors, asset management), Interconnected (supplier networks, shared decision making with partners), and Intelligent (integrated demand and supply management, read-respond automation evolves into predict-and-act, sustainability models to address usage impact of carbon, energy, water, waste).  

These are the types of solutions that our alliance with Deloitte addresses - enabling companies to consolidate redundant processes and actively incorporate enterprise assets into their operations.

Joe Biron is a Senior Architect for Axeda

A shoe may be used to drive in a nail, but does it have usability?

Wikipedia defines usability as "a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal." Almost anything can be made into a tool.  The focus of usability is on how easy that tool can be used to accomplish the desired objective. Which has better usability for driving nails - a shoe or a hammer?

I have had the occasion to interview web designers and user interface (UI) engineers. One of my favorite questions is to ask them for a web site they think is really well designed and one that is not well designed.  I then have them justify their selections. It gives me some insight into how they evaluate the user experience. As technical people, they generally prefer sites that are focused, easy to navigate, and surface information in an expected way. They value information over graphics.

We have all experienced software or web sites that seem to read your mind. Needed information always seems right at hand without requiring you to read the whole page. You finish your work quickly and in a positive frame of mind. If a site is bad, you avoid it unless absolutely necessary. If good UI is so obvious (and so important), why aren't all products or web sites well designed?!

The reason is people!  They have many similarities, but they each see the world through a different set of eyes. They may also have different goals or objectives for their use of the system.

Take the time to understand your user community and their expectations.  Will they use the system every day or only on an occasional basis? Are they after detail or simplicity? Do they prefer text or graphics? Are they self motivated or being pushed? The answers to these questions may impact what level of complexity or navigation they will be comfortable with.

A useful model for solution evaluation is to first define the expected workflows. For example, an asset has a problem. How is the user informed of the problem? What are the steps and information necessary to diagnose the type of problem? How do you determine root cause? What are the options for repair? What people, systems, and other processes are involved or impacted by the workflow?  Create a written summary of each workflow with emphasis on the information required to perform each step.

With workflow summaries and user characteristics in hand, you are now ready to approach the solution UI and judge it for usability.  Have your user community involved in the evaluation.  This will help you better understand their needs and they will have more ownership of the selected solution. Walk through the workflows for each solution under consideration. The scoring is simple - does the solution make it easy for people to accomplish their particular goal?

Read the related articles for Randy's 10-Step Series:
10 Steps to a Successful Remote Service Evaluation
Step 1. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Have a Vision of What Success Looks Like
Step 2. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Work with Cross Functional Teams
Step 3. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Answer What's in it For Your Customers! 
Step 4. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Agree on a Scoring Matrix and an Evaluation Process
Step 5. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Security Matters
Step 6. Successful Remote Service Evaluations - Scalability is More Than Just Multiplication