By Dick Stark

xMatters, formerly AlarmPoint offers alarm/communication management through a relevance engine to capture and provide alerts to what really matters to an organization– whether in supply chain, IT management, or  business continuity.  RightStar has several new xMatters prospects and we are very excited about our new partnership to resell and implement the xMatters product line.

One of Gartner’s Top 10 Technology Trends for 2013 is Actionable Analytics, and xMatters’ relevance engine enables enterprise users to make faster, more informed decisions.  xMatters filters and manages thousands of static and dynamic factors to deliver information on a broad scale to bring in people efficiently and rapidly when they are needed.  What is xMatters’ value proposition and how does it apply to RightStar and our customers?

A good place to start is Department of Justice, where RightStar has been on-site for more than a year working with the BMC BPPM product line for enterprise and application monitoring. There we are implementing xMatters for high impact and severity infrastructure events that are detected by the DOJ operations team. We have set rules to take key events and automatically publish them into xMatters to engage the right teams. By integrating xMatters directly into their BMC event management setup, DOJ can have technical resources engaged even before an incident is raised. When fully implemented, DOJ hopes to minimize the duration and impact of outages.

Another key xMatters focus area is the IT service desk. Often times, tickets are distributed in a queue fashion with emails sent to everyone and tickets “up for grab.” xMatters can route tickets to one person at a time, based on rotating on-call schedules, and reach out to other people, only if they don’t respond. The result is increased responsiveness from assigning a ticket to confirmation of ownership.

xMatters also provides an automated conference bridging capability. Service desks often elevate a priority 1 outage (Major Incident Management) to Level 2 or 3 technicians that may require specific subject matter expertise. A normal response is to set up a conference bridge with all the right participants.  This is often a time consuming process and it may be 30 minutes or more before the right people are identified and dialed-in. Automated conference bridging reduces this assembly time to less than five minutes.

Business Continuity Planning is yet another key application area for xMatters.  By shrinking the time to notify everyone of a pending event from hours to minutes, the xMatters relevance engine can improve the safety and security of employees and their companies. The granularity of the product allows relevant information to be distributed by individual and department, (e.g., Facilities, HR, Security, or Corporate Communications), depending on the type of activity.

xMatters works because their relevance engine offers a non-generic highly tuned business process approach to Actionable Analytics as well as Enterprise Risk Management, Disaster Recovery and BCP planning.