Savision, a Dutch company who makes business service and cloud management solutions for Microsoft System Center, but whose R&D is mainly in Canada, has released a new dashboarding tool for System Center Operations Manager aimed at more technical users, which complements their flagship Live Maps solution

Savision, which makes business service and cloud management solutions for Microsoft System Center, has released Dashboards by Savision, a new offering which is directed more at line technical users. It complements the company’s flagship Live Maps solution which is targeted at more senior IT decision makers in an organization

Savision is a player in what analysts define as the IT Operations Analytics segment, companies which make tools that quickly analyze massive amounts of data and turn them into easy-to-use information for organizations. The company was founded in 2006 by two Dutch EDS consultants who were heavily involved in Microsoft engagements in what would become Systems Center, who then built the initial version of Live Maps, which remains their flagship product.

“Live Maps took the raw technical data from Systems Center and presented it in more efficient ways,” said Rob Doucette, Savision’s CTO. It gives organizations a visual, business service view of their IT infrastructure, and provides proactive performance management to provide IT professionals with information needed to keep IT flowing smoothly.

“We excel with more mature IT organizations, who have moved away from component monitoring and can relate to things that relate to the business,” Doucette said. “They want to know ‘how’s payroll’, ‘how’s finance’ – understanding these things as a business service instead of as a low level component. With an immature IT organization, it can be hard to communicate that business service value.”

Savision’s sweet spot is in the enterprise, particularly among Fortune 500 companies, and limited to those who use Microsoft System Center.

“That’s something that will change in the future, but today, if you don’t have System Center, we don’t have a story for you,” Doucette said.

Doucette and his R&D team of 14 people, who handle what he estimated to be 90 per cent of Savision’s R&D, are based in Ottawa. While Canada is thus critical to Savision from a technical perspective, from a market perspective, it is still underdeveloped.

“Market penetration in Canada is still immature, compared to the U.S. and western Europe,” Doucette said. “We do have some good customers here, including government and universities though.”

Savision goes to market through a hybrid channel, with both direct sales and a select group of over 50 partners who cover 40 countries. They presently have a handful of partners in Canada.

“We still do more business direct than channel, and a lot of the channel business is customer preference,” Doucette said. “We do a lot of the sales grunt work because of the nature of the Live Map flagship product. The user starts with a blank canvas and a lot of new users get stuck. Their partner has to be really heavily focused on Systems Center to be able to help them, as opposed to a partner who just sells something off the shelf.”

Dashboards by Savision is aimed at the same sort of customers Savision sold to before, but is targeted at a different type of user in the organization – typically line technical people rather than senior IT execs. It lets them view and respond to the state of their IT infrastructure on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.

“This is a net-new product with new code, and new software,” Doucette said. “Live Maps has some ability to get information through a web browser, but it is based on older technology like Silverlight. Dashboards by Savision is a built from-the-ground-up HTML5 application.” It comes with dashboards for core Microsoft applications such as Active Directory, SQL Server, and IIS. It also lets IT techs build and customize their own dashboards inside a web browser.

Dashboards by Savision is being offered as a free download, but it is very much a freemium model.

“The free version gives you the core Microsoft applications out of the box, and the ability to create one free dashboard,” Doucette said. “To go beyond the one custom dashboard requires the user to pay.” Additional custom dashboards can be bought on a subscription basis.

Dashboards by Savision is available for immediate download now.