Sunrise Sostenuto 

by Steve Broadhead

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: Moving The ITSM Market on

Sunrise Sostenuto: Technology Overview

Sunrise Sostenuto ITSM: Hands-on Product  review

Summary and Pricing Information

The helpdesk software market, more latterly broadened into the ITSM market, was established in the 80’s and ‘90’s and has arguably remained somewhat static since.

Yet research by the UK Helpdesk Institute has shown that the “performance” of most helpdesk software, in the eyes of the customers, has been, at best, “good” and often merely “adequate” or worse. While vendors have often shone in other areas such as customer support, it is clear that many of the helpdesk products on the market are beginning to get past their “sell by” data in terms of features sets, functionality, usability and overall design. For example, when asked to pinpoint areas for potential improvement in helpdesk software as part of a survey, three notable areas stood out - functionality, the increase in benefits that Internet/browser support gave and the use of knowledge management. These are all areas that need to be exploited by ITSM software vendors if they are to truly move helpdesk and its related functions into the new millennium.

With Sostenuto - the product under test here - Sunrise is claiming to be doing exactly that, while focusing on improvement in all those aforementioned key areas. Of course, while the feature set of a new product is important, so is the ROI available on that purchase. With this in mind, Sunrise is keen to stress the value for money aspects of Sostenuto. The idea here is that there are inherent cost-benefits attached to deploying an entirely web-based product like Sostenuto, such as a high level of process automation and simple user interface, both saving time and therefore costs, initially and in the longer term. A simplified user interface means less training, while this combined with more automation equates to fewer human errors and very significant cost savings as a result.

Ultimately, what we are talking about with ITSM is not fire-fighting (as many people think it is) but service delivery to the end users. Whether that "service" is an application or whatever, users need those services to be available. So you have to remove the single point of failure problem in the first place and then provide a real means of escalating a problem in the event of one arising. The problem is that there often isn't one and therefore users are left without a service available for hours because the right people don't know there is a problem. This is especially the case now where companies have 24-hour computer-based operations. In this situation there has to be a hierarchy of support, so that problems can be dealt with in the right way, by the right people, at all times. But there are many problems which could be resolved by automated routines and free up the human resource.

The nature of the issue here then is to give people the right information wherever they are; to create effectively a virtual team of people who can manage the network from wherever they are and have time to do so pro-actively. Unfortunately, this differs from where most companies are today, which is still looking at a device level view of the world - fault reporting in other words. Instead the network must be viewed with service availability in mind; to look at the end user services which need to be delivered across the network and to ensure that they are. Currently support staff look at a hardware error and then try and correlate it with the service, if they can. So, for example, a network router may go down somewhere but they might not be sure exactly who it is affecting and what services or applications are not available as a result. All they know for sure is that there is a problem with that router. People need, therefore, to gain an applications view of the world, where prioritisation is made simpler and relates directly to the services they are trying to provide. This means using automation more, for example - recognising a condition and enabling a response. In many cases certain alert conditions are always followed by certain diagnostics patterns, which will usually then narrow that problem down. Yet all these steps are still usually carried out manually. If these were automated to this level so that the human process starts with the results of the diagnostics, companies are immediately increasing the skill levels at which helpdesk staff work by getting rid of the human element in the basic stuff. That way they have a far greater chance of solving a high percentage of problems with the first line of support, since their skill levels are effectively higher.

Coming, as Sunrise does, from a background of offering a more traditional helpdesk product - Enterprise - it should be in a position to best judge how revolutionary its new product needs to be in order to move the ITSM game on and add real intelligence into the helpdesk process. Here we’ll find out just how successfully this UK software house’s attempt at bringing ITSM products into a new era have been.

With Sostenuto, Sunrise has truly rewritten the rulebook with a pure browser-based application built on an underlying CORBA-Java distributed architecture. This is not simply a “web-ised” version of its Enterprise software but a completely new product in every sense. It is based on an n-tier architecture utilising the Java/CORBA Object Web model. An n-tier architecture lends itself well to moving the complexity of the system to the middle tier(s) where Sunrise claims it has several advantages over the more common, traditional 2-tier architectures. First, Sunrise believes that 2-tier client/server applications run into problems as the number of users increases and that ongoing maintenance is easier, as in most cases only one server will need to be updated. A key point is that in an n-tier model, most of the code is independent of front-end technology which makes the system both mores scalable and more portable.

So think of it more as a framework and less as a rigid “shrink-wrap” software application and Sostenuto is more easily understood. Sunrise had a very specific goal in mind here: to deliver a product that would be capable of growing with an organisation’s business, the design goals being centred on the fundamental concept of “change”, another key point that continually crops up in user surveys. So that as a business grows, the services that it provides to its user community need to evolve. The information that the organisation needs to capture, the way in which that information is captured and the way that information is presented may all need to change, so Sostenuto was designed with all these points in mind. As a result, the major design goals were focused in the following areas:

With Sostenuto, Sunrise had specific architectural targets, designed to enable the product to scale as required by any organisation, as follows:

Sostenuto In A Nutshell…. Sostenuto provides a secure A-Z (lifecycle) workflow for any task or event, with a series of operations impacting upon that service request/task which may or may not change the state (key milestones throughout the lifecycle) at any point during that lifecycle. Underlying business rules control what actually happens at each point along the way, the workflow dictating just what the user actually sees and does (managing their input and what screens they see and use) while the underlying elements remain largely transparent to them. In other words, it might be complicated below the surface, but above - from the users perspective - it’s all about simply driving a browser-based interface. In the review section which follows, we look at just how this works in practice. Sostenuto is made up of several elements or modules; a client workstation “thin client” (one time only Java applet download), a web/application server - IIS 5.0 or Sun ONE Application Server 7.0 - and a database server (SQL Server 2000). It is provided complete with knowledge management, software and network discovery and reporting modules.

Figure 1 - The Sostenuto Screen Designer

If this sounds a little scary then you can take some comfort in the knowledge that Sunrise already has some “early-adopters” using the product in ways they hadn’t even envisaged themselves, or that they really understand if they’re honest, but the customers are very happy. In some ways the situation is analogous to when Lotus introduced Notes - which became a phenomenal success - and spent the first 12 months trying to work out what it actually did for a living!

But it’s as a relatively straightforward, fully featured ITSM product that Sostenuto presents itself on first acquaintance. The big differences lay beneath. Sostenuto is based around the idea of configured services, rather than true hard-coded modules, or sub-applications with a view to being almost infinitely flexible. Almost. A pre-defined set of services is provided, which include familiar helpdesk areas such as Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and Contact Management.

These appear on a menu bar running along the top of the browser screen with a number of windows below that vary in type and function depending on the service, and features thereof, being accessed. Importantly, Sunrise has taken all the best Windows-GUI features such as “drag and drop” and incorporated them into the browser interface. All too often, a browser-based application simply lacks real functionality but this absolutely isn’t the case here.

Figure 2 - The Generic Sostenuto Interface

In addition to the default set provided, any services can be created. Services are effectively a series of configurations that define the presentation, behaviour, location and security features of the information associated with that service, which itself is defined by one or more configurable “Lifecycles”.

Basically, a lifecycle dictates which operations can be performed on a service request/task and when these operations can be performed, such as creation/deletion and updates.

Figure 3 - The Service Manager

Access to those operations is further controlled by the security model. Security is a key feature of the software, with a common, multi-tiered methodology running throughout the product, regardless of service type. Operations performed on a service request/task may change the state of that service request/task and it is these “states” that represent key milestones throughout the lifetime of the service request/task, from creation to deletion.

Each lifecycle is triggered-off by specific criteria you define when configuring the service. For example, when setting up an Incident Management service, you might define a category field to represent the category of the incident being reported. This category may represent a software issue, hardware issue or network issue, for example. When defining lifecycles, you can define different operations based on the type of category, where the category acts as the trigger for a lifecycle and what criteria must be met for that lifecycle to be initiated, such as ”category equals software”. You then specify the operations that can be performed for that lifecycle and so on.

At the heart of a service is the “Workflow”. This defines the order in which information is captured, specifically the control of screens that are displayed in response to user operations and events. The workflow specifies which operation/event will display a certain screen or populate the details on the current screen. It is activated upon the selection of a service, defining which screen is displayed first and which screens are displayed subsequently in response to those user operations/events.

Underpinning all events within Sostenuto is a business rules engine that enables the software to react to events and programme schedules so that field updates, operations and notifications can be performed automatically when a rule is triggered.

Figure 4 - The Sostenuto Schedule Rule Screen

To some extent it’s all about that automation process - something the world has been banging on about for years, yet we’re still looking at a largely “manual” world today. Minimising human error reduces costs and increases the efficiency of an ITSM team and Sostenuto has clearly been designed to allow this to happen.

Looking beyond its capabilities as an ITSM solution, either using in-house development skills or outsourcing from specialists, Sostenuto is thoroughly capable of being a one-stop-shop platform for a large number of bespoke application developments. Basically anything that fits the CORBA/Java, n-tier architecture can be developed using Sostenuto. Again, this means there are significant cost savings and economies of scale to be had - learn use, use many times.

Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8391 9000

Pricing: From under £20000 for a 10-user licence.