In our personal lives do we advocate our social responsibility to encourage and become smarter to reduce our individual contribution to global warming? When it comes to waste, we at least try to adopt lean practices to avoid duplication (lean thinking) and our recycling management (like all our waste packaging from Amazon). So why in IT do we find ourselves continuously replacing old systems heritage with shiny new systems? Not look at retrofitting our classic systems with a shiny new UI or support for the latest greatest technologies (mega/multi-cloud, containerisation or predictive analytics).

My previous blogs have mentioned that the messaging from Micro Focus is to protect your investment in IT systems and business smarts. Use the example of your our car. If you are lucky enough to own a classic car, it may not be the fastest, most reliable or have the latest technology, it may be an endangered species and you may struggle to get parts any more, but you have formed a bond with the product (whatever car you may or may not own).
For a lucky few, you may swap your car every couple of years and never have to worry about the potential MOT test failures (I.e. maintenance window & downtime). This seems to be the approach for enterprise business products as quoted by that 1/3 customers will typically swap out enterprise software every three years. But how can this be cost efficient over the total cost of ownership?

You may be asking what does this have to do with SMAX? Unfortunately, due to my limited knowledge around ITOM, I’ll have go back in time circa 1990 to my final year dissertation on “Automation IT Based Helpdesk” which shared similarities with some of the capabilities of SMAX.

The idea back then was the ability to develop dynamic personas which allowed automated service desk tickets to provide different responses based on the end user’s knowledge level based combined something similar to hot topics analytics:

• Example A - Limited IT knowledge - Local Printer not working - turn it off and back on again.
• Example B - Geeky IT knowledge - check bios for ECP / EPP settings for conflict of possible IRQ issue

However, it shows how far technology has come with the flagship SMAX platform. In the May release, they introduced MAX, the intent learning virtual agent.

Combined with an industry leading approach to smart asset management through the CMDB discover along with ticket auto-categorisation capability.

With all this next-generation technology and analytics, SMAX is embracing the lean engineering mantra. Additionally, with the introduction of MAX, the bot and the upcoming SMAX SaaS offering Micro Focus will continue to be a clear leader in the Service Management segment.