Total Visibility

White Paper
October 2010

Total Visibility
How to increase control and add value to your business

Total Visibility - How to increase control and add value to your business

4 What’s Visibility?

5 The need for an integral solution

6 Applied Visibility

10 Tango/04 Solutions

12 About Tango/04

This White Paper aims to initiate the discussion about the concept of
Visibility in business and describes why it is currently an unavoidable
necessity for maintaining and improving service levels, adding value to
the business, strengthening security, and speeding up the process of
making decisions and maximizing the resource’s efficiency.

The paper investigates these issues and - through examples of real
cases - shows some of the benefits that result from the implementation
of solutions that provide visibility both to IT and the rest of the areas of
the company.

© 2010 - Tango/04 Computing Group
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Much is said about the complexity and competitiveness of markets, and major challen-
ges companies are forced to deal with daily. But what does this really mean? What is the
real problem? The number of variables that organizations must manage simultaneously
and continuously - not only to grow, but merely to survive - have increased exponentially
and continue to do so. Then, how can each one of them be kept under control? How to
ensure its proper functioning? How can the alignment of the whole company be ensured
to meet business objectives?

Departmentalization tends to form silos within companies, and the frequent lack of com-
munication and integration among them hinders proper functioning and company perfor-
mance in general. To illustrate with a practical example, let us take the IT Department. As
infrastructure becomes more complex with the integration of multiple servers, applica-
tions, databases, and devices, it is increasingly difficult to understand business priorities
and visualize how a small failure in a single technological component can have a severe
impact on a full business service. Equally difficult is spotting events that result from a
failure that, even though they do have a certain importance on that level, have little or no
impact at all on business services.

In this context, improving the overall functioning of business processes and reducing cor-
porate costs appear as two of the main objectives of all organizations. Along with them,
a third variable is presented as both a mean and a goal: increasing the efficient use of
information and analysis. After all, how could the problem of complexity be solved without
the necessary visibility, while meeting strict service level objectives and reducing the total
cost of operations at the same time?

Finally, how does Total Visibility help to improve this situation?

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What’s Visibility?
In our opinion, visibility is having the necessary information to control critical problems,
inefficiencies and bottlenecks in real time. It is an essential requirement for companies
to be agile and more competitive, as well as to motivate staff, align departmental silos,
optimize workflows, achieve sustainable compliance of regulations and audits, and
continuously improve services.

Going from the particular to the general, it could be said that a department that has
access to the state of all business processes, is a strengthened department. But a
company that has real time visibility of all the information that is relevant, as well as
analytical skills and the capacity to proactively solve incidents, is an agile and efficient
organization, ready to grow.

The lack of visibility of what happens in the various areas of the organization and the
scarce alignment between them, leads to the difficulty for detecting both the problems
that occur in different sectors and their mutual impact. Most of the tools oriented to
provide visibility that are available today show the problems in an isolated way. This
means that even though they produce a large number of data, little information is useful
or manageable.

This is why, in order to achieve Total Visibility, it is also important that everyone can see
what they need to see and how they need to see it. Management areas will only be able
to take full advantage of the various business dashboards if it is also possible to drill
down and obtain detailed root causes of what is happening.

If we cannot see something, how can we control it and
manage its changes for our benefit? No one can measure or
manage what they cannot see.

Visibility

In our opinion, visibility is having the necessary information to control critical problems,
inefficiencies, and bottlenecks in real time. It is an essential requirement for companies
to be agile and more competitive, as well as to motivate staff, align departmental silos,
optimize workflows, achieve sustainable compliance of regulations and audits, and
continuously improve services.

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Consequently, visibility is not only business intelligence in real time, it is more than
that. It is the ability to control applications and technological services, it is Security and
Compliance, it is monitoring of critical business processes, all that with the purpose
of improving management, aligning people, seizing opportunities, and avoiding losing
money and prestige.

The need for an integral solution
ERP systems, software for supply chain management, bar codes, radio frequency identi-
fication (RFID), mobile phones, wireless computer networks, and Web-based exchange
of information are often mentioned as visibility solutions. In fact, all these could be con-
sidered components that are useful to achieve greater visibility, but none of them alone
provide a complete solution for the problems we face. This is because, although what
they provide can be a deep image of what happens, the picture is still only partial.

We believe that in order to address the current complexity, companies need a solution
that allows them to monitor and control all events integrally and in real time, which also
must be multiplatform, extensible, and easy to use. Thus, a single tool will provide visi-
bility of the entire company, and will be able to be adapted continuously to needs that
may come up.

Knowing information in real time is crucial in order to be able to act proactively. If we
cannot see something, how can we control it and manage its changes for our benefit? No
one can measure or manage what they cannot see.

Having a multiplatform solution is the only way to consolidate the different systems and
process them jointly, aligning the functioning of the entire company and guaranteeing
that visibility reaches every event, application, and process.

Extensibility is an unavoidable requirement if what we are looking for is long-term solu-
tions that can integrate the changes to answer to address each new need that arises.

Finally, ease of use: if there was a tool that provided visibility of the entire company and
to all areas, but only a few technical profiled people could understand it, what would be
the point?

We mentioned the importance of having the possibility to extend the scope of the so-
lution to different areas of the company; this means that in order to achieve true Total
Visibility, the chosen solution should be applicable within companies both vertically
and horizontally. Therefore, it will provide visibility to the various sectors (Technology,
Security, Business), and in different business areas (for example, areas of Customer
Service in the financial sector, or areas of Distribution in companies seeking to strea-
mline its supply chain).

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Thus, visibility in every area of the company will contribute to increasing control and
adding value to business through proactive actions and agile decision-making across
different sectors. There cannot be agility without visibility.

There cannot be Agility without Visibility.

Applied Visibility
An example in banks

Across the globe, the financial sector is in the eye of the storm. Increasing regulatory
pressures and tightening economic conditions force its participants to adapt quickly to
the new panorama.

The key to success in this challenging environment is to have all relevant information in real
time to improve operational decision making. But it is not just about having data, it’s about
being able to understand it, and having views which are adjustable to the needs of users.

For example, Figure 1 shows a control panel/dashboard which provides a picture of the
state of the services in bank offices.

The colorful graphics facilitate understanding the information and speed up the process
of decision making. Real-time management
of critical applications enables service level
improvement.

Working with solutions that provide Total
Visibility, banks will have greater visibility of
different transactional processes in real time
(for example, Home Banking, ATMs, payment
processing, phone banking) at different levels
and areas of management. Figure 2 shows
an example of a dashboard that is used to
monitor the state of the ATMs in a particular
region selected by the user.

In every organization, each of the different
areas require particular information that is
relevant for having an immediate view of key
Figure 1 - The colored icon informs clearly and simply the general state of monitored indicators that determine their performance
processes (in this case, the service state of bank offices). Some data of particular
relevance (Service level in the last hour and Goal) are reflected with large, easy- weekly, monthly and quarterly. This information
to-observe numbers. Line charts show the health of various processes in different
can be tailored to specific work roles: while
periods of time.

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senior managers need a comprehensive
view of corporate performance, covering first
class financial aspects, human resources,
and customer metrics; a manager of a
branch requires information about the sale
of local products and the profitability by line
of business. Figure 3 shows the dashboard
used by the Department of Technology of a
bank to have visibility of the IT services state
and data flow.

Regarding the Security Department, the main
objective of a tool that provides visibility is to
make banking operations absolutely reliable.
In this sense, there are many processes,
Figure 2 - Icons of different colors provide a snapshot of the service level of the ATM
events, and incidents for which banks need
network of a bank. At the bottom of the dashboard, references of what each color means to have real-time visibility in order to ensure
are permanently available. The line graph allows comparing the availability and activity of
the monitored ATMs. their proper functioning.

Features, such as collecting, storing, and
interpreting complex centralized logs from
multiple platforms, which can also be analyzed and correlated to provide users with
comprehensive visibility of all that is happening in the monitoring applications in real-
time, contribute to achieving sustained compliance with internal and external audits,
central bank requirements, and local and international regulations such as SOX, PCI-

Figure 3 - In this dashboard colored icons report the state
of IT services and data flow in real time. The small graphs
on the right show the state of security events, server
performance, and key performance indicators (KPIs) of the
business in real-time.

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DSS, and HIPAA.
Other features that are useful for strengthening the Security areas of companies are:
sending scalable alerts and predefined automatic actions (which provide greater reliability
and control by keeping the heads of each sector informed of everything that happens in
real time), forensic analysis (which provides an accurate diagnosis of the condition of the
monitored components), and predictive analysis (which, based on statistical analysis of
trends, allows predicting what will happen in the future).

On the other hand, reports provide both instant images in real time
and forensic analysis on service levels (SLAs), security, regulatory
compliance, user activity, systems usage, and more. The clearer and
the more intuitive the design is, the greater its ease of use will be.

For banks, the possibility of issuing reports instantly helps improve
the overall business vision, as well as sustainable compliance with
security audits. See Figure 4.

An example in supply chains

Releasing a product in the market involves coordination,
communication and collaboration among suppliers, manufacturers,
and carriers, as well as inventory management and purchasing
channels, distribution, wholesale, and sales.

Presently, a new business model prevails in which the different
parts of the supply chain are distributed across various parts of
the world, involve different suppliers, and operate in different time
Figure 4 - The use of reports allow companies to implement a zones, etc. This makes it necessary to have more control processes,
continual improvement program, focusing their attention on the
components with the biggest number of failures.
not only to ensure the quality but also to assure delivery times and
availability of the final products. In order to be able to survive in
this decentralized, complex, and high speed environment, it is
necessary to have clear visibility of the entire process.

An example of how it would be useful for logistics companies to have a solution that
provides visibility can be seen in Figures 5 and 6.

In the logistics and supply chains sector, every day everyone must work in order to have
the necessary element in the right place, at the right time, and in the exact amount. That
is, to know if there are obstructions in the chain and what is needed to resume the flow.
A tool that provides Total Visibility in real time allows monitoring the various links of the
chain simultaneously, enabling informed decision making to the various areas involved.

This results in proactive management - rather than reactive – of the supply chain.

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Figures 5 and 6 - In these
dashboards, colored icons inform,
in real time, the status of the various
sectors of a large sporting goods
company’s warehouse, and the
infrastructure of the four centers of a
laboratory.

In addition, Total Visibility represents a huge opportunity for improving collaboration and
teamwork with suppliers and internal and external partners.

The global view must be complemented with the possibility to drill-down into a
detailed view. This will allow understanding the root causes of problems and allow
immediate action.

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Tango/04 Solutions
Centralized monitoring: the key to assuring Total Visibility

Tango/04 provides an agile combination of software and services that guarantee the re-
sults defined in the scope of the project and the budgeted costs, and allow the continual
growth of the solution, providing companies Total Visibility through integral and centrali-
zed control of every event.

The software allows controlling the Technology, Security, and critical business proces-
ses of companies in real-time with a single, easy-to-use, and rapidly implementable tool
which is capable of integrating multiple platforms and applications. Its performance is
complemented with a wide range of Professional Services offers aimed at providing
users the maximum benefit from their investment in the solution.

It is a flexible approach that has already been proved successful, which is adaptable to
the needs of each client in the different stages of the solution’s life cycle, and allows you
to have the entire Tango/04 team of specialists at your disposal, who are professionals
with proven experience after hundreds of implemented projects around the world and
in leading companies in various industries. Some of them are: Nike, Banco Votorantim,
Bayer, Inditex (Zara), Caja Navarra, and Pierre Fabre Ibérica, among many others.

In order to meet this objective and to carry out the monitoring of the various corporate
areas in a centralized way while providing visibility to all sectors of the organization,
Tango/04 has developed the innovative “1-2-3” strategy (Technology-Security-Busi-
ness). This strategy is carried out by the implementation of VISUAL Message Center,
the flagship solution of the company, which provides an agile tool in one single solution
to: 1) Manage the critical infrastructure, applications, and business services (BSM), 2)
Comply with current and future audits and control security in real time, and 3) Manage
business processes In a centralized and efficient way.

With VISUAL Message Center companies can centralize events, controls, and informa-
tion from different sources, correlate them, and get immediate visibility of what is happe-
ning at every moment, identifying any situation that may be affecting the critical activities
of the organization, providing an essential solution to proactively react at the right time,
and offering support to carry out a quality process and continual improvement.

How do we work?

Having Total Visibility means that the different areas of a company have access to all the
information that is relevant and necessary for making decisions in their daily work.

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To make this possible, VISUAL Message Center collects events of all kinds, centralizes,
correlates, and stores them in secure databases, and then processes and displays them
in dashboards that translate the collected data in graphs, tables, and businesses views
that provide a quick overview, which is thorough and easily understandable. Similarly,
the information is analyzed and presented in advanced reports that help to make detai-
led historical analysis, making it possible to draw conclusions from what happened and
establish a continual improvement process.

The use of agentless technology for the collection of events allows controlling complex
and heterogeneous infrastructures, and integrating different sources of information in a
non-intrusive way (there’s no need to install agents or modules), thus offering maximum
ease of deployment and management.

The advanced monitoring, automation, alert, escalation and visualization functions fa-
cilitate simultaneous management of multiple systems, applications, business process,
networks, devices, and other components. In this manner, Tango/04 promises to answer
to all corporate needs with one solution. This is possible because the collected infor-
mation is provided to each area in an easily understandable format, which reduces the
traditional gaps between the perception of the IT areas and Business.

The solution reaches its full potential when combined with the Professional Services
offered by the company. The working methodology is as follows: before starting the
implementation of each project, the scope and budget are defined and compliance
is guaranteed. Implementations are, in all cases, complemented afterwards with on-
going services, which provide assistance options for those who want to manage the
solution by themselves, as well as for those who prefer to delegate the administration
to Tango/04.

Thanks to the agile combination of Software and Services, users can be certain that,
whatever the situation, Tango/04 will provide the appropriate resources and services to
keep the solution constantly updated, make it grow, and adapt it to the particular needs
of each company.

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About Tango/04 Computing Group

Tango/04 Computing Group is one of the leading developers of monitoring software for Technology, Security/
Compliance and Business Service Management (BSM).

Tango/04 helps companies maintain the operating health of business processes, improve service levels, comply
with security audits, increase productivity and reduce operating costs aligning their IT department with their
business objectives. The group’s unparalleled “1-2-3” monitoring approach provides in only one single easy-to-
use, real-time, multiplatform solution a powerful tool to: 1) Manage your critical infrastructure, applications, and
business services (BSM), 2) Comply with current and future audits, and control your security in real time, and
3) Manage your business processes in a centralized and effective way.

The group operates throughout the world through its vast network of Business Partners and has more than
2,000 customers, including companies such as: 3M, Alcampo, Arcelor, Banco Itaú, Bayer, BBVA, Boehringer
Ingelheim, Bridgestone, Citigroup, Capgemini, CC&G (London Stock Exchange Group), Coca-Cola, Danone,
DIA, Dolce & Gabbana, Dole Fresh Fruit, EDS, Euronet Worldwide, First Data Ibérica, Fortis, GE Money,
Gucci, Helvetia, Inditex (Zara), ING Nationale-Nederlanden, Liberty, L’Orèal, Luxottica, MAPFRE, Manpower,
Miele, Nestlé, Nike, Nissan, Pierre Fabre Ibérica, Prada, Random House Mondadori, SEUR Geopost, Shell,
Telmex, TNT, Tribunal Regional Do Trabalho, Yves Rocher and Zurich Financial Services, among others.

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