The SilverMine scripting tool gives SilverBack service providers open access to the database and allows them to create their own value-added applications and customized reports to meet specific customer needs and provide additional sources of revenue and competitive differentiation.
"SilverMine is a great tool for our partners who wish to provide a higher level of reporting detail to their customers, giving them any degree or range of micro or macro views they desire," said Robert Klotz, SilverBack VP of Technical Services. "SilverMine actually represents a revenue opportunity for service providers because they can now go beyond the use of our native templates to script their own results."
One application of the SilverMine scripting tool developed by SilverBack partner Digital-DNS of Greensville, SC, is the development of CIO Scorecards, a graphic report that provides a weekly snapshot on the status of any network's health, which ensures immediate accountability and empowers CIOs to more closely align business and IT goals.
In addition to the Scorecard, Digital DNS also offers a monthly scorecard that automates the task of compiling network data across an unlimited number of IP addresses from multiple customer sites over a 30-day period. "Before we had developed a means to generate these reports monthly, it would take us about 65 hours to run a monthly tally that covered our own 30 customer sites," said Al Gossett, CEO of Digital DNS. "Using SilverMine to write an application that would automate this process was the smartest move we ever made with a scripting tool."
Specifically, the Scorecards chart the health of an organization's networked IT systems, applications, services, patches and vulnerabilities within a few concise pages, conveying performance metrics, availability and degree of latency; it also measures how the IT department or service provider is doing against SLAs and/or other goals.
"This is an invaluable communications tool for giving the CEO or CIO a window onto the network and its status with a simple weekly report card," said Bill Brown, CTO of Digital-DNS. "With this report, we strengthen our relationship with our customers at the highest levels, since now the executive can successfully communicate with his C-level peers. We make the CEO/CIO look good, and that person has a means of demonstrating accountability with his internal resources and external providers."
The Scorecard is also valuable for documenting internal controls as they pertain to security, an important feature as companies struggle to adhere and remain in regulatory compliance with complex federal mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
"CIOs are overwhelmed by too much information," said Jim Hare, VP of Worldwide Sales, SilverBack. "Many times, service reports can go overboard with reams of arcane data that looks impressive for its sheer volume, but which can lose the forest for the trees. What's key here is generating accountability, conveying only top-drawer concerns, and displaying the overall view of the CIO's network within a few graphic pages. When reporting to the CIO, 'more is less' should be the mantra."
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