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Motive Inc., which specializes in application management software, has introduced three new products for troubleshooting and tracking enterprise application performance.
The new products, Motive Profile, Triage and Resolution, are designed to reduce the time and manual labor associated with diagnosing, tracking and resolving problems with application configurations and performance, according to officials with Motive, based in Austin, Texas.
Motive Profile automatically queries and analyzes application configuration to make it easier for IT managers to track configuration changes over time and across multiple operating environments. Motive Triage seeks to define and isolate specific performance problems, said Scott Abel, executive vice president of Motives enterprise business unit.
Motive Resolution provides tools for automating the application analysis and diagnosis process to reduce the time it takes to fix a problem.
Lawson Software Inc. has licensed Motive Profile and uses it under its own service label, Lawson Interactive Support, to allow customers to interactively troubleshoot problems and track the resolution of problems, said Cole Orndorff, vice president of global support with Lawson in St. Paul, Minn.
Lawson Software markets a line of enterprise resource planning, human resources, health care management and retail merchandizing applications. Motive Profile, along with information exchange through Lawsons Web site, is helping the software company speed up the support process and reduce the number of support phone calls needed to resolve the problem.
“The new Motive Profile basically allows us and the customer to see what their application configuration is,” which saves a lot of time when Lawson is working with a customer to troubleshoot a problem, Orndorff said.
“Rather than ask a lot of questions about what operating system, what database version and what application upgrade are installed at the clients site, with Motive Profile we use some telemetry to get the information we need to find out what environment” the customer is working with.
“We can save time for our customers and for ourselves if we can capture a snapshot of what our customers have, and we can store that to review it later,” he said.
“The Motive product provides the interaction capability between us and the customer and documents the interaction between us and the customer,” Orndorff said. This can be an important factor when Lawson has to bring in technical specialists to resolve problems. The captured documentation allows the specialist to review the situation without making the customer repeat or duplicate the same information, he explained.
Next Page: Troubleshooting through “asynchronous chats.”
Internet Dialogs
“When someone has to pick up the ball from a Lawson perspective, we are able to get up to speed and solve a problem much faster,” said Jeffrey Quast, Lawsons quality programs manager.
Another advantage is that it makes it easier for Lawson to duplicate and examine a problem with the same product release and operating environment, Quast explained.
Profile helps support what Quast described as an “Internet dialog,” where the client and Lawson exchange information and questions to reach a conclusion of what the problem is and how to solve it. “We call it an asynchronous chat,” Quast said, because its not happening in real time, but lot of information is exchanged in a relatively short period of time.
One of the main benefits of the Motive Profile application in the brief time it has been installed is that it has helped reduce the number of call center support calls by slightly more than 50 percent, according to Orndorff.
Orndorff feels that customers are able to get more effective interaction with Lawson through the Web connections than they did through the typical call center technical support scenario. “The overall touches we have with customers has gone up, but the cost of those touches are going down,” he said.
Motive also announced this week that another major enterprise resource planning software company, PeopleSoft Inc., will use Motive Profile in its Total Ownership Experience customer support program.
PeopleSoft intends to incorporate Motive Profiles configuration management features to allow customers to track changes in the PeopleSoft application environments to help with problem diagnosis and resolution.
Motive Profile is available now. Motive Triage and Motive Resolution will be released in September.
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