MSI, also known as Service Integration and Management (SIAM), is designed to help you manage complex IT services and processes across your entire organization. Working with an MSI partner helps ease the administrative burden on you: it can be used in enterprise mobility, security and other areas of your company. It can also be applied to systems integration.
Something I’ve learned in recent times is that when we talk about digitalization, we are really talking about operational efficiency. Our customers face challenges in infrastructure integration, IT/OT convergence, defining and deploying the new digital workspace, and more. With so many things to manage, MSI will come into its own in systems integration. It will do this because MSI can encompass everything from IT services management (ITSM) to systems integration, workflows to AIOps, robotic process automation (RPA) and more.
There is a business need for it. Changing business priorities, particularly post-COVID-19, means changes in budget priorities: many organizations are switching from a CAPEX model to an OPEX one and are increasing their reliance on the cloud. Increasing automation is a focus to help with cost controls while increasing operational efficiency and increase productivity. MSI in systems integration can be a huge advantage.
Powering automation and orchestration with AIOps
With so many technological capabilities to manage in an organization, MSI is an asset, but it goes further than that. Automation and orchestration using AIOps is central to the exercise. AIOps, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to IT operations, is now essential for monitoring and managing modern IT environments.
Gartner has outlined the role of AIOps in automating and orchestrating, and they break it down into a cyclical process. Overarching the entire process is that your AIOps platform should enable continuous insight across all your IT operations monitoring. “Monitoring” is one of the three main elements of AIOps in systems integration. Monitoring includes using real-time and historical data to conduct historical analysis, enabling performance analysis and ensuring correlation and contextualization, designed to enable prediction. The second element is “Engage,” which relates to ITSM and workflow, encompassing task automation, agent performance analysis and knowledge management. The third element is “Act,” where you deploy automation – in this case, RPA – to improve your processes and make operations more efficient.
This is all powered by a central AIOps platform that utilizes big data and Machine Learning (ML) to make continuous improvements. MSI thinking applied to systems integration isn’t a one-time deal: it should help you realize improvements in your IT operations on an ongoing basis.
How Orange helps you
Orange helps customers address these three elements of systems integration using our MSI expertise and experience. It’s a specialist skill set, and it pays to work with the right partner to get the results you want.
For the “Monitoring” aspect, Orange offers an integrated and transversal approach based on our having teams of experts, a monitoring catalog and a dashboard in place. We can give customers a correlation of events from different data sources plus machine learning algorithms that deliver “customer solution monitoring,” rather than just “product monitoring,” to drive end-to-end visibility.
In the “Engage” stage, the Orange ServiceNow solution helps our customers by bringing together numerous, varied services and removing the complexity of managing complicated infrastructures and multiple operators. ServiceNow gives companies a powerful platform that helps them combine multiple technologies and systems and transforms traditional work methods into digital workflows. Our proven operational experience managing multiple providers and technical expertise on digital integration, combined with the ServiceNow platform capabilities, give our customers a market-leading MSI platform integration solution.
Our RPA expertise (“Act”) completes the Orange systems integration proposition and enables automation, supported by partnerships with leaders in this area, like Intellibot and UiPath.
Enabling digital integration, empowering your business
MSI in systems integration can give you the visibility and control over your IT landscape and processes that let you concentrate on running and growing your business. At Orange, we refer to ourselves as a network native digital services company, but we are also a systems integrator and everything in between. And when we talk about digitalization, we are generally talking about operational efficiency. We believe in leveraging the value of data in the business ecosystem.
So, in helping companies enhance systems integration, we’re able to bring our MSI expertise to take on the issue. Using RPA, workflow management and predictability under the AIOps umbrella, companies can drive operational efficiency and value from an MSI approach to a traditional business challenge, systems integration.
Learn more about Multisourcing Service Integration from Orange Business.
Ibrahim Daher is Head of Solutions Development and Engineering in the Enterprise Services Business Unit at Orange Business. He manages the development of innovative solutions and large programs focusing on digitalization of the customer care relationship in addition to orchestration, monitoring and reporting for service management.