I met up with my old friend Martin Williams yesterday; he is CEO of a startup company called ATOV.  Apparently AtoV means Anarchy to Visualisation, which is exactly what they do.

Some firms have limited instrumentation to monitor their IT systems, some firms even have a Command Centre or Bridge Operations to react to outages in these IT platforms but no one monitors the customer experience. IT departments can often tell you that a router is broken or a server is down or even that a disk is almost full, but they all get unexpected calls from angry customers that critical services are down. (Mostly there is no connection between actual hardware and software faults and the impact this has on a customer’s services.)

AtoV take this anarchy and turn it into a customer experience journey visualisation that connects the IT folks to the business. Frankly it’s brilliant. If you aren’t using their tubemapper product then you are working blind.

1. Operations work according to business priorities rather than severity of technical outage. (Using TubeMapper, the operations center are told how much money the business is losing as a result of a technical fault.)
2. IT departments can use historic data when considering where to invest money (they can see how much technical faults have cost them in the past.)
3. IT operations and the business are using the same system and are looking at the same data. (Bridging that IT-business gap has historically been difficult but can easily be achieved using the AToV approach.)

The main benefit here is customer confidence and retention. We are all under pressure to do more with less and this product makes sure when things do go wrong, the answers are at your finger tips when the customer calls.

Have a look at the demo.

ATOV have already achieved a lot with this product and are looking for several more early adopters who are offered a complimentary license. Contact Martin dot Williams at atov dot com for details.