Predictive Analytics – The What, How and Why?

The Exoprise marketing team sat down with their CEO, Jason Lieblich, to discuss predictive analytics, market trends, and the technology’s usage in troubleshooting network issues.

Q. How would you define predictive network technology?

A. At Exoprise, we define ‘predictive network technology’ as a way to predict network and service slowdowns or outages – especially for cloud application services such as Microsoft 365, other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), their networks and access. To accomplish this goal, we utilize a combination of real-user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) combined with our crowdsourced data. Taken together, our solution can often see in advance of network slowdowns, alert the respective IT teams to conditions and assist in troubleshooting what’s happening in real-time.

We think to be successful at predictive analytics for IT, you have to have this combination of RUM and STM spread out across your networks all the way to the end. And now, with hybrid work being so prevalent, you have to be able to examine the overall Internet, ISPs, and network peering exchanges throughout the world.

Q. How important and revolutionary is this technology?

A. Predictive network technology is especially important with the rise of cloud/SaaS and cloud, now combined with hybrid work – it just makes for constantly shifting topologies and conditions. When everything was behind the firewall, or served up through consistent VPNs, it was easier to troubleshoot, easier to see the need for and expand capacity.

The shift to SaaS and distributed work, the change in everyone’s schedules, makes network monitoring, prediction, and analytics more critical. It’s a fallacy to think that latency is constant, bandwidth is infinite, or that the network won’t change. It changes every day and hour, and our customers want to understand when problems are occurring to take proactive remediation steps and minimize business disruption.

Q. What would you say are the benefits of predictive analytics?

A. Exoprise solutions allows support teams to receive proactive notifications about looming outages or slowdowns from our synthetic solutions. This means they don’t have to wait for a user to be impacted before they have telemetry into the network end-to-end.

IT can then combine this data with our digital experience monitoring solution, the complete picture. The business user endpoint is where all IT comes together; all the application and service delivery, the apps, the network, the homegrown and third-party solutions all come together on the user’s desktop and that’s where we capture the complete digital experience. It’s where you have to be to ascertain the health of systems.

The goal is to stabilize IT to the point where it is transparent, MTTR is reduced to zero, and business productivity is vastly improved.

Q. Who will be this technology’s biggest supporters?

A. These will be enterprises still grappling with the pandemic and hybrid work challenges. Due to the sudden and fast shift in the office work culture, companies are trying to optimize their work from anywhere initiatives and supporting solutions that can help them with this transition period.

Furthermore, businesses may have had to reshape their network over the past few years. Collaboration, UC, and remote video have changed the face of the corporate network, and now they have capacity problems, latency issues, packet loss, and others. Previous SD-WAN implementations may no longer be effective or relevant.

Q. What types of enterprises will most likely adopt predictive analytics technology?

A. Those enterprises that have adopted mission-critical cloud and SaaS en masse and want to deliver best-of-class service to their remote employees will benefit the most from predictive network technology. Time is essential in these companies, so tools that help predict, troubleshoot, and remediate issues will be the most valuable.

Q. What challenges will businesses face after adopting this technology?

Often, adopters are inundated with too much data from other tools that provide synthetics or RUM. Exoprise offers a streamlined and customized dashboard view, offering real-time insights into the end-user experience. We’re still combining the intelligence of synthetics and RUM together for the predictive insights as well as the crowdsourced data, reducing and filtering the noise, etc.

Q. How can our readers get started with predictive network technology?

A. The best way is to sign up for a free 15-day trial of the Exoprise Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solution and see the benefits for yourself.

Q.  What else would you like to add?

A. We are the ONLY vendor that can perform hop-by-hop diagnosis for all streaming apps such as Zoom, WebEx, Teams, and GoToMeeting through our Network DEM solution and augment predictive network technology. Give it a shot with Exoprise!

Thank you, Jason, for contributing your valuable time to educating our readers.