Questions with "Srinivas Ramanathan of eG Innovations"

"Our mission and the reason we do what we do at eG Innovations is to ensure that IT applications and infrastructures deliver the performance that is expected of them, so organizations can focus on their core business. 

"I contacted Srinivas Ramanathan, the CEO and founder of eG Innovations, to inquire if he would be interested in participating in one of my "5 Questions" interviews, aiming to gain his insights on the digital user experience. Before establishing eG Innovations, Ramanathan was a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. 

During his tenure at HP, he notably contributed as the chief architect of Firehunter, a solution for monitoring the performance of internet service providers. Additionally, he was a significant contributor to the second version of HP's WebQoS product, designed to enable Quality of Service for web applications. Srinivas background is rich in internet technologies, performance monitoring and management, and multimedia systems. This rich background of Srinivas is one of the key reasons for the success of eG Innovations.

Let's start with what is "Digital Employee Experience". A lot of the focus with digital employee experience rightfully is on getting the best response time and throughput. But this is not all. When a problem happens, how quickly can the IT operations team determine where the root cause of a problem is and resolve it? This is Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and that's an important component of DEX as well. In the same vein, if a problem happens, it is addressed and it happens again and again, which impacts user confidence and satisfaction. So, accuracy in resolving problems is another important attribute of DEX. Ideally, IT operations want to be proactive – so they can detect problems before users notice. Then there is intelligent capacity planning, so as you onboard new users, it doesn't impact the user experience.

At eG Innovations, we look at digital experience holistically and address all of the different digital employee experience components that I just outlined. By monitoring logon time, app launch time, screen latency, and other attributes, our eG Enterprise solution gives you proactive alerts. Often, these issues are effects of a problem, while the cause may be elsewhere. To detect the root cause of problems, eG Enterprise gets granular insights from every layer and every tier of the entire service delivery chain (from desktop to VDI, connection broker, hypervisor, storage, and infrastructure services like Active Directory), and uses AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) capabilities to correlate between different alerts and pin-point the root-cause of problems. Built-in machine learning capabilities are then used to get capacity insights and right-sizing recommendations to help optimize your digital workspace.

Our differentiators are many. Firstly, we offer a single solution, a single web console from where you get all of the capabilities I outlined and it can be deployed 100% on-premises or as SaaS. Secondly, we offer true end-to-end visibility. You get deep insights into every tier of the infrastructure supporting a digital workspace (e.g., not just the Citrix tiers), so when a problem happens, you are not wondering what you missed. And we don't restrict ourselves to digital workspaces alone: the same eG Enterprise solution monitors your SAP or healthcare application, Microsoft 365, web applications, databases, containers, and other modern enterprise technologies too. 

This end-to-end coverage is a critical reason why our solutions are being used by clients to answer the key question "Why is my virtual app/desktop slow?". Thirdly, the AIOps capabilities incorporated in our solution make it very easy to use and you can set up different views for different stakeholders in an enterprise – i.e., the help-desk staff, IT architects, SMEs, executives, etc. Finally, the solution is fully multi-tenant and ideal for managed service providers looking to offer DEX monitoring as a service to clients.

"Looking towards 2024, what innovations or enhancements can we expect from eG Innovations that will further advance monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities, particularly in expanding on the employee experience?"

This year, you will see us expand our solutions in different areas. Having the right metrics is a key to making the right decisions in business, and the same holds true for IT operations as well. With every release of our product suite, we push the envelope, looking to improve the level of insight our solution has across every tier of the IT landscape. 

Once the metrics are there, you need technologies to make the right decisions. We are enhancing the AIOps capabilities in our toolset to reduce the dependence on the IT admin. We will do this in different ways. Integration with Open AI to allow admins to get instant and accurate recommendations is one such capability. Taking our analytics one step further with forecasting is another. We are also working on ways to make IT compliance enforcement easier for admins and self-service approaches that organizations can use to reduce the number of help-desk calls they get from users.

"How are AI and automation integrated into eG Innovations' solutions, and what unique benefits do they offer for predictive analysis and efficiency improvements?"

These days, IT operations teams like retail consumers want solutions that are plug-and-play. AI and automation are key for monitoring and observability solutions to achieve this. From an automation perspective, our solution's deployment can be made touch-free through integration with gold images or orchestration technologies like Nerdio and Terraform. Built-in auto-discovery and auto-configuration of the monitoring ensure that metrics are collected without human effort. 

This way, you can provision and monitor large environments with several thousand users in under an hour. As I mentioned earlier, AIOps capability is at the core of our solutions. We apply machine learning to key metrics to determine which metrics are exhibiting anomalies. A patented, rules-free metric correlation technology then analyses desktop, server, session, network, hypervisor, storage, and other metrics to narrow down where the root cause of problems lies. With this capability, we are able to provide administrators with a prioritized list of alerts at any time – this list highlights where the root cause of a problem lies and where the effects are. 

The result is faster, accurate diagnosis of problems and accurate resolution, all of which help in enhancing the digital employee experience. Once the exact problem is determined, automation can again help in rectifying it. If the same problem occurs often, the resolution can be automated so mean time to repair is drastically reduced. eG Enterprise embeds automatic remediation for some of the common digital workspace problems and provides an extensible framework for you to add custom actions as well. Tools that do not have embedded AIOps capabilities necessitate manual analysis of metrics and thresholds, which is time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone.

"As IT environments grow in complexity, could you outline the unique challenges you foresee in user experience monitoring and how eG Innovations plans to address these with solutions not readily found with other vendors?"

Complexity is not new in IT. Over the years, the introduction of virtual machines, cloud environments, container technologies, auto-scaling, etc. have all added functionality but introduced complexity, especially from a user experience monitoring perspective. The dynamic nature of these technologies poses challenges. For instance, in an auto-scaled environment, it's essential to collect live metrics and details, rather than wait to analyze the system post-facto, as the system itself may have been scaled down. Complexity also arises from new technology innovations – new protocols, new resource types (GPUs), etc. Our success at eG Innovations has been based on acquiring domain expertise in the technologies we support. When we first started, we looked at the Citrix stack because customers were asking us to, and we had no idea what to monitor and how. Working with clients over the years and assisting them solve different problems, we've acquired expertise with digital workspace technologies and embedded our learnings in our product suite. In fact, our product roadmap has been heavily influenced by real-world needs. We expect to continue along the same path in the future as well.