Let me start by asking you a question – would it be easy to imagine Apple without iTunes, or even metaphorically – Amazon.com without Amazon Web Services?
Let us pause for a moment and think about Amazon. Amazon.com was not initially built to be served out of AWS, but was served out of a more traditional Oracle-backed in-house system. On the other hand, AWS was designed to take the pain away from managing environments, but it made a lot of sense later for Amazon.com to move to AWS. One would ask why, when everything was working so well? Simple really, the goodness around elasticity, efficiency and reliability that AWS brought to Amazon.com was enormous. This not only spurred Amazon.com to greater things, but also got third-parties and developers invested in Amazon to get more out of AWS e.g. the AWS marketplace, and the Amazon AppStore.
That brings me to ActiveEfficiency – 1E's Efficiency platform.
As regular readers of the 1E blog, we are all familiar with the 1E strategy – to make IT more efficient, be it software, hardware, or the network. Although all our products have a specific narrative and a set of focused goals, there is always an underlying insight these products can feed each other with, e.g. if as a customer of 1E, you'd want to supplement the goodness of one product with another, then ActiveEfficiency is the vehicle that would help you do that. That doesn't necessarily mean ActiveEfficiency is useful only if you have deployed more than one of 1E's products. I could summarize ActiveEfficiency as not only being a glue but also a healthy supplement to each of our products.
As a customer of 1E, you could leverage ActiveEfficiency’s core premises in a variety of ways:
1. Interoperability – ActiveEfficiency Server works well with your existing infrastructure, and can accommodate data from a variety of data sources like Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manage, through our own agented and agentless discovery mechanisms. What happens if you’ve already bought into a 3rd party data source not on that list? No worries, we can integrate with any data source. By way of an example, we wrote a custom ActiveEfficiency connector for one of the world's largest financial organizations allowing them to harvest their existing discovery infrastructure without buying into a new discovery mechanism. Consolidation is Efficiency!
2. Enablement and Extensibility – ActiveEfficiency Server is built around RESTful API's that make it easy to interact with the platform and even extend it. Device Tagging is a perfect example of enabling ActiveEfficiency to accommodate a device attribute unknown to 1E.
3. Collaboration – ActiveEfficiency is built to deliver the best of what we know as quickly as possible down to you. So, that might be enabling our latest software catalogue from the cloud down to your corporate network that 'AppClarity' could leverage with immediate effect.
4. Scalability – ActiveEfficiency needs to accommodate large sets of data potentially from different sources, and needs to serve all of 1E's products. This means there is no question that it has to be performant, and we are constantly striving to improve our performance numbers to further increase efficiency of using 1E products. I will explore this more in a later post so stay tuned.
5. Security – ActiveEfficiency is a secure service, secured using standard Windows Authentication. You can lock down access to the ActiveEfficiency Web Server, to a machine account or a set of user accounts as is appropriate to your environment.
I hope you have found this post useful. In the next post, I'll dig deeper into the specifics of the recently released version of ActiveEfficiency – ActiveEfficiency 1.7! Stay tuned.
