Reveille has historically collected data on capture and ECM applications, with the purpose of enabling its customers to proactively manage performance. In other words, if an ECM or capture process is broken, Reveille’s software is designed to help users fix it in real time. This focus has placed the Atlanta-based ISV squarely in the application performance management (APM) market.
With the upcoming release of Reveille 8, the ISV has plans to expand the types of ECM and capture data it is collecting and the actions its software can take. “We have always purpose built our software for APM in the ECM market,” said Sean Allen, VP, marketing, for Reveille. “We have now purpose-built it for analytics for ECM and capture.
“This has involved a maturing of our platform, as well as a lot of work on our front end. We have a brand new UI that has been modernized and is more responsive. It is built in HTML 5, utilizing CSS3 style sheets. Reveille 8 comes pre-packaged with seven analytics dashboards and there is also the ability for users to modify those and even create their own. Basically, we want to enable our customers to visualize the information in the lake of data we are able to pull from ECM applications.”
Reveille has coined the term “active insight” to describe what its software offers. “Insight is the data we are able to pull, while ‘active’ means that users are able to react to events,” said Allen. “That ability to react is one of our major differentiators.”
Reveille 8’s pre-packaged dashboards fall into three categories:
- Customer Experience: This includes the performance management that Reveille has historically been known for, as well as new areas like measuring application adoption. “When we gather performance data, we are also gathering transaction data that tells how people are using content,” said Allen. “Fundamentally, any application is really a set of transactions. As a result, we have insight into the adoption rate of applications created within ECM systems.“For example, if a financial services organization has deployed a loan origination application, we can tell how often its loan officers are using it and how long they are on it for. We can even tell if there are nooks and crannies that are not being touched. We also have visibility into mobile users.”
- Behavior: This category focus on security and auditing capabilities. “From a security standpoint, Reveille is able to determine a baseline of normal activity and, as a result, it can determine if something deviates,” said Allen. “For example, if Ed normally accesses 50 documents per week and suddenly he’s accessing 50,000 in a day, Reveille can be set up so that it will trigger a command to automatically suspend Ed’s usage rights until the situation can be checked out.“In addition, since we know what users are doing, Reveille comes in handy in an audit discovery process. In our datastore, we have information that can help answer questions like who accessed what and when. Reveille can produce reports containing information like the number of users that access a particular type of transaction. This is valuable for any type of content that is regulated. We are having more and more conversations specific to auditing, as organizations come under pressure to be able to prove what they are doing and when.“Related to this, there is also value in being able to determine the value of content to an organization by being able to tell what is accessed the most frequently. Reveille can surface data on what people bring up, and this can enable organizations to determine what they should care about and what should potentially be sent to a digital landfill.”
- Operations: These dashboards help organizations manage tasks like capacity planning, upgrades, and moving to a private cloud. “We are able to track trends at a user or application level and see what is being stressed by current loads, and determine what would happen if more users or document volumes were added,” said Allen. “We know what the footprint of a typical user is, for example, and can therefore determine at what point a system will start getting stressed out and more capacity should be added.“Regarding upgrades, we understand the baseline performance of a current system and what a user’s world looks like before an upgrade. This information can help determine whether an upgrade will really make a user’s world better or not. For example, Reveille can help determine if moving from an on premises to a cloud deployment would be helpful.“Finally, what we’re seeing with private clouds is that often organizations are leveraging them similar to the way they have traditionally leveraged shared service environments. Businesses are offering services from their cloud to different lines of business and they want to be able to slice and dice the charges based on usage, which we can track. Even if they aren’t getting that granular, when it comes time to expand the capacity of the cloud, understanding usage enables them to know who to go to first to pay for it.”
Allen discussed Reveille 8 with us at the recent Kofax Inspire Conference in Nashville. Reveille is OEM’d by Kofax and brought to market as Kofax Monitor. “The complete set of capabilities in Reveille 8 will not be available in Kofax Monitor, as it is a Kofax branded solution and very specific to their technology,” said Allen. “We have added support for Kofax TotalAgility (KTA) and Kofax Analytics for Capture (KAFC). So, now Kofax Monitor will show up in their Analytics Solution for KTA.”
Reveille’s Web site currently lists solutions for Box, IBM Datacap, IBM FileNet, Kofax, Microsoft SharePoint, Open Text Captiva, OpenText Content Server, and OpenText Documentum. “We focus on the ECM, capture, and collaboration industries,” said Allen. “We realize that not all of the dashboards introduced in Reveille 8 make sense for the capture market, but capture is still a big part of our customer base and our focus. We will continue to push on and find additional analytics disciplines that make sense for capture. We did a lot of surveys and talked to the market, as well as industry analysts, to come with our initial dashboards, but the list will keep getting longer.”
Allen added that the diversity of Reveille 8, in regards to the stack of technology it can be used with, is of great value in the current market. “People are increasingly not making a single enterprise decision for content management,” he said. “They typically have a couple capture applications and ECM repositories, and they might be playing with Box and doing something with SharePoint. When you have all these different pieces, it creates nooks and crannies for security issues and performance bottlenecks as documents flow between systems. Reveille 8 can help address those problems.”
While Reveille remains focused on its customers’ ECM performance issues, Allen suspects that eventually greater demand for the software will be driven by its new security and audit features. “We feel that with Reveille 8 we be able to solve problems for a broader set of customers,” he said. “While it’s mostly IT personnel that cares about performance, we are now able to market our software to people that have to deal with audits and security, as well as those responsible for line-of-business level reporting.”
Allen acknowledged that moving into the broader analytics space potentially brings Reveille into a wider swath of competition, but believes its software’s ability to run in an agentless manner inside of ECM and capture applications represents a significant differentiator. “It’s like the difference between standing outside a burning building and waiting to see smoke before you realize it’s on fire vs. being already inside and standing with a firehouse ready,” he said. “There is just no comparison when it comes to discovering issues. Unless you are embedded deep inside applications like we are, you just don’t have the same context.”
For more information: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180213005170/en/Reveille-8-Unlocks-Significant-Content-Service-Platforms
