HCLSoftware provides a product called iControl that is all about bringing visibility into business processes, and it does that by leveraging the power of Splunk to gain insight to all the parts of the puzzle. While at Cisco Live, I had an opportunity to chat with Ian Philips and Nitin Sharma to dive deeper into something called the Order-to-Cash business process which leverages Splunk, AppDynamics, iControl, and BigFix. Though this product customers are seeing:

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Hey everybody, we’re out here at Cisco Live and I ran into Ian here from HCL software. Now, we had a conversation back in February at Cisco Live in Mia and we talked all about iControl. Now, you’ve been telling me about this order-to-cash business flow from the time somebody places an order to all the processes that go into it and cash remedy at the end. And all the pieces that go wrong with that. Can you give me some more information about what you’re doing there? >> Yeah, thanks Jason and it’s lovely to see you again. So, if we think about every business in this world has an order-to-cash process in some way where they are converting a an order or a client execution into into the end of the day into cash. Um when things go wrong, it can either be a business or it could be an IT problem. And and that’s generally where we where we flourish with HCL iControl. Um it’s all about bringing clarity to the problem and being able to dig deep into the into the root cause and then fix things faster and quicker. So, just imagine an incident call happens. The business is is jumping up and down. They’re going, “Give me an update. Tell me what’s happening.” The application people are are digging into AppDynamics, looking to see what’s the problem with the with with the application. Your infrastructure guys are looking at the logs and and trying to actually understand what’s going wrong in the log in the logs. Now, what we want to do is we want to bring that all together into a very three, four click um uh view so that we can actually dig into it and go, “Is it a business problem? Is it an IT problem? What’s the actual exposure to the business?” Um which orders are are are outstanding and and move that into our service management platform to actually dig deep into the incident and resolve it as fast as possible. Now, there’s a lot of processes in there. How are you using the Splunk platform and the pieces of Splunk through all of this. >> Yeah, so one of the uniquenesses of HLI control, it’s a it’s a built-in Splunk application. So, it brings together from the top of the of the full stack observability, bringing it together from the from the business metrics to your application metrics in in AppDynamics, and then all the way through to your Splunk melt layer. And and by by bringing that all together, we can actually bring the picture and and do root cause analysis much much faster. >> So, I heard we might have a demo, didn’t we? >> All right. What you are seeing right now on the screen is a various order to cash management processes, where the various stages of order, like the receiving order, preparing quotations, the sales and the checks availability, including the payments. These are the various stages which has been mapped to these 46 different processes. Now, if you see what we have been doing here is matching these various processes to these various layers of Splunk information. If you see what it is showing is an application error, where where you can go right away on the click, you can deep dive into an application error, while showcasing that eight errors has been breached, and which is impacting the application. The impact is on the order statuses. The orders are stuck. This is right. There’s no going into an Splunk application, AppDynamics application, where these errors, the multitudes of the systems being consolidated, there is 14 different counts of an error, and right on the click, you can see an incident, and you can directly go to the incident into a service management queue. Where the service management has all the details which is ported over from the application side. Now, the functionality is that now we are not talking about the application impact. We are talking about how these processes being highlighting the application error and the impact and then the stock orders on one go. >> That’s a really great demo there, Nithin. Now, using all these integrated pieces, what are you seeing customers achieve? >> So, firstly, as you can see in the demo, within three clicks, you could go from a business problem all the way down to an IT problem to get to root cause. What we’re actually seeing is a 60-plus percentage increase in in business outages, uh repairs, which is faster mean time to repair, and then mean time to to to bring the service back online. Um we’ve also seen that the the cohesion between the business teams and the IT teams are is a lot less. Um all of a sudden, there’s no more blame game. Everybody’s quite clear on on on where the issue sits, and then they start repairing it. And once you’ve got the process mapped like what like we have it as well, and you understand where the IT components fit in, if things start going wrong, you can start looking business business process re-engineering, or you can do um architecture changes to your to your application landscape to be able to rectify these problems in long-term long-term views. >> That’s just really incredible what you’re doing there, Nithin. If I want to go get some more information, educate myself further, what should I do? >> Well, you can always come and visit us at the HCL software website um and have a link look look in the link below, and you can click on it and come and see us. >> All right. That’s really great. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, Jason. >> Thank you.