Understanding and Visualizing Key Data with TARGIT
Thirty years ago, SMT Data was just beginning to discuss performance capacity data and producing static reports. SMT Data’s customers would have to create reports themselves through SAS or other developmental channels. Unfortunately, this approach to reporting lacked critical capabilities and did not effectively bridge the gap between data and visualization.
“We needed a BI solution that offered functionality, ease of use, and considerable power,” says Steven Thomas, CTO of SMT Data. Thomas has been a crucial part of SMT Data for over ten years and is responsible for consulting and presales.
Today, SMT Data is utilizing TARGIT Decision Suite to provide valuable insight to their customers. The business intelligence (BI) platform and interface help SMT Data’s customers tackle their daily operational challenges while:
- Saving costs
- Improving performance
- Regaining control
- Making informed business decisions
- Reducing the skills dependencies
- Securing IT efficiency
Before TARGIT, providing customized reports to their clients was much more difficult. Since partnering with TARGIT, SMT Data consultants rely less on their developers and more on TARGIT, which allows an understanding and a visualization of the data. Having access to this valuable information has changed how SMT Data drives its business.
Specific Business Practices Impacted by TARGIT
“We’re taking huge amounts of performance capacity data for our biggest customers — it’s terabytes of data every day, and we’re aggregating that data and filtering it into a data warehouse. Then, we put TARGIT on top of it so the customers can quickly access and understand the cost drivers, and then optimize their business,” Thomas says. At the push of a button, the users have instant insight into their critical data and the ability to drill down into details to get a comprehensive understanding of the numbers.
SMT Data gathers performance and capacity data from their customers' mainframe installation and servers. Within TARGIT, SMT Data's customers can simply look at the capacity usage over a specific period to determine the peak hours when they are using the most capacity. TARGIT quickly helps determine their peak utilization and allows them to analyze the underlying cost drivers during specific time frames:
The goal is to save money, so SMT Data's customers often need to move the workload away from peak hours or optimize the factors that can or cannot be changed.
Embedding TARGIT into their software allowed SMT Data and its customers to start building custom reports that pick up where static reporting leaves off for companies.
“TARGIT allows us to open up the data, drill into it, slice and dice it along different dimensions. To understand anomalies or patterns, that’s where TARGIT is really powerful.” Thomas says.
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What's Next for SMT Data?
SMT Data evolved from a reliance on static reporting to implementing a data warehouse and complete business intelligence solution. In the future, Thomas says, “We’re looking to move more into artificial intelligence and data lake technologies to get even more insight from the data. Of course, TARGIT will be an essential part of our future.”
Thomas emphasizes that the collaboration is more like a partnership than a customer-supplier relationship due to TARGIT’s prominent role in the solution: “The fact that we have a close working relationship, and receive support from consultants, the development team, and the management team within TARGIT is very important to us.”
Thomas emphasizes that the collaboration is more like a partnership than a customer-supplier relationship due to TARGIT’s prominent role in the solution: “The fact that we have a close working relationship, and receive support from consultants, the development team, and the management team within TARGIT is very important to us.”
