Meet ups are back and it was ACE!!
No, literally, it was – but I will come to that in a moment.
Well, what a month October was! We had our first ‘in-person’ event since September 2019! And it was ACE! We were slightly nervous, as it has been such a long time since we held one of these events and we were not sure if people would turn up. How wrong we were! The venue was packed (btw, we can thoroughly recommend the Tokenhouse cellar bar in Moorgate). It was a fantastic opportunity to say thanks to existing and new customers, our partners, have a few drinks, something to eat and see ManagementStudio and its new addition, the Application Confidence Engine or ACE for short, in action.
Thank you to everyone who made it!
This was a chance for our team to get together as well. Covid lockdowns meant we could not get to see our Irish contingent as often as we would like so we had some of the development team over from Galway (and suffice to say, there were a few hangovers the next day!!) In fact, we had people making special efforts to get to the event from all over the UK and we are so grateful for that. Familiar faces and fresh faces were there, and any initial nerves were soon allayed when people started to show-up. Eager to see what is new and socialise, mingle, and talk about new opportunities.
The focus was on our new addition, ACE (I promise I will get to that shortly), but we felt it would be good to bring everyone up to date on our core solution, ManagementStudio as this was introduced only last year.
Justin Pickup, our illustrious co-founder, did a quick intro and thanked everyone for turning up and explained the reasons for holding the event. He then handed the baton over to Ben Cook, one of our Senior Product Specialists, to run through a demonstration of ManagementStudio and then onto ACE. Ben did an excellent job of highlighting the fresh look and feel of ManagementStudio (minus the reliance for Silverlight). He talked about our mantra of the four pillars; Capture, Control, Communicate and Collaborate which is now at heart of our methodology.
Ben then moved onto ACE. As I mentioned earlier, that stands for Application Confidence Engine, and there is a clue in the name as to what it does. Application rationalisation is a key component of any IT transformation programme and, whilst we have made every effort to simplify this in the past it has always been one of the most time-consuming elements. Imagine discovering you had thousands of applications and knowing you will have to go through those one at a time to either accept, reject, or rationalise to a specific version. We have had one large customer discover over 40,000 applications! Even with the best tools available that is going to take some time. So, how can we help?
Well, our amazing development team have produced a unique solution that crowd sources the decisions made by other companies, using ManagementStudio on applications. Now, do not worry, as it is only the decision that is recorded. This can then be reconciled against other users doing the same thing and suggestions can then be made about whether an application should be accepted, rejected, or rolled up to a newer version.
These are not forced on anyone and are merely suggestions, but if the table is showing that 90% of people choose to reject a given application, then you could take the view that this is the way to proceed. Anything lower than, say, 50-60% might still require the business to take a closer look, but it does mean that a huge chunk of the work can be automated and therefore saving a massive amount of time, effort and money.
The image below highlights how we can currently rate 70% of applications.
We have many companies that are already using this which, of course, means that the confidence data rating will only improve! The more people use this, the better the data will be for others to act upon.
Thus far, the feedback has been, frankly speaking, amazing. In fact, it has been ACE (sorry that is the last time I will use that pun).
If you could not make it on the night but would like to find out more, then do please let us know and we can arrange a demonstration of both ManagementStudio and ACE.
We will be doing more of these so please subscribe to our newsletter for notifications about upcoming events.
Keep In The Loop
Sign-up to our newsletter and be the first to hear about new events as we announce them!
