Necol Keenan, Founder of Luminescent Real Estate

We’re determined to be the agents you can’t help but call friends and the people you never hesitate to call, even years after the sale.

TEMECULA, Calif. (PRWEB)
January 21, 2022

Luminescent Real Estate today announced its partnership with Side, the only real estate technology company that exclusively partners with high-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages to transform them into market-leading boutique brands and businesses. The collaboration will ensure that Luminescent Real Estate, a firm committed to customer-centered real estate, is powered by the industry’s most advanced platform.

Luminescent Real Estate founder Necol Keenan is a Southern California native who understands the nuances of the area, and her fresh marketing ideas and high-level negotiating skills have helped her become a top-producing agent in the region. Keenan is a residential sales specialist who also has extensive experience guiding first-time home buyers and those looking for a larger home or downsizing.

Luminescent Real Estate is a team of values-driven professionals who work with kindness and strive to do better. At Luminescent, Keenan is joined by members of her former team, the Necol Keenan Group, who closed $20 million in transactions in 2020 and receive an average of 5% over the list price when selling homes. The company serves buyers and sellers in the Temecula, Murrieta, Orange County, San Marcos, Oceanside, and Carlsbad areas.

“Doing right by people is in our bones — we never compromise, no matter the cost,” said Keenan. “We’re determined to be the agents you can’t help but call friends and the people you never hesitate to call, even years after the sale.”

Partnering with Side will ensure Luminescent Real Estate remains on the cutting edge of the evolving real estate market while continuing to deliver premium services to its clients. Side works behind the scenes, supporting Luminescent Real Estate with a one-of-a-kind brokerage platform that includes proprietary technology, transaction management, branding and marketing services, public relations, legal support, lead generation, vendor management, infrastructure solutions, and more. Additionally, Luminescent Real Estate will join an exclusive group of Side partners, tapping into an expansive network from coast to coast.

“At Luminescent, we take a personal approach to real estate,” added Keenan. “Working with Side allows us to access state-of-the-art marketing, technology, administrative, and legal services, which means we can focus on providing the highest level of customer service and delivering clients a positive real estate experience.”

About Luminescent Real Estate

Luminescent Real Estate is a customer-focused real estate company that uses local expertise, innovative marketing ideas, and personalized plans to help people navigate the Southern California real estate market. Its team members are committed to achieving their client’s real estate goals while providing a stress-free experience. For more information, visit http://www.luminescentrealestateca.com.

About Side

Side transforms high-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages into successful businesses and boutique brands that are 100% agent-owned. Side exclusively partners with the best agents, empowering them with proprietary technology and a premier support team so they can be more productive, grow their business, and focus on serving their clients. Side is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.sideinc.com.

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Surfside Solutions Inc. (“Surfside”), an end-to-end marketing technology that aggregates first-party data across all customer touchpoints, today announced the launch of real-time ecommerce measurement to the Surfside Attribution Platform, a self-service measurement tool that allows dispensaries, brands and delivery companies the ability to visualize online sales that are directly attributed to their digital and traditional media campaigns.

The addition of ecommerce measurement to Surfside’s Attribution Platform allows customers to visualize campaign metrics, store visitation and ecommerce sales in one single view. Real-time ecommerce attribution combined with retail foot traffic measurement provides advertisers with a complete picture of the path to purchase, offering transparency and insight to aid in better media optimization decisions.

“Our biggest goal at Surfside is to turn first-party data into an asset for media performance and sales for our advertisers,” says Michael Blanche, co-founder at Surfside. “By clearly visualizing exactly which channels, ad creative and audiences are driving the strongest return on ad spend, real-time ecommerce attribution allows our clients to use their own sales data to improve the performance of their marketing initiatives.”

With the addition of real-time ecommerce attribution, users can:

• Change attribution windows to measure ad performance. Adjust attribution windows from 1-hour to 30-days and anywhere in between to truly understand ad performance through multi-touch attribution.
• Optimize campaigns as they happen. Integrating the measurement platform to the Surfside DSP (advertising platform) allows campaign optimizations based on ecommerce events, like completed checkout, or abandoned carts to bring back relevant consumers.
• See the customer journey at scale. Easily calculate overall lifetime value by seeing how and when customers begin the journey, how long it takes them to make a purchase, and how ads impact the buying cycle.
• Measure omnichannel media across multiple platforms. Surfside’s attribution platform can measure media across any third-party platform, tying advertisements from desktop, mobile, tablet, OOH, TV and more to ecommerce and store visitation results in one dashboard.

As customer journeys get more complex and attribution gets more crucial than ever, Surfside continues to build best-in-class reporting to give advertisers the control they need to understand ad performance alongside overall business metrics. By offering a truly real-time view of ecommerce sales and return on ad spend in a single dashboard, real-time ecommerce attribution makes advertising with Surfside as transparent as possible.

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Perennial NHL all-star Wayne Gretzky famously advised skating to where the puck was going, not where it is right now — a phrase that has since gotten widely adopted in a martech world fraught with constant change.

Of course, this approach makes sense. If you always target the status quo, what happens when digital marketing currents shift, as they constantly do? Consider: Who today wants to build a martech strategy based on third-party cookies?

At the same time, two decades in the analyst world has taught me that nobody — nobody — in our industry really knows exactly where the puck is going, at least not with Gretzky-like certainty. So the best you can do is strengthen your core to be able to shift quickly as the martech state-of-play evolves. Think of it as a kind of “pilates for your stack.”

Three exercises for your martech Stack

If we’re talking pilates, then what you want to do is focus on your core. Here are three important muscles to prioritize in 2022.

1. Customer data unification and management

Customer data platform (CDP) technology is hot right now, and for good reason. At RSG, we evaluate thirty vendors and climbing. But the industry’s dirty little secret is that many initial implementations offer only scant value amid a dearth of robust, clean, unified customer data. Enterprises that thought their CDP would provide the essential building blocks of customer data processing have, for the most part, come away disappointed.

In 2022, focus on your broader customer data enterprise “fabric.” You’ll find it a complicated but potentially very rich tapestry. But most importantly, you need to get the base infrastructure right: Ingestion, cleaning, stewardship and identity. The good news is that more than your marketing department needs this sort of hub as well. This short briefing explains some key architectural considerations.

2. Component content for an omnichannel future

There’s a similar muscle to build on the content side of your stack. If you are pursuing an omnichannel strategy — and who isn’t? — then you will need a reliable store of reusable content components. Not just snippets of text, but base image/media building blocks and relevant data, especially product data.

Where would you find the authoritative source for all these components today? Probably all over the place, and worse, mostly stuck in a single engagement channel like email, web, or e-commerce.

Prioritize getting a handle on all of these marketing assets and ensuring that you have a common metadata regime to classify (so you can find and manage!) the individual pieces. Unfortunately, the Omnichannel Content Platform marketplace remains nascent, but savvier enterprises are beginning to step into the pool.

3. Internal capacity

The martech capacity gap (see image below) predates COVID, but the pandemic has surely aggravated it for every enterprise. RSG vendor evaluations can help you with the hyperbole gap, but capacity is a more complex challenge. For example, nearly all the large-enterprise members on RSG’s large-enterprise MarTech Council have suffered talent shortages.

Solid vendor evaluations can close the hyperbole gap, but it’s up to martech leaders to close the internal capacity gap. Source: Real Story Group

I don’t have any magic wand to wave here that will close this resource gap, except to encourage you to keep working to create an attractive workplace for martech specialists. What you want to avoid is over-reliance on an outsourcing strategy. First of all, martech integrators are also short-staffed too, but more importantly, you want to keep and maintain as much learning and expertise in-house so you can move quickly as the puck gets passed around.

The case for not overskating

In some enterprises, I see the “future puck vision” justify over-buying complex marketing technology, ultimately undermining the very speed and agility you seek.

The thinking goes like this: “We probably can’t handle this advanced technology today, but in a couple of years, we’ll get there, so let’s license it now, and maybe it will push us to become more proficient.” Of course, in two years, the puck will have moved even farther. Or, to put it another way, if you can’t master an overly complicated martech platform now, you will only find it all that richer (read: more complex) two years hence. So you end up perennially behind.

RSG always advises looking at vendors representing differing points on the complexity spectrum. Ideally, you can find the right match with a system that stretches you a bit yet won’t go underutilized. Meanwhile, any technology supplier should constantly be innovating themselves, so in all likelihood, the simpler solution you adopt today will get enhanced over time. Careful diligence in a structured selection process can uncover whether that vendor or open-source community is skating towards the ever-moving puck at a pace and direction that works for you.

Real Story on MarTech is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Real Story Group, a vendor-agnostic research and advisory organization that helps enterprises make better marketing technology stack and platform selection decisions.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Tony Byrne is founder of Real Story Group, a technology analyst firm. RSG evaluates martech and CX technologies to assist enterprise tech stack owners. To maintain its strict independence, RSG only works with enterprise technology buyers and never advises vendors.
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Advisor Websites’ Inaugural State of the Industry Report

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• Advisor Websites’ Inaugural State of the Industry Report Analyzes Successful Digital Marketing Strategies for Financial Advisors

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It’s no secret that the demand for digital marketing in the legal industry has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. Has this increased demand grown beyond the capabilities of your in-house team or the fee earner or business professional tasked with overseeing the firm’s marketing efforts? If so, then it might be time to consider outsourcing your legal marketing!

Here are five reasons to outsource all, or some, of your legal marketing functions:

1. Benefit from a team with diverse skills (& opinions)

No individual is capable of doing everything by themself.

Are you a solo marketer working in-house at a law firm? Or are you an attorney or business professional with split responsibilities? Do you sometimes you feel like you’re on an island and responsible for not only doing everything by yourself but also coming up with ideas by yourself?

When you outsource your legal marketing, you have access to a fully stacked team of professionals with a variety of experiences. Each team member brings their own range of skills and expertise, meaning multiple experts are focused on your success, not just one (likely overwhelmed) person.

Not only does this team provide you with a diverse skill set and diverse backgrounds, but it also provides you with an opportunity to workshop your ideas and receive different viewpoints.

At LISI, we are big fans of the “better together” approach, and with an outsourced marketing team, you can get better outcomes by taking a team approach to brainstorming, strategy, and execution.

2. Expand your marketing technology toolbox

Outsourced marketing teams tend to be “technology agnostic,” meaning they are willing to work with the platforms that you already have deployed in-house. However, if you are seeking new providers and/or don’t know which technologies are right for you, your outsourced marketing team can help you sift through the options and will often have preferred tools they can implement. Not to mention they can help streamline the implementation and configuration, and guide your efforts to succeed.

Oftentimes those tools have a cost associated with them. To purchase each individually can add up quickly. But when you have a team of outsourced marketing professionals, they may cover the cost of tools they use to execute your marketing.

Some common examples of marketing tools include:

• Social media, including HubSpot and HootSuite
• Graphic creation and design, including Canva and Lucidpress
• Video and audio editing, including Wondershare Filmora and Descript
• Video recording and streaming, including Zoom and StreamYard
• The Adobe Creative Suite, which encompasses many of the categories listed above (and more) but is so powerful that it gets its very own bullet point.

Digital marketers never travel empty-handed. Think of an outsourced team as your marketing “Mary Poppins” with a bag of tricks and some magic up our sleeves.

3. Save time & money

Most marketers in professional services firms wear multiple hats. Some days (hours?) you may be a marketer. Others you may be a business developer. For some, you might also be an attorney, a paralegal, or a legal assistant. Outsourcing alleviates the challenge of having to do it all yourself instead of billing time.

An outsourced marketing team is focused solely on marketing. They are creating and executing marketing plans day in and day out, learning what works for law firms…and what doesn’t. They don’t have to switch gears from writing a brief to marketing, or put marketing to the side when they go to trial.

Serving your clients is important. But so is keeping a full pipeline of prospects. By outsourcing some or all of your marketing, it frees you up to focus on what you were hired to do. It allows you to bill more, produce more, and see more results – both in the courtroom and in your sales funnel.

Plus, when you outsource marketing, you do not have to pay health insurance or a 401K, or worry how to keep things moving when they go on vacation. Outsourced legal marketing teams make sure you are covered.

4. Be strategy-driven instead of task-driven

Marketing encompasses a lot – websites, public relations, search engine marketing, social media, branding, swag, advertising, thought leadership, content marketing…you get the idea. Oftentimes, marketing then becomes reactive, rather than proactive. You end up getting bogged down in the task-driven work, which does not leave time for the more strategic parts of marketing.

Experienced marketers know that having a well-organized, strategic plan can cut through the task list – and drive results. Outsourced marketers understand its importance and are there to do the heavy lifting for you. By creating a strategy-driven marketing plan, your marketing efforts will become more organized, more efficient – and therefore more effective.

Emergencies and a deluge of day-to-day tasks will always come up. But when you have a plan – and a team – you do not have to carry the burden alone, allowing you the time to focus on other strategic measures for growing your practice, or your firm.

5. Following best practices & staying “in the know”

An outsourced marketing team is always in the know. Why? Because we make it our job to stay on top of the newest developments, trends, and opportunities. With an outsourced marketing team, you get multiple individuals who are each staying up-to-date on the latest trends in their discipline. And, just like attorneys chat with other attorneys about developments in the law over lunch, an outsourced legal marketing team is talking about developments in digital marketing pretty much all the time.

Having a full team of legal marketing professionals allows us to stay abreast of best practices in all aspects of digital marketing so you don’t have to.

The digital marketing landscape has evolved exponentially, and now your marketing options are nearly limitless. Whether you are part of an in-house marketing team, a solo marketer, or an attorney who also oversees marketing, you can benefit from the contributions of an outsourced marketing team. Outsourcing some or all of your marketing efforts is cost-effective, efficient – and gets results.

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Editor & Publisher (E&P) is looking for an ambitious, free-lance journalist to create content that informs, enlightens and educates our multichannel audience of c-suite news publishing executives on the pressing issues facing the media industry today.

The successful candidate will be excited by doing enterprise, in-depth or project reporting with a heavy reliance on primary sources and rigorous fact-checking. The perfect candidate will have some working knowledge of all aspects of the news publishing and media industry (editorial, business, print/ digital publishing, revenue, etc.) to adapt their reporting to the subject.

Desired Qualifications:

• No less than 3 years’ experience in journalistic reporting.
• Comfort working independently and/or collaborating on team projects.
• Proven ability to generate and suggest highly relevant, innovative project ideas with strong potential for impact within the media industry.
• Superior ability to uncover and develop human sources long term and on the fly.

To apply please send coverletter, resume and writing samples to robin@editorandpublisher.com

About E&P: 
Founded in 1884, Wikipedia describes E&P as the “bible of the newspaper industry.” E&P’s monthly print and digital audience of over 170,000 reaches twice as many as any other industry trade publication or website, with three-quarters of readership describing themselves as in a “management position” within their organization. E&P covers all aspects of the news publishing industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, audience development, digital publishing diversity & equity challenges and more.
E&P’s yearly EPPY Awards® are considered the news publishing industry’s most prestigious honor for excellence in digital publishing. CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Newmark Graduate School of Journalism are just a few of the news organizations recently recognized with an “EPPY.”

The Curated Experiences Group, the owners of Editor & Publisher Magazine (E&P), believes that every person we serve via our various channels is valued and should be treated with respect. We value a diverse workplace as well. E&P also is committed to promoting inclusivity, equality and diversity in all our policies, practices and procedures.

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A tumultuous 2021 led Sherri Moyen to make her recent move to join Conductor, a former WeWork company, as its first female CFO, helping her to overcome her risk-averse tendencies and realize her long-held interest in joining a growth company. 

Moyen had long been interested in startups but stuck through thick and thin with call center tech firm Aspect Software for more than 12 years. She helped the firm manage through a 2016 bankruptcy reorganization, rising to become interim CFO in 2018 and full-time CFO in 2020. Ultimately she oversaw a merger last year with Noble Systems in a deal with private equity firm Abry Partners that valued the new company, Alvaria, at over $1 billion. Along the way she gained skills beyond accounting and financial reporting that she believes are valuable. 

She learned the ins and outs of the world of private equity and distressed debt, and how to work with lenders, but it was no easy feat. While working with an advisor, taking pitches and ultimately selling the company, the mother of three was also juggling her family responsibilities and caring for her mother who was diagnosed with brain cancer and died in July. Moyen herself also ended up with pneumonia after battling COVID-19, which led to her wife, an ICU nurse, having to leave her own work to provide Moyen’s care.

Sherri Moyen

Courtesy of Conductor

 

“A lot of things were happening at once and it made me realize life is short and you need to take risks,” Moyen, who is 45, told CFO Dive, adding that Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” has also inspired her by nudging her to pursue her career development.

The shift in her mindset led her to begin considering joining smaller companies than she’d previously explored. The difference in size is stark: Conductor has 300 employees and annual revenue of about $45 million compared to Alvaria’s 2,000 employees and $410 million in revenue. 

On a catapult

Moyen is looking forward to helping grow the SEO firm’s annual recurring revenue to $100 million over the next few years, with the ultimate goal of an exit through an initial public offering or a SPAC deal. In November the company was already working on a funding round for $150 million led by Bregal Sagemount. “I was super excited about joining a company where it felt like they were already on a catapult to take off,” she said.

Moyen was also impressed by the risks its own co-founder, Seth Besmertnik, took in 2019 to buy the company back from WeWork. Conductor was  snapped up in 2018 by WeWork, which planned to use its marketing technology to learn about business’ office space needs but before the co-working company’s plans began to fizzle amid drastic cuts, Besmertnik and his leadership team bought out the business. 

“It would have been very easy to stay with WeWork but the founders saw that the company under WeWork wasn’t headed in the right direction and they decided to take back control in order to determine their destiny,” she said. “That showed me how much they believe in the company and their future.”  

Moyen was also drawn to SEO firm Conductor for other reasons, including her belief in the power and importance of the business of online marketing and the company’s diverse and open culture. Not only did Conductor already have a female COO, Selina Eizik, she was impressed by Besmertnick’s commitment to building a diverse team after he acknowledged to her that he had sought to overcome what she called “an unconscious bias” toward hiring white men. 

“Conductor has a lot of very talented, capable people, yet less egos than any other place that I have worked,” Moyen said in a follow-up email. “Healthy debate/discussions are encouraged, which is incredibly refreshing to me.” 

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Conductor is a former WeWork company. 

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We all know that marketing is both an art and a science.

It’s hard to measure the impact of brand on revenue, but we marketers know it has an effect. However, we work for businesses that have hard number targets and little interest in art.

That’s why you have to get the science of marketing right to have the freedom to do the art.

If you can nail both, you get…

• A seat at the executive table and the ability to guide company direction
• Freedom to do the things you know are great, meaningful, and right for your department and the company
• And (perhaps nearest and dearest to my heart) the end—or at least a minimization—of “Hey, look at what ‘Company X’ is doing. We should do that.”

Like Rodney Dangerfield, Marketing Gets ‘No Respect’

I can’t think of any other corporate occupation that changes more quickly than marketing. Just for geeky fun, I recently made a list of all the technology I’ve become proficient on in the last 20 years—with zero training:

Acrobat, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, SharpSpring, HubSpot, HootSuite, Buffer, SurveyMonkey (now Momentive), Zoom, ZoomInfo, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Act-On, Google Analytics, Omniture (now Adobe), Dropbox, Basecamp, Slack, WordPress, Sitecore, Drupal, Homegrown CMSs, Wix, Avid, Final Cut, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Semrush. And I’m sure there are more that I’m forgetting.

Can you think of any other profession that needs all those tools in its wheelhouse? I can’t. And that’s just technology.

Let’s talk about strategy and tactics. We need to understand how to flawlessly execute branding, social, Web, search, paid ads, events, direct mail, PR, analyst relations, lead generation, webinars, videos, podcasts, blogs, messaging, sales tools, articles, and reporting—all with an eye to how those tactics generate revenue, influence buying decisions, and improve our brand position.

To top it off, most of us didn’t go to school for marketing; and even if we did, marketing changes so rapidly that a college degree in it becomes less and less helpful with each passing year.

Is it any wonder that marketers…

• Tend to have short tenures at organizations
• Often turn into little balls of stress and anxiety
• Feel alone and overwhelmed

No, Your CEO Doesn’t Know Marketing Better Than You—Here’s How to Push Back and Prove Marketing Effectiveness

I have never heard a CEO walk up to the accounting department and say, “Hey did you see the way Competitor Company is doing its spreadsheets? We should do that.”

Yet, it happens to us in marketing. All the time.

What you’re really hearing is frustration: CEOs can’t get a handle on what Marketing is doing and how it helps the company. They see what other companies are doing (because marketing efforts are super visible) and they wonder what their own investment is getting them.

Here’s how to prove Marketing’s effectiveness and avoid those awkward conversations.

1. Start backward

Know what the company goals are and align yours to them. Set a revenue (or at least pipeline) target for your marketing team.

If you can’t prove Marketing’s influence on revenue, you have to fix that. It should be your No. 1 priority. You will never get a bigger budget, more staff, or a promotion if you can’t prove real influence on revenue—and saying that a customer or prospect received an email doesn’t usually count in B2B.

This is the point where many marketers say, “But my sales team doesn’t follow up on the leads that I send them,” or “They don’t track data correctly in Salesforce.” I’ll say it again: fix it. This is your No. 1 priority!

Get friendly with the head of Sales, make deal source a required field in Salesforce, hire an SDR to follow up on Marketing leads by promising a real appointment target that they have to hit, attend regular team sales calls, run through new deals in Salesforce, and ask Sales where they came from. Whatever it takes.

2. Invest in your team

HR, Accounting, Sales—almost every other department in your company gets regular training. Yet in a recent (nonscientific) poll I did on my LinkedIn page, 0% of respondents said they got formal marketing training from their company, and a full 78% said it was up to them. The lucky ones (11%) said they received training at conferences a few times a year.

We can and must do better for our profession.

If this is the moment when you say “I don’t have budget for that,” remember that the average tenure of a CMO is the shortest of any C-level executive. I just listed all the tech and tactics marketers need to know right now, and I’m certain there’s more coming. Marketing teams must be in a constant state of learning and development to handle what’s now and to see what’s next.

Yes, marketing departments are way too small to handle the massive amount of heavy lifting they have to do. Yes, budgets are always getting cut. But too many new tools and tactics barrage us every day to not have everyone on the team cross-trained and exceptional.

3. Get really good at reporting

Every time we talk about engagement, clicks, and opens, our CEO, CFO, and CSO roll their eyes at us. Those are important leading indicators to us, but they’re not what we need to report on at an executive level.

By using a marketing automation system, having a good rapport with Sales, and establishing a few easy processes, marketing teams can and should be able to report on the following:

• Marketing-sourced deals that turned directly into pipeline (from events, downloads, webinars, contact forms, ads, etc.). I set it up like this: What is the primary activity that caused a contact to re-engage? For example, the prospect downloaded a paper, causing an SDR to follow up, which led to an appointment and then a deal. Deal source is “Web download” because that action started the chain. C-level financial people can accept that.
• Channels that drive the most pipeline
• ROI per channel (pipeline and closed deals)
• Lifetime value of the marketing activity (a customer who came to the company through marketing and continues to purchase)
• Lead flow—names to pipeline

The great thing about such reports is that you find interesting nuggets of gold for yourself and your team. You can start to see shifting trends and make truly informed decisions about where to spend your bigger budget.

Then, you will finally have freedom to do the art.

More Resources on Marketing Effectiveness

Proving Marketing to Execs (Part 1)

Three Ways to Strengthen the Marketing and Finance Relationship

These Four Data Points Demonstrate Marketing ROI to the C-Suite

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AIOps startup BigPanda announced Jan. 12 that it has raised $190 million in a new round of funding, increasing the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion and giving it unicorn status.

AIOps is a rapidly growing technology category in which artificial intelligence (AI) is used to help optimize and manage IT operations and systems. Headquartered in San Francisco, BigPanda has seen rapid adoption and growth since its founding in 2012, particularly over the last few years as demand and adoption of AIOps have accelerated.

“The AIOps market is moving from an early adopter technology to a mainstream solution on the roadmap of every CIO,” Assaf Resnick, co-founder and CEO of BigPanda, told ITPro Today. “This is being driven by the fact that digital services are no longer optional – they are mandatory for businesses to survive.”

BigPanda’s Path to AIOps

When Resnick started BigPanda, the company was not an AIOps vendor – it was a marketing technology company. Resnick recounted that while building out the original vision, the company developed a sophisticated cloud environment to run its services.

“As we started to scale, we ran into operational issues, so we solved them,” he said.

Resnick said that his “lightbulb moment” came when he and his co-founders realized that if BigPanda, at its size, struggled with the complexity of infrastructure and the amount of data that comes from monitoring tools, other companies were likely dealing with the same or larger issues to deal. That’s when they pivoted the business to AIOps, with the company shifting its focus to solving IT operations problems with AI and automation.

“We didn’t just evolve our business model – we ditched the marketing technology product and created the BigPanda AIOps platform out of a need we directly experienced,” Resnick said.

Market Demand for AIOps and BigPanda’s Platform

There are a number of market dynamics driving demand for AIOps as well as BigPanda’s platform.

According to BigPanda’s 2021 AIOps Benchmark Report, published on Jan. 6, the majority of organizations are planning to use or are already using some type of AIOps platform. Among the key reasons why are the challenges of DevOps and multi-cloud architectures. Seventy percent of respondents said it takes 3 hours or longer to resolve major incidents.

“DevOps was supposed to simplify ITOps, and some believe it should dramatically reduce major incidents and change-related outages,” Resnick said. “But the research showed that supporting reliable hybrid and multi-cloud architectures remains challenging, especially for large organizations.”

Each day, ITOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams face a tsunami of data associated with their digital services, Resnick said. In fact, he noted that most organizations have anywhere from 50 to 100 monitoring tools that spew out data about specific applications, systems, cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Most organizations also have tools to track specific types of changes and map topologies. In Resnick’s view, none of those individual tools provides a complete picture, and it is no longer possible for humans to filter through all of their data and piece together the story of an incident.

“Dozens of people who could be doing high-value work are, instead, on multi-hour bridge calls, pointing fingers and trying to avoid blame,” Resnick said. “For these reasons, most CIOs and their teams are evaluating and adopting AIOps.”

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CareCloud Reinvents its Healthcare Analytics and Business Intelligence

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• CareCloud Reinvents its Healthcare Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform, PrecisionBI

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