There's tons of exciting things happening within IT Operations Analytics. Not sure what we're talking about? Well, here's what you missed last week!

Companies large and small have begun exploring how their data might be turned into a competitive advantage, but solutions come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. This can make it difficult to determine the specific value of purpose-built options such as workload analytics. However, research shows that those that have made the investment are gaining significant value from enhanced visibility over their IT operations. We’ve put together an infographic that shows the business value of workload analytics and how the solutions can be used effectively. Highlights include:

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It might be hard to believe, but very few companies have really taken advantage of the massive amount of data available to them from IT and used it to improve how they deliver various services. I spend a lot of my time speaking to workload automation customers to understand their “style of management,” and find only a select few that have moved from a reactive style to more of a proactive one. There seems to be a lot of “chasing” of problems after they occurred. Part of the problem is discipline, part is the software tools they are using, and the other part is having an approach to gathering the data from all of the dependent sources of data that could contain the intelligence to diagnose problems before they happen.

Here's what you missed last week!

Check out the IT operations analytics news highlights from last week below!

To continue my little saga about corporate culture and the good folks who impact it and are impacted by it – Here's a little story some of you may already know. Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) in "The Art Of The Start" coined the term "Stanford Shopping Center Test.” He tells the story of running into a former Apple colleague in the parking lot of a shopping center (well, he almost did as he saw the guy first, then ran the other way).

Just about any IT service can be found in the cloud these days. Whether it’s software (SaaS), infrastructure (IaaS) or a platform of some type (PaaS), it’s available. More and more traditional on-premise software vendors are moving their capabilities where customers can consume them – usually on a subscription basis – with little or no outlay of capital expense to get started.

It’s been over six months since I joined this fascinating company, Terma Software Labs. I continue to be amazed by how dedicated the customer base is and how enthused they are about the road ahead. A few weeks ago we met with several customers in Boulder, CO to hear about their requirements for the future and to share with them our vision for the future. I’m sure everyone would agree there was a lot of out of the box thinking going on especially when it came to understanding the kind of impact their businesses had on workload automation.

I recently sat down with Bob Schwartz, CEO of Arbiter Software, and Jim Anderson, VP of Product Strategy for Terma, at CA World 2013 to interview them both about their recent strategic alliance announcement.