Customer Success - Alert Technologies
.NET Controls Give the Edge to Alerting
Have you ever missed an opportunity because you were unable to access your email? Have you found that many problems took longer to address and were more costly to solve because you were notified of a problem an hour too late? These are issues faced by many business decision makers and when Alert Technologies noticed that many organizations were suffering due to not only a lack of timely alerts surrounding business critical issues, but also the technical complexity of existing alerting systems, they turned to Microsoft's .NET Framework and Infragistics® NetAdvantage™ to create a cutting-edge alerting system that allowed non-technical business decision makers to define the events that are most important to them, receive a real time alert when it occurs - no matter where they are - allowing them to take the appropriate action immediately!
To deliver the power of critical business information into the hands of decision makers who need it and need it now, Alert Technologies created ResponseTime Alerts - an innovative new strategy in the alerting industry which combines the benefits of business monitoring and business alerting and tells you what is happening now as opposed to in the past and hence allows you to respond immediately as events occur.
ResponseTime Alerts provides the non-technical, business end-user with full control to create and adjust their own alerts - to monitor the data they select, for the conditions they want to know about and notify them by the channel they choose, wherever they may be. With ResponseTime Alerts, the end-user can create an alert from scratch in seconds, while still being fully supervised and controlled by the DBA and system administrator.
Alert Technologies wanted to break through the barrier on traditional reporting in near-time - a practice that delays the relaying of essential information to business decision-makers who may have already missedan opportunity - as well as provide a system that was easy-to-use for even the least technical business end-user. Alert Technologies turned to Infragistics NetAdvantage toolset to develop an intuitive, comfortable, and standardized user interface that had the Microsoft looks and feels to which end users are accustomed and would require minimal training to use.
NetAdvantage and the Microsoft .NET framework allowed Alert Technologies to develop a powerful desktop and web-based application faster, while still being able to achieve the development of a feature-rich user interface with consistent style and function across both Windows Forms and Web environment. This, in turn, allowed Alert Technologies to get their first product to an emerging market quickly and strategically while providing a high-level of quality that would make it tough to beat.
Situation
Alert Technologies has been endorsed with the provision of a DTI SMART Award, a grant for research and development awarded by the Department of Trade and Industry for the development of technologically innovative products and processes.
Alerting solutions in the UK and US have focused on centralized alert creation via a technical toolkit, which can be very difficult for the end user to understand and utilize. Alert Techonologies' competitors all offer these very centralized solutions, with a variety of subscription and delivery mechanisms requiring technical IT staff to create even a basic alert.
ResponseTime Alerts breaks through these traditional barriers – delivering all the power of making and implementing decisions directly to the end user, but in a controlled, easy-to-use environment. ResponseTime Alerts provides the non-technical, business end-user with full control to create andadjust their own alerts – to monitor the data they select, for the conditions they want to know about, and notify them by the channel they choose, wherever they may be.
Alert Technologies wanted to change the focus of business alerting to be a powerful compliment to other reporting and analysis tools. Using the .NET Framework, Infragistics NetAdvantage Toolset, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Notification Services, Alert Technologies created a solution to revolutionize the way companies do business - with realtime information and analysis available and supporting rapid, knowledgeable, and powerful decisions at every level.
Solution
The power of alerting technology is on the forefront of businesses' agenda. In the traditional model, businesses defined and created reports on a periodic basis, such as key performance indicator (KPI) reports and daily trading data. These reports present specific data or information that highlight trends or situations (i.e. declining sales) and are generally produced by a package-based or bespoke reporting tool. Additional, offline analysis of data can be undertaken using dedicated business intelligence (BI) tools, such as data mining packages. 
These approaches have a number of significant drawbacks. First, the reports are generally based on data held within the system. Second, the level of detail makes it very difficult to pick out what is important. Third, the reports are, at best, produced in near-time. Finally, by the time the report has been accessed, read and interpreted, it is either too late to take any action (i.e. an opportunity has been lost), or the problemtakes longer and is more costly to resolve. These drawbacks would be overcome if business people were able to define the events that are most important to them, receive a real time alert when it occurs, wherever they are, and then respond by taking appropriate action.
Business alerting does exactly this and is becoming an increasingly important tool in today's agile and responsive business. According to research, most businesses are expected to adopt some kind of alertingover the next few years to survive in the increasingly competitive business landscape. Event monitoring and Alerting (EM&A) is considered by experts to be an essential ingredient of the rapidly-growing process of business activity Monitoring (BAM), for which the worldwide market is predicted to be over 2.7billion by the end of 2005.
ResponseTime Alerts was designed to leverage both a Web and Windows Forms UI, so Alert Technologies intended to choose a toolset from inception - if one could be found to meet their developers' needs.Infragistics' NetAdvantage toolset fit the bill.
Through the use of the NetAdvantage toolset, Alert Technologies was able to achieve all of the commercial-class UI features that would be critical to ResponseTime Alerts success.
Because NetAdvantage is a toolset consisting of both Web and Windows Forms elements with one style of interface that is built upon Infragistics Presentation Layer Framework, as opposed to a group of disparate controls, the learning curve for developers is dramatically reduced and the maintenance burden correspondingly lowered. This, in turn, made it easier for Alert Technologies to create the standardized, easy-to-use UI required to appeal to even the non-technical, business user. Infragistics elements have aconsistent look and feel across the GUI in both Windows Forms and Web clients, with all elements designed (based on the framework) to be compatible with one another and can be layered without interaction problems. By choosing Infragistics as the single vendor, as opposed to choosing each needed element from a different vendor, a single point of contact and support was established for all needed elements, simplifying technical support issues, decreasing development time and increasing productivity. The use of the NetAdvantage toolset saved Alert Technologies approximately 20% on the overall development time and an estimated savings of £10,000 in development costs allowing them to bring ResponseTime Alerts to market far sooner and within budget.
By using a toolset, Alert Technologies felt that they could achieve all of the benefits and minimize the problems associated with using 3rd party elements. In particular, Infragistics had gone to great trouble toprovide both help samples and example applications showing how the elements could be applied and what they could achieve. This was a major factor in Alert Technologies faith that they would offer many attractive UI features while allowing developers to understand their use.
Benefits
Employees, customers, and companies have all benefited from the development of ResponseTime Alerts. Alert Technologies met its objective in creating a solution to an emerging marketplace need: how to provide generic, yet customizable alerting for a wide range of businesses, and make it simple enough for even non-technical users to customize the solution so they can receive the information they want any time, anywhere.
Scalability
In order to provide simplicity and scalability, Alert Technologies created a UI that excelled all others in the industry. Alert Technologies standardized the UI across both the Windows Forms and Web environments, with access to Windows Forms functionality available through the Web GUI - providing a rich user experience, with intuitive, easy-to-use features as well as the benefits of easy deployment. The resulting application is scalable up to 1000's of alerts. Message Queuing is used within the 'loose coupled' architecture to provide a more robust, scaleable architecture.
Increases Employee Responsiveness
Business alerting is not scheduled reporting, but a productivity tool that works with existing database systems and corporate applications. This tool is driven by the user with a personalized service that informs the business operative of events as they happen. Because the alerts are immediate, responsiveness and mobility are increased, which enables management to make faster and better decisions.
The NetAdvantage toolset allowed Alert Technologies to develop a feature-rich user interface with consistent style and function across both Windows Forms and Web environment. This interface allows ResponseTime Alerts users to feel comfortable using the product, therefore allowing them to react far more quickly to changing business issues - any time, any place, anywhere in the world.
Provides Essential Information in Real-Time, Not Near-Time
Alert Technologies created ResponseTime Alerts to reduce the overall response time to business events so when important things happen, the information finds the business operative immediately. The real-time notifications result in operating costs decreasing as problems are eliminated or dealt with more rapidly andcommunications with mobile workers are reduced (up to 23% of UK workforce, according to Butler Group). Companies are also able to exploit new opportunities as they arise, as a result of employees being moreresponsive to events, and by leveraging more value from existing IT and staff investment.
Revolutionizes the Industry
ResponseTime Alerts breaks away from the traditional approach to business alerting (using a technical toolkit with a variety of subscription and delivery mechanisms which require a technical IT staff to createeven the most basic alerts) and apply the latest system capabilities – delivering to the end user all the power of making and implementing their own decisions, but in a controlled, easy-to-use environment. AlertTechnologies particularly wanted to allow alerting against any data source without the need to understand the technicalities of that form of data or to be trained in writing query language.
Alert Technologies created a powerful complement to other reporting and analysis tools. ResponseTime Alert's simplicity and rapidity of deployment are its key features in the information delivery arena.
For more information about Infragistics NetAdvantage go to:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage.aspx
NetAdvantage is a complete presentation layer toolset ideal for building commercial class interfaces for Microsoft® Windows®-based applications, XML Web Services, and Web Solutions.
For more information on Infragistics Presentation Layer Framework go to:
http://www.infragistics.com/learn/presentation-layer-framework.aspx
For information regarding the increasing importance of presentation layer development within the application development lifecycle go to:
http://www.infragistics.com/learn/gartner.aspx
About Infragistics
Infragistics is the market leader in providing a broad range of presentation layer development tools and services for building applications utilizing Microsoft .NET, and COM environments. Over the past 15 years, Infragistics has received over 220 product awards and industry vendor of the year awards from market-leading publications and resellers. Infragistics' diverse product line for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Tablet PC, and COM environments are used worldwide in nearly every Fortune 2000 Company, over 96,000 corporations and 200,000 independent developers and consultants. For more information or to arrange an introduction or technical demonstration of Infragistics development tools, please visit www.infragistics.com or call us at +1 (800) 231-8588.