FireScope made it to the Wall Street Journal in a Lee Gomes story about 'Mashups' and how they're making their way into business applications. Although Lee Gomes' article was pretty strong (Mark Lynd is the President of FireScope and somebody that I had only met on the telephone a few weeks ago) on Mashups, it left out much of the power of how FireScope is using mashups to change enterprise service management.
Product managers? Service managers? Program managers? Any of these job classifications that have responsibilities for business processes that can be adversely affected by network performance, outages or involves multiple applications need to manage not just the application, but also the network. That's where FireScope comes in – customers can get insights from equipment, services, applications, networks and business resources that are not otherwise readily controllable by the manager in question, but are critical to the success.
Imagine that you're the product manager responsible for home loans at a national financial institution. Knowing that 50% of your products come off the web, and the other 50% from within the branch network, but usually only in the afternoon, means that you need to know what's going on with the website, the Internet circuits to the national network of websites (you do have redundant data centers, right?), the management console of the processing server, the switching and routing network, the network of branch processors etc. You may not need or be able to control each of these shared infrastructural components, but you do need the right to a national map, with red lights for problems. Clicking on a red dot gives you an insight into what's happening there and contact details for the regional manager(s) in charge of the site or service.
The point – use mashup technology to make management of business processes more elegant, simpler and more responsive for people that the business holds accountable for the revenue implications of service.