Nexthink: Innovation from the Swiss Alps - a Pioneering Proactive IT Solution
Near Lausanne, at the heart of the Swiss Alps where innovation meets tradition, Nexthink is developing a ground-breaking proactive IT solution. Founded in the early 2000s at EPFL’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Nexthink opened its first offices at Lausanne and quickly gained global recognition for its efforts to optimize IT based on the user perspective and to proactively enhance the IT experience – and the working life – of workforces everywhere.
This led to established, reactive IT organizations in enterprises being questioned and to a search for new ways of doing things.
But in many enterprises, the IT department is still stuck with old, time-consuming approaches to problem solving. They rely on employees reporting issues and use the number and type of tickets being opened as an indicator of potential bigger problems looming in the background, even when they introduce new services. Their insights into the actual user experience and the value and efficiencies generated by new services and procedures are alarmingly limited.
"Before Nexthink, I was blind. Now I can get complete visibility of how and by whom our applications are used with just one click, and if needed, I can contact those users directly. That is especially useful when I'm mapping out innovation steps, planning migrations of on-premises applications to SaaS environments or placing them for management," says Michael Trepte, Head of IT Business Applications, Landis+Gyr.
More than 1,000 customers worldwide and hundreds in the Alpine region alone (including AXA, Baloise, A1 Telekom, Swarovski and Tirol Kliniken, to name but a few) prove that advancing towards ambitious digital transformation goals and solving intractable real-world problems at the same time is possible.
What sets Nexthink’s solutions apart from the crowd?
Nexthink sees itself as an innovator and creator of the concept of digital employee experience management and has concentrated all of its efforts on this one topic for over 20 years now. As a result, we have gained the largest customer community in the region, by quite a wide margin. At Nexthink, we are proud of the fact that our customers share their approaches, successes and questions not only in a broad-based online user community, but also at quarterly user group meetings. These are usually organized by one of our customers on their premises and aim to promote personal interactions as well as the exchange of knowledge.
And of course, Nexthink has far more to offer than issue notifications. The market is full of tools that monitor either networks and infrastructures or applications.
Some vendors boast that they are able to collect thousands of data points, but that's only useful if they're the right data in the right context, which can deliver useful insights.
At Nexthink, we don't limit ourselves to monitoring the status of an application or service on a device. Instead, we offer complete end-to-end visibility of the endpoint performance, the virtualization layer, the applications and the network (including WiFi and video call quality) – in real time – as well as a full, user-centric view from SaaS applications all the way down to the transaction layer.
At the end of the day, how can you make the right decisions if you don’t know what your end users are actually experiencing? A response time of x milliseconds or y seconds to log on to the user interface of a well-known vendor’s CRM tool which you recently adopted – is that slow? Is it good? Does it even matter to the user in question and if yes, is it a big issue? Maybe the real problem is a lack of know-how rather than the technology?
Nexthink uses objective measurements to put the user's feelings in context, so that you can understand and interpret the situation fully. We believe that you need this combination of subjective perception and hard facts to decide which action you ought to take.
“We invested in Nexthink to become more proactive and identify issues before our users noticed them,” says Caitanya Svoboda, Cloud & Digital Workplace Architect, MED-EL.
Nexthink leverages its vast customer base with currently over 20 million managed workplaces to map performance and benchmark data and use its millions of anonymized workplace data sets to help its clients avoid problems that have already been encountered elsewhere.
This use of swarm intelligence is only one facet of a host of analysis opportunities. Nexthink uses built-in AI and machine learning capabilities to inform IT departments automatically and in real time about defects, troubleshoot issues and recommend appropriate actions.
To enable users without years of relevant training and experience to participate in digital experience management, Nexthink drives the rapid expansion of its “Assist” function, which allows the execution of analyses via natural language interactions with the system. This means that in the near future, anyone will be able to create dashboards, reports, diagnoses and employee surveys easily and without a long onboarding process.
This will lead to a quantum leap in the use of our solution, even though our user interface is already more intuitive and useful than those of many of our competitors.
One area where Nexthink stands head and shoulders above other vendors is the automated issue resolution using what we call remote actions. Nexthink leverages advanced analysis algorithms and machine learning not only to detect problems early, but also as the basis for automatic problem resolution. By automating these tasks, IT teams gain more time to focus on more strategic work.
“By automating recurring tasks, we managed to reduce the workload massively, especially for our people at the service desk,” says Pascal Probst, Product Owner – Digital Workplace, Client Engineering, Baloise Group.
With its current innovation step, Nexthink goes far beyond resolving issues on individual machines and allows for comprehensive orchestration of complete workplace situations (such as the onboarding of new employees including the necessary activations). This will enable IT teams to improve the user experience and productivity even more rapidly, cost-effectively and seamlessly. A low-code workflow engine provides the basis for optimal management of even complex IT setup (including almost any third-party systems) and for user-focused IT operations.
But impressive as it is, for us at Nexthink proactive IT is merely the first important step towards a much bigger goal: preventive IT. The best issues are those that no one notices. That’s why the largest enterprises and service providers partner with Nexthink to turn our common vision of “zero ticket” IT into reality.
This will provide our customers with more opportunities to concentrate on innovation and value generation in their core business and to use their proactive energy to reach their business objectives.
