As the leader of Netuitive's dedicated professional services team, I believe I work with some of the best and the brightest in the industry. My team is focused on enabling our IT analytics software to be delivered as a turnkey solution, and we have cut our teeth doing this at the world's largest enterprises. So I thought I would share some of the insight we have gained over the past year.

Following are four key lessons learned about what it takes to successfully deploy IT analytics software for some of the world's largest companies:

• Demand for analytics as a Managed Service - Line of business owners, the IT "customer" in large organizations, are increasingly driving demand for complex IT analytics software to be implemented and deployed as a managed service within the enterprise at a fixed monthly cost and stringent SLAs ensuring success. Improving ROI and controlling costs are paramount.
• Don't skimp on education and training -- While the instinct is "do-it-yourself", the IT Operations staffs in most large organizations are too busy in their daily responsibilities to ramp up on new, analytics based monitoring software. Comprehensive training services from the vendor instill best practices and can actually save time and money by reducing the time before solutions become operational.
• Incorporating custom data should be easy - Holistic views of service health often involve custom data sources and business metrics. As Netuitive does, any analytics tool should take an open approach monitoring and provide customers with a way - through services or do-it-yourself tools - to incorporate these data sources.
• Every application can use the VIP treatment - At Netuitive, we boil down the value of our analytics and our implementation approach down to an acronym: VIP (Visibility, Isolation, Proactive Management). Yes, I'm sorry it sounds trite. However, it consistently describes what every customer wants for their critical applications. VIP is explored specifically in this white paper on operational adoption. It examines how to overcome the cultural and organizational challenges standing in the way of proactive management.

While there are many more key observations and lessons learned, these are four that stand out. As you evaluate advanced IT analytics technologies to complement large scale APM solutions, keep in mind that Netuitive uniquely allows you to correlate application performance to business results, and that our Professional Services team is among the best in the business at helping large enterprises implement this type of solution the right way to deliver value to your company.