Rebendo delivers real-time visibility to help hunt down inefficiencies

Despite the adage, in the business world — ignorance is rarely bliss. In fact, what you don’t know, what you don’t see, can be fairly disruptive to your day-to-day operations and particularly painful to your bottom line. An unknown problem or inefficiency can lead to unnecessary delays, process missteps, erroneous data and all manner of frustration among your staff, partners and customers.

Finding ways to decipher these unknown issues was becoming a priority for IBM Business Partner Rebendo AB. A developer of performance management solutions, the firm specializes in creating customized, detailed dashboards that provide users with increased visibility into internal IT and network operations. And it had started recognizing a pattern among its clientele.

“We were seeing a new type of problem,” recalls Slobodan Djurdjevic, Founder and Owner of Rebendo. “We work with a lot of industries—car companies, public agencies, banks—but insurance companies, businesses that see high transaction levels, seemed the most common place for this challenge.”

“They would have an IT issue, but they wouldn’t know what was causing it,” adds Michael Kling, Chief Executive Officer at Rebendo. “Today’s IT business demands higher availability and faster development with a more flexible cloud sourcing strategy. For example, they would have a response time go up by 10 to 20 seconds, but they had no idea where the bottleneck was that was causing the delay. And for companies that deal with hundreds of thousands or even millions of transactions, a delay like that can cause many problems and bad will. And for maybe nine out of ten cases that we saw, the issue was not network application related.”

Recognizing an opportunity, Rebendo began putting together a new managed service that could deliver comprehensive, real-time monitoring of application processes and promote smoother operations.

We have a tradition, a goal, that for every customer, we want to be their strategic advisor when they focus on predictability. With Rebendo Insight and Instana, we’ve built the platform for the next step in their automation journey together with IBM’s AIOps [artificial intelligence for IT operations]
Michael Kling
Chief Executive Officer, IBM Business Partner Rebendo AB

And the company’s client base saw a clear opportunity for this new solution. “Real time is critical,” explains Jörgen Neij, Service and Solution Manager at Bankgirot, a customer of Rebendo for over a decade. “Real time is why we approached Rebendo originally. We are a clearing house and process something like eight million payments every day. To track that volume 24×7 can be a challenge, but real time is the only option.”

Djurdjevic picks up the story, continuing: “So we talked to Jörgen and our other customers. We asked them, ‘What would you like this solution to be? How would you like to see your monitoring area?’ And we quickly came to the decision that we needed this service to have its own portal where we could deliver total observability over everything in an IT environment, including any monitoring products already in place. We say: ‘Integrate what you have. Add what you need.’”

Integrate what you have

In early 2021, Rebendo launched its new service, Rebendo Insight—integrated with technology from Instana®, an IBM Company. The new solution provides users with a centralized management dashboard, while IBM Observability by Instana APM delivers the cloud engine that empowers users to observe, monitor and resolve application or service issues in real-time.

“It was important to integrate Instana into Rebendo Insight because it would give us—and our customers—more options and let us be more predictive,” notes Kling. “We can now pull five different types of data sources into our offering. We can integrate other APM [application performance management] products that the customer already has, or whatever else they want to add. Whatever tools they want to use, there’s now only one place to look, and you can see everything with predictive ability.”

Alongside real-time monitoring, Rebendo Insight can also be used to validate the impact and success of new system changes or network applications. As Djurdjevic explains: “Before the user does a change, we can do a baseline that can be compared against the performance after the change. You can see if it’s made things better or worse, and that’s a big value for our customers.”

It was important to integrate Instana into Rebendo Insight because it would give us—and our customers—more options and let us be more predictive.
Michael Kling
Chief Executive Officer, IBM Business Partner Rebendo AB

Every second counts

Beyond the centralized visibility into IT and network operations that Rebendo Insight delivers, the solution’s real-time monitoring promotes greater efficiencies and faster problem resolution. And the granularity of this insight—updating every second—has proven to be a key advantage compared to competing platforms.

“Some of our competitors,” notes Kling, “offer insight only once every 60 seconds. But that’s not what our users want. When we were building Rebendo Insight, we asked our customers about that level of granularity, and they told us, ‘Why would I use a product that doesn’t see 59 seconds of a minute? That’s a worthless product for me.’”

The new platform has also proven to be fairly intuitive for users, as Kling continues: “We have a tradition, a goal, that for every customer, we want to be their strategic advisor when they focus on predictability. With Rebendo Insight and Instana, we’ve built the platform for the next step in their automation journey together with IBM’s AIOps [artificial intelligence for IT operations]. We can train the customer, we can help them set up the dashboard, and it’s not a burden on them or us. It’s very intuitive to use and easy to add in monitoring for different needs or different parts of the company.”

“It’s a very effective service,” concludes Djurdjevic. “We can set up and deploy everything quickly. We had a project in Stockholm where we were able to show the customer that we saved them two years and four months of setup time since they didn’t have to research and build everything by themselves. And that’s what we’re all about, making our customers more efficient.”