Technopedia Normalizes IT Language, Improves Efficiency

Most people of a certain age will recall how invaluable the Encyclopedia Britannica, the World Book or other such multi-volume sets of information were to our academic and intellectual lives. The benefit of a carefully edited encyclopedia was consistency, quality and accuracy of the data. When data center managers are procuring, servicing or managing IT assets, where do they turn for an objective and far-reaching collection of names, facts and data points about their hardware and software?

BDNA, a company that sells such data sets, recently released a free version of this resource. Called Technopedia, it is a comprehensive encyclopedic resource for the IT crowd. In today terms, it’s a data set that “normalizes language.”

Technopedia lists more than 450,000 hardware and software products and thousands more are added daily, including data points such as size and wattage of hardware or versions and support available for software.

By using Technopedia content within their core IT systems, users have gained great operational efficiencies in their existing tools, processes and people. The community version of Technopedia offers any IT organization of any size the same opportunity to become more efficient.

“The problem that many were facing is that the people performing the major functions in IT -- such as IT planning, procurement, and service management -- were calling software and hardware different names,” said Walker White, CTO of BDNA. The IT function has many "moving parts" if you will. The data center IT is planned by one person (or team), purchased by another staff person (often in another department), and inventoried by someone else. Getting all of the data about the equipment and software in sync is often an overwhelming task that results in a lack of reuse of equipment and a lot of manual work.

Increased Insight and Agility

As you can imagine or have experienced yourself, this process sometimes creates a mess of unmanageable data for CIOs or managers who are trying to determine answers to questions like "how many Dell servers do we own" or "how many software licenses of Microsoft Project do we need to renew?"

“We take data from all systems and translate it into a common language. This generates massive enterprise efficiencies,” he explained. “It gives IT managers strategic insight because the information is accurate, aggregated and actionable.

White said that their database content comes from a number of sources and it is scrubbed for consistency. BDNA developed the tools and processes for collecting and maintaining, tracking the lineage of products.

Technopedia contains hardware and software products from more than 11,000 vendors worldwide, organized in a single, universal taxonomy, providing:

"Technopedia represents the culmination of a ten-year journey in building an IT reference catalog that is second to none. It has also made real BDNA’s vision of a Common Language of IT," said Constantin Delivanis, CEO and co-founder of BDNA Corporation. "By offering Technopedia to all IT professionals, we open a new chapter in the world of IT – the gains users will realize from easily sharing information across various IT systems for their strategic and operational initiatives will far exceed anything we can imagine today."

Technopedia Community Edition is available for free and can be downloaded from Technopedia.com. The free version cannot be used in other products and there is no support. Technopedia Enterprise Edition is also available on a subscription basis to customers that require technical support, service-level agreements (SLAs) and streaming updates.

Companies worldwide use on BDNA’s patented technologies for normalization, data enrichment and discovery, dramatically increasing visibility and reducing the time and overhead involved in developing and executing on strategic IT initiatives.