IT Managers: Buy yourself a 6thSense

By Vivek | January 31st, 2007 at 10:47 am ET         

Yeah you are reading it right. As an IT Manager, you might always wonder - How much time your development team is actually spending on developing the product? What is the actual usage of the development tools/IDEs so that you can cut down on the non-essentials? How your development team compares to others in the community? And many more questions related to performance and usage metrics. So while the really insightful managers, with the so called 6thSense, can glean the right information from what they are being reported, others are left out to play the guessing game by looking at hurriedly filled Friday timesheets. With increased level of outsourcing it adds another dimension to judge how many hours are actually spent by your outsourcing partners.

Research Triangle, North Carolina based 6thSenseAnalytics takes out this guessing and approximation game and presents you with the real usage stats. The hosted solution from 6thSense plugs-in data collectors into most of the major IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio to enable On-Demand tracking. Co-founded in November of 2005 by Greg Burnell, and Todd Olson, 6thSense has till date received $5 million in Series A round of funding from Core Capital, and $1.7 million in seed funding from Intersouth Partners for their SaaS solution.

With the new release of 6thSense coming this week they will be introducing around 5000 pre-built reports making much easier for managers to track activity from the account dashboards. Some of broad domains touched by these reports provide aggregated times spent per project, team, activity, and technology. The data collected can be used from micro to macro analysis. On the micro-side managers can track activity of their developers. Reports at 6thSense makes use of the “Active Time” concept, which shows exactly how much time an individual contributor spends interacting with software development tools to design, develop, test or debug each specific project. These reports from 6thSense should prove to be very effective in understanding contributions and efforts of an individual towards key organizational initiatives.

On the macro-scale, managers can track the complete development effort for a project which can make future estimations and comparisons to initial estimates easier. Using the 6thSense reports, CTO can present exact reports to his CEO at their level of investment in each of the primary systems that comprise their application portfolio.

6thSense also has application on the licensing compliance end. Number of the enterprise software licensing based on per seat basis. Sooner or later there are most installations floating around than the company is licensed for. Not each of these installs might be under active use. 6thSense data collectors can aid companies in tracking down this activity and getting rid redundant installs of costly softwares. 6thSense also has an community side to the service. The service provides completely anonymous data(all community date is “de-identified” and cannot be associated back to any specific 6th Sense customer) from the community of all 6th Sense users. This makes it very easy to compare your development effort data and perform comparative analytics.

6thSense service is priced very competitively at $960/user/year with no extra charges for the number of data-collectors used. With no server side product to install and availability of SDK to build data collectors for specialized products, 6thSense can provide real value at a tiny price.

Links:
6thSenseAnalytics