Introducing Ask SysTrack for AirWatch

At Lakeside Software our goal has long been to make insightful, high impact analytics readily available to help answer questions and enable better decision making in IT.

In August we took a major step forward in data accessibility with the introduction of Ask SysTrack, in partnership with IBM Watson cognitive services. This Natural Language Processing (NLP) question tool made it possible to find highly specific SysTrack data using nothing but everyday questions, greatly reducing the barrier to entry for all SysTrack tools. A basic introduction to the Ask SysTrack was provided in a previous blog post by Ben Murphy. You can download a white paper for more in-depth information on how the tool works.

One of the interesting things we discovered in the intervening months has been that Ask SysTrack was getting asked questions it understood but didn’t know the answer to. We inadvertently trained Ask SysTrack’s AI dictionary to understand nearly every question someone in IT might ask it. The best metaphor for this would be like being asked for directions to somewhere you don’t know how to get to. Say someone stopped you on the street and asked:

“How do I get to Bob’s burgers?”

You understand they are looking for directions to an eatery named Bob’s burgers. But you don’t know the answer.

Something similar was happening to Ask SysTrack in production – it was getting asked lots of questions about mobile devices.

Since SysTrack is traditionally a desktop analytics tool, it offers only limited visibility into the mobile device space. It’s difficult for users who are unfamiliar with the vast quantities of data available to them through SysTrack and other tools to navigate to the mobility data they need in the moment. But that data was easily found in their EMM console.

Since the most popular EMM tool in SysTrack Community is Airwatch, we reached out to our friends at VMware with a proposition: Let us extend our natural language insight engine to your platform.

One thing led to another, and today we’re introducing Ask SysTrack for AirWatch. Through partnership with VMware AirWatch, the Enterprise Mobility Management leader in the Gartner VMM Magic Quadrant, the Ask SysTrack workspace analytics insight engine now includes Natural Language Processing capabilities for the entirety of the AirWatch platform. This means that the ease of use made possible by the industry first Ask SysTrack now expands into the mobility space.

Using nothing but simple questions you can track down otherwise hard to find data that typically requires a large amount of familiarity with AirWatch to locate. Say for instance that you want to know where to access your compliance polices.

Or maybe you want to know how many of your employees use iPhones.

Once again, what would normally be difficult to find only took a simple question.

The Ask SysTrack tool is available with SysTrack 8.2 while Ask SysTrack for AirWatch is made available through the installation of an AirWatch SysTrack Kit.