Critical application status information
Faster Analysis & trouble shooting
Clear insight in WAN usage
Trend analysis for critical applications

Customer Case:
Major accounting & consulting firm

The customer provides industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services to build public trust and enhance value for its clients and their stakeholders. The customer's Dutch organization has 5300 employees working from 19 offices. Worldwide this company has over 100.000 employees and is represented in more than 150 countries.

The Challenge
The problem the customer was facing was limited insight into the performance of their applications and outsourced services. Although the company had purchased and deployed traffic management devices in their network in order to provide the needed insight into application performance, insight was limited due to the complexity of the device-specific technical reports produced by their equipment, and by their service providers.
Without a unified customer-oriented view, the customer was limited to labor-intensive and error-prone methods in order to determine if, when, and where application performance issues could lead to severe business impact. For example, before the deployment of NetX™ random file transfers and distributed network problems regularly interfered with mission-critical Lotus Notes transactions. The information that the customer needed to solve the problem was scattered across multiple devices and service provider portals, and not in a form easily understood by network operations.

The NetX™ Business Service Orchestration Service
The main objective of implementing the NetX Business Service Orchestration (BSO) service was to create a more proactive ICT organization that had visibility not only into the actual application performance and availability experienced by end users, but also into the impact that outsourced services had on business-critical applications.
After the implementation of the NetX BSO Monitor service, the customer was able to get a complete overview of how business applications were performing, whether or not infrastructure resources or providers were being efficiently used, and where previously unknown problems created potential risks for important business processes. Because the WAN and important application servers were outsourced, it was critical that the customer had a business service orchestration capability in-house to orchestrate the integration of internal and external IT services.
The NetX BSO Monitor service provided the customer with a business-oriented approach to ICT management. By translating complex device and service provider information into business-related objects such as applications, business services, and business processes, the customer was able to make improved decisions that have lead to cost and risk reductions. This translation made it possible to easily align the use of infrastructure resources and service provider services with business goals. By continually monitoring end-user service level agreements instead of technical monitoring, the customer was able to determine if the service levels purchased from external providers were actually being delivered, and if they were efficiently being used.
The NetX BSO implementation provides insight into end-user SLA threshold violations during office hours for applications important to internal customers. Based on the collected data the NetX BSO platform provides a monthly evaluation report with tactical information about the usage of internal infrastructure and external services, providing the customer with better leverage when managing and negotiating with external providers. the customer now has total orchestrated control over IT services delivered to their business users, while having the flexibility to outsource non-core services as needed.

NetDialog’s Approach
NetDialog’s Business Service Orchestration approach helps customers to regain control lost to outsourcing, internet service, remote workers, and rapidly changing technologies. By applying BSO, customers are able to manage disparate technologies and service providers as if they were a single in-house application.
Additionally, since NetX BSO runs as a service out of NetDialog’s datacenters, it is easy to get the service operational. This was a great advantage for the customer. Because there were no servers or software to install, the customer was (within 24 hours) able to get a complete overview of the behavior of a number of business critical applications: Lotus Notes, SAP and the intranet environment – despite the fact that all or parts of these applications were outsourced.
By discovering all application related traffic, setting the right service level objectives for the individual applications, and providing complete reports on each application, the customer got complete insight into the behavior of these critical business applications. This insight helped them in vastly improving the overall performance and efficiency of their IT resources because for the first time they had access to accurate data that showed which infrastructure components and outsourced services caused problems that affected the business.
With the help of NetDialog BSO experts, a number of monthly reports were defined that helped the customer in their continuous effort of getting a complete picture of the status of their business applications, regardless of the technology or provider used. Finally, more business applications and business processes were added to the NetX BSO platform. This way the customer got a more complete picture of the behavior of all applications and business processes running over their infrastructure. This lead to a very efficient and optimally configured infrastructure that runs all business processes and applications, according to business goals.

Results
The customer’s experience shows that the insight they gained by using NetX BSO Monitor resulted in:

  • A complete overview of the status of business critical applications, regardless of who owns or operates them;
  • Faster analysis and shorter trouble shooting time of infrastructure bottlenecks, because all data is available through the NetX BSO portal. This way support personnel at different locations work on the same problem with the same data;
  • Immediate access to graphs that show the status of business critical applications without having to wait for engineers and consultants to analyze and report data from multiple sources and providers;
  • Direct access to application traffic data and analysis, trend analysis and network & application efficiency;

This has lead to a situation where the customer for the first time has access to integrated and relevant information about the performance of business supporting applications that are either outsourced or make use of outsourced resources. Because it became very clear where (sometimes previously unknown) bottlenecks existed, the entire infrastructure could be re-configured in order to make much more efficient use of infrastructure resources, while simultaneously achieving a higher level of end user performance. Instead of adding resources, resources are now being used in a much more efficient way. Bottom line: this enabled them to get more out of their existing investments, and improved the control they have over outsourced service providers.