Customer Case:
Semiconductor company

The customer is a world leader in the manufacture of advanced technology systems for the semiconductor industry. The company offers an integrated portfolio for manufacturing complex integrated circuits (also called ICs or chips). The corporate headquarters are located in Europe, with research and manufacturing facilities located across Asia and North America. Additionally, the company provides optimal service to its customers via over 60 sales and service organizations in 14 countries.

The Challenge
The problem the company was facing was limited insight into the behavior of mission-critical applications, deployed across a global network infrastructure provided by multiple service providers. The company had recently completed a global consolidation of storage and application resources, and random application performance issues were affecting or threatening to affect important business processes. Because the infrastructure was provided by multiple providers (WAN, Internet, VPN), the monitoring and management of application performance was costly and management information was incomplete.
The company’s customers depend on timely assistance from the company to support their semiconductor manufacturing processes, and hours of downtime are costly and unacceptable occurrences. The company’s customer support engineers depend on SAP and other online tools to resolve issues quickly, and without these tools it isn’t possible to support their customers.
Without a business-oriented view of application performance, the company was limited to technical reports produced by their own in-house tooling, and the complex and device-centric reports provided by their network service providers. This resulted in a situation where it became increasingly difficult to identify and resolve application performance problems within an acceptable amount of time.

Business Service Orchestration
The main objective of implementing the Business Service Orchestration (BSO) service was to create a proactive approach to not only identifying application performance problems before they blocked business critical processes, but also to identify the impact that outsourced services had on business-critical applications.
The core application of the Business Service Orchestration service is NetX. After the implementation of the NetX (which is a service, delivered out of the NetDialog datacenter), the company was able to get a complete overview of how business applications were performing, whether or not infrastructure resources and providers were being efficiently used, and was able to identify previously unknown infrastructure risks before they impacted mission-critical business processes. Additionally, the company gained insight into exactly which provider was responsible for which part of application performance issues.
NetX provided the company with a business-oriented approach to IT service management, by translating complex network information into business recommendations that have lead to cost and risk reductions. This translation made it possible to easily align the use of infrastructure resources and outsourced services with business goals by clearly identifying how the applications used by important business processes were performing. Because the company interacts extensively with its suppliers and customers via remote access, having the capability to identify which provider and even which part of an outsourced service was impacting important applications has resulted in extensive improvements to their service delivery capabilities. Not only have they improved their mean time to repair for service incidents, but they have also greatly improved their control over their service providers.
In addition to assisting with an initial optimization of the infrastructure, the NetX service provided insight into SLA threshold violations during office hours for applications important to the business, ensuring that the company’s customer support organization knew well before their customers did of potential problems. This enabled their organization to proactively set expectations for their customers, and quickly engage the help of their service providers or internal IT organization when appropriate.
Finally, the in-depth reporting provided by NetX enabled the company to perform a monthly review of the resources and outsourced services used by mission-critical processes, ensuring that the optimum level of resources or services is always available for important applications – ahead of time.

NetDialog’s Approach
NetDialog’s Business Service Orchestration (BSO) approach helps customers to regain control lost to outsourcing, internet service, remote workers, and rapidly changing technologies. By applying NetX, customers are able to manage disparate technologies and service providers as if they were a single in-house application.
Additionally, since NetX runs as a service out of NetDialog’s data centers, it was easy to get the service up and running for the company. After the service was deployed, the next step was to get a complete overview of the behavior over the network of a number of business critical applications: SAP, E-mail, and online storage.
By discovering all application related traffic, setting the right service level objectives for the individual applications, and providing complete reports on the applications, the company gained extensive insight into the behavior of these critical business applications. This insight helped them in vastly improving the overall performance and efficiency of their applications 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 professional services, a number of monthly reports were defined that help the company in the continuous effort of getting a complete picture of the status of their business applications, regardless of the technology or provider used to deliver them.
Finally, more business applications and business processes were added to the NetX BSO platform. This way the company got a more complete picture of the behavior of all applications and business processes using their IT infrastructure. This lead to an efficient and optimally configured infrastructure that runs all business processes and applications, according to business goals.

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

• A complete overview of the status of business critical applications, regardless of who owns or operates them;
• Faster analysis and shorter troubleshooting time of infrastructure bottlenecks, because all data is available through the NetX portal. This way support personnel at different locations work on the same problem with the same data;
• Immediate access to information that shows 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 company for the first time has access to integrated and relevant information about the performance of business supporting applications, regardless of whose network service is used to deliver them. Because it became very clear where (sometimes previously unknown) bottlenecks existed, the entire application delivery 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.