“We used to run only 18 users on one Citrix server, but since using Vantage, we’re now running nearly 70 users per server with no issues—that’s a big cost savings.”-- Bill Davidson, Manager of Platform Technologies, Reed Smith LLP
Customer Profile - Reed Smith is one of the 15 largest law firms in the world, with more than 1,500 lawyers in 23 offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Founded in 1877, the firm represents leading international businesses from Fortune 100 corporations to mid-market and emerging enterprises. Its attorneys provide litigation services in multi-jurisdictional matters and other high stake disputes, deliver regulatory counsel, and execute the full range of strategic domestic and cross-border transactions. Reed Smith is a preeminent advisor to industries including financial services, life sciences, health care, advertising and media, shipping, international trade and commodities, real estate, manufacturing, and education.
Vendor Profile - Compuware Corporation maximizes the value IT brings to the business by helping CIOs more effectively manage the business of IT. Compuware solutions accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of critical business systems while enabling CIOs to align and govern the entire IT portfolio, increasing efficiency, cost control and employee productivity throughout the IT organization. Founded in 1973, Compuware serves the world's leading IT organizations, including more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. Compuware's 2006 sales was $1.2 billion.
As a worldwide law firm, Reed Smith moved to a consolidated data center and a centralized Citrix environment, using Compuware Vantage to monitor end users’ experience of application performance. To date, the firm has few disruptions and better performance, all while saving significant IT costs by fixing inefficiencies it didn’t even know it had.
Results
• Improved application availability and performance
• Reduced IT costs
• Greater return on Citrix investment
Customer Overview
Reed Smith, one of the world’s largest law firms with more than 1,500 attorneys in 23 offices, represents international businesses from Fortune 100 corporations to mid-market and emerging enterprises. Its attorneys provide litigation services in multiple industries, including financial services, life sciences, health care, advertising and media, shipping, international trade and commodities, real estate, manufacturing, and education.
Challenge
Reed Smith is continually growing as the firm pursues its acquisition strategy. With this expansion, its IT team looked to reduce IT costs and complexity by reducing its network of data centers and migrating to Citrix. Although the consolidation provided greater flexibility to support the firm’s future growth plans, there was also greater risk for major service disruptions. Reed Smith CIO Gary Becker comments, “We place a high priority on building superior client relationships. Our lawyers need to be able to count on technology to meet our clients’ needs. This couldn’t be more important.”
To assure the same or better user performance, Reed Smith required a solution that delivered a more proactive, strategic approach to service management:
• baseline reports for establishing realistic service level agreements
• complete understanding of the end-user experience
• full visibility of application availability and performance.
Solution
Reed Smith took a two-prong approach to implementing Vantage. To start, Reed Smith established realistic baselines for its migration. Vantage collected key user transactions and performance metrics, and IT teams compared the time spent on client-side processing, network transmission and server processing as applications migrated to Citrix. “Pre-migration measurements revealed the homepage took between 7.5 to 11 seconds to load. Now it takes around 2.5 seconds,” recalls Cory Cousins, Reed Smith tools monitoring and reporting analyst. “Vantage shows us whether we’re meeting or exceeding our SLAs.”
Although service levels were on target, users still reported slowness. The firm turned to Vantage’s end-user experience monitoring to understand response time from the attorney’s viewpoint. “We started from an enterprise view, drilled down to a single user’s end points—what they were doing within Citrix, the amount of traffic they generated and any associated errors,” says Cousins. “With this data, we can really learn from our users’ experiences.”
For instance, Vantage identified peaks in network consumption caused by users streaming video within Citrix. Reed Smith minimized the packet size and freed up resources. Fixing inefficiencies saves the firm money.
“Vantage allows us to see a condition emerging so we can address it before it becomes serious,” states Elbie Yaworsky, director of technology at Reed Smith. “Vantage provides the granularity we need to see the actual user experience.”
Reed Smith also leveraged Compuware and Vantage globally to cut overall project costs when it acquired and migrated a large London law firm. “No one needed to make their way to London,” explains Yaworsky. “We acquired all the information we needed to understand the problem and fix it remotely.”
Results
To date, the data center and Citrix migrations have been a success:
• delivered on its “same or better” user performance guarantee
• continues to meet or exceed SLAs a 100 percent of the time
• reduced operating costs significantly by eliminating inefficiencies
• quadrupled the users per Citrix server to gain more return from the firm’s Citrix investment.
Reed Smith has an enterprise-level dashboard using Vantage. This dashboard offers a bird’s eye view of IT service and alerts Reed Smith to emerging problems using color-coded indicators. A quick glance shows where problems originate and lets teams drill down by geographic locations to get to the source quickly.
With Vantage working at the core, Reed Smith can ensure technology is the last thing to stand in the way of client-attorney relations. “Vantage provides the level of diagnostics that is so important to us. We’ve gone from being reactive to proactive,” says Yaworsky. “The paradigm shift from distributed to centralized computing really warranted having this level of inspection, and the investment we’ve made in Vantage helps us maximize the investment in the IT evolution here at Reed Smith.”
Continue reading other LoveMyTool posts on Compuware Vantage »
Recent Comments