"Using Vantage gives us a lot of confidence, not only on this project, but seeking new business, too."-- Davy Richmond, Education Operations Director, Northgate Information Solutions
Customer Profile - Northgate Information Solutions was founded in 1969. With more than 30 years' experience in the IT market, Northgate is a leader in providing specialist software, outsourcing and information technology (IT) services to the human resources, local government, education and public safety markets. Northgate, which is listed on London Stock Exchange, currently employs over 6,000 staff and operates in 46 countries across 5 continents. Northgate has approximately 4,500 large/medium customers and approximately 10,500 small/medium enterprise (SME) customers world wide. The many corporate organisations Northgate works closely with include approximately 1 in 5 Fortune 500, 90% of the UK local authorities and all of the UK's regional police forces.
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.
Customer: Duncan Barry & Nigel Kernohan, Northgate Information Solutions
Situation: Reduce the risks and costs of administering and maintaining application service.
Northgate Information Solutions Finds An Automated Management Solution That Is Predictive And Proactive
When a company is bidding on a services project for information and communications technology (ICT) that requires managing close to three thousand servers in more than 1,200 locations, it's time for it to find a tool to automate tasks that would otherwise be too labor-intensive to consider. For Northgate Information Solutions, it needed to find a solution that would help them win the bid-and keep the servers up to strict service-level requirements.
Northgate Information Solutions is no stranger to large, managed ICT services contracts. With over 25 years of experience, Northgate provides services for government, education, commercial and utility organizations throughout the United Kingdom, including more than 50 percent of local UK governmental authorities.
So it was with confidence that Northgate approached bidding on a portion of a large educational project: C2K (Classroom 2000), designed to provide a world-class learning technology service for all schools in Northern Ireland. The contract would call for the vendor to manage more than 2,700 servers, running vital educational and administrative software in more than 1,200 locations throughout Northern Ireland-which raised considerable questions of logistics. And there was another catch: service penalties.
"The contract was to be based on service-level availability," says Davy Richmond, Education Operations Director for Northgate. "Whoever won the contract would be potentially liable for large penalties if application service levels dropped below a certain threshold. The penalties were high enough to be considerably detrimental to our finances. In order to exceed service levels, a proactive remote monitoring systems management tool was required.
"We needed an automated management product, one that would allow us to receive alerts and produce reports on exceptions rather than flood us with raw data. So we began looking at the best offerings on the market."
Searching for a Solution
Richmond and his team had ruled out an application performance management product they already owned. Generally dissatisfied with how difficult it was to use and the quality of information it provided, the team hadn't upgraded the product. The search for a new performance management product, however, wasn't turning up any great solutions-at least, to begin with.
"We began contacting various software vendors to come and do a proof of concept for us that would show us how long their products would take to install, what sort of information we'd receive, what sort of support they offered and so on," notes Richmond. "We asked each to set up their products for ten servers as a demonstration. The three largest vendors each wanted two to three weeks to set up their software. A couple even wanted us to pay them to prove their software worked. In all honestly, their products were so complicated that they themselves were having difficulty implementing them."
It didn't stop there, however. Richmond and his team visited a reference site for one of the vendors, and indeed, the users there were happy with the product, as they were just beginning to get the application performance analysis data they needed-nearly three years after they installed it.
"We immediately threw that option out," says Richmond. That's about the time Richmond and his team started looking into Compuware Vantage.
Vantage Delivers the Data—Instills Confidence
Vantage, Compuware's complete application service management solution, showed it was up to the job very early in the review process. "When the Compuware people came out to show us how Vantage would work, they had it monitoring the 10 live servers within one day," explains Richmond. "No detrimental effects to the servers, no down time, no impact on system performance. In two weeks we were running Vantage on the 30 pilot C2K sites, proving we could manage the contract."
Now, Northgate manages the 2,700 servers at 1,200 sites with only two system administrators and one operator. Richmond says, had they chosen any other software package, their staffing would have to have been tripled-plus support staff. The Northgate team who act as "virtual classrooms technicians" now receive alerts from Vantage whenever system performance threatens to fall below service levels, or other events occur that may affect performance, so Northgate technicians can take proactive measures to remedy the problem. In addition, Vantage is used to auto-repair problems that go unnoticed by the customer who can continue to deliver lessons as if nothing happened. Detailed reports can be sent to the customer explaining the problem and what steps were taken by Northgate to resolve it. Richmond and his team also use Vantage for end-user experience monitoring, capacity planning and trend analysis.
"Using Vantage, we can see a reduction in memory availability or an increase in CPU usage and know that's going to be a problem in a few months," explains Richmond. "To be able to be proactive toward these issues before they become a problem is very important. We can share this information with the contract managers, show them the potential risk, and show them what we're doing to reduce or eliminate that risk. The more we can do to show our customers that we're capable of managing the job beyond their expectations, and we're actually doing it right now-that makes the job all the better for us."
"Using Vantage gives us a lot of confidence, not only on this project, but seeking new business, too. We've got a good story to tell prospective customers. And we can show them our data center, show them the alerts coming through and how we work with them. We can show prospective customers that Vantage alerts us to service issues, and we can predict performance problems and be proactive."
Continue reading other LoveMyTool posts on Compuware Vantage »
Recent Comments