Profiles in Partner Success

PROFILES IN PARTNER SUCCESS | NOVEMBER 2015
CA Unified Infrastructure
Management
Profiles in Partner Success
2 | PROFILES IN PARTNER SUCCESS | NOVEMBER 2015
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary
3
Introduction: Service Providers Scale Services, Revenues and
Profits with CA UIM
3
Alliant Engages CA UIM to Reduce Customer
Costs and Risk, Prepare for the Internet of Things
5
CA UIM Powers High-Value Industry Services for Alphaserve
7
CA UIM Gives Capgemini Brazil Unified Visibility of
Technology and Global Business 9
GDT Advanced Solutions Leverages CA UIM to Optimize the
Customer Experience
11
OneNeck Uses One Solution to Monitor its Customers’
Hybrid IT Environments
13
Conclusion15
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Executive Summary
Around the world and across market segments, service providers are more
successful because they’ve implemented CA Unified Infrastructure Management
(CA UIM). In this paper, we invite you to meet some of the providers that are
profiting from CA UIM. Hear from the firms’ executives and find out why they
chose CA UIM—and why they’d do it again.
Introduction: Service Providers
Scale Services, Revenues and
Profits with CA UIM
The savvy service provider leader understands that things like meeting service level commitments,
delivering innovative new services, maximizing operational efficiency and increasing business agility
aren’t just nice-to-haves, they’re critical ingredients for revenue growth and business success in the
application economy. Many of the most successful service providers have chosen CA UIM because it’s a
monitoring platform that works to their advantage as they seek to deliver more services and value and
expand revenues and profits.
Service providers choose CA UIM because it helps them:
•Expand their service catalog. CA UIM represents a single, unified solution and architecture that can
power an extensive set of monitoring services. CA UIM supports more than 140 technologies and
environments, including physical and virtual servers, networks, storage, databases, applications, user
experience, public and private clouds, power and cooling infrastructure, mainframes and more.
Figure A
CA UIM delivers
powerful benefits to
service providers.
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•Scale operations and revenues. CA UIM features an efficient, multi-tenant architecture that has been proven to scale
to support global deployments and hundreds of thousands of devices with a single instance. It’s a solution that
enables service providers to support more users, devices, transactions, environments and customers.
•Delight customers. Service providers leverage CA UIM to gain a unified view of their client’s environments, so they can
manage service levels proactively, spot and pre-empt issues and speed repair. Further, they can deliver the
sophisticated reporting, dashboards and portals that provide more value and build more trust with customers.
•Enhance margins. With CA UIM, service providers can standardize on an easy-to-use platform that offers
comprehensive coverage. By reducing the cost and complexity of managing multiple point tools, service providers can
boost staff efficiency and improve margins.
On top of all this, CA UIM is backed by CA Technologies, a vendor with a pervasive presence across service provider
markets. CA has a proven track record of truly partnering with its service provider customers, offering not only categoryleading solutions but the enablement resources, flexible pricing, consulting and support that they need to gain
maximum value from their investments and optimal market traction for their CA-powered services.
Many reasons. Many benefits. One solution.
Browse the following pages to see why leading service providers have adopted CA UIM and how they benefitted as a
result. This document features profiles on the following organizations:
Alliant. Alliant has built an innovative service delivery model. CA UIM is instrumental
in supporting the organization’s approach to standardization, efficiency and scale,
enabling the team of 150 to manage infrastructures in 48 states and 37 countries.
Alphaserve Technologies®. With CA UIM, the team at Alphaserve was able to move
away from many monitoring products, minimize “noise” and streamline operations—
which has been essential in helping the company maintain internal margins above
70 percent.
Capgemini Brazil. CA UIM is helping Capgemini Brazil to support large, extremely
complex and globally distributed client infrastructures. Through its unified coverage
and sophisticated insights, CA UIM has helped the organization speed troubleshooting
by 60 percent.
GDT Advanced Solutions™. Aligned with the company’s ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library)focused approach, CA UIM helped GDT Advanced Solutions modernize its infrastructure
monitoring, gain end-to-end visibility of client environments and speed mean time to
repair (MTTR) by 20 percent.
OneNeck® IT Solutions. The company standardized on CA UIM, and as a result has
seen improvements in every area of its business, including improved SLA compliance
and enhanced reporting services. Today, OneNeck relies on CA UIM to monitor nine
data centers and hundreds of customer environments.
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Alliant Engages CA UIM to Reduce Customer
Costs and Risk, Prepare for the Internet of Things
COMPANY PROFILE
Headquartered in Morristown, NJ, Alliant designs, deploys and manages a global
IT infrastructure utility that delivers agility and scalability while lowering
operating costs and risk for commercial enterprises.
FAST FACTS
CONTACT
Website: www.allianttech.com
Phone: 973-267-5236
Twitter
LinkedIn
Company Size: 150 employees
Founded: 1998
Locations: Headquartered in New Jersey, with customer locations in 37 countries
CA UIM Customer Since: 2009
TOP AWARDS
•
•
Q&A with ...
Alliant Named to CRN TechElite 250 List
Alliant Recognized by Cisco for Customer Service Excellence
What value-added managed services does Alliant offer?
We deliver global infrastructures, including wide area networks (WANs), local area
networks (LANs), unified communications and data centers. What’s different about
Alliant is that we don’t just build and operate this infrastructure, we own it.
Our Continuous Infrastructure Service (CIS®) represents a fundamental change in
terms of risk. With traditional managed services models, customers offloaded some
of the work, but none of the risk. Businesses were still exposed to the risk of
obsolescence, maintenance, operations and costs of ownership. We’re taking all
those risks out of the equation for the customer.
Bruce Flitcroft, CEO, Alliant
We build a reference architecture for all configuration items (CIs) that are part of
the core IT network—including circuits, routers, WAN accelerators, switches,
wireless access points, IP phones, telepresence video screens and wireless LAN
controllers. This means we work with specific models and configuration options.
This standardized approach enables us to scale and support large customer
networks. We have 150 employees and we’re currently managing 32 large global
networks for our customer base, which includes some enormous companies.
Compared to traditional models, it takes much less labor for us to build, manage
and operate networks. Many traditional IT departments will have one full-time
employee (FTE) for every 250-400 CIs. We now have one FTE for over 1200 CIs and
we expect that number will grow to 5000 in the next two years—that’s up to 20
times more efficient than current IT departments can run infrastructure.
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This efficiency helps us to be profitable and it enables us to
deliver significant cost savings. Our customers typically see a
20 percent return on investment on infrastructure spending
within the first year.
The reality is that in most IT organizations, 80 percent of
personnel, labor and budget are effectively focused on keeping
the lights on. We remove the requirement for companies to
invest so much time and effort in operating their infrastructures. This enables CIOs to start migrating employees to other
IT roles that better prepare the business for the digital future.
We build and operate networks where the cost per CI is
dropping precipitously. With these cost savings and our
modular, standardized approach, we make it practical for
customers to expand past core infrastructure and to begin
supporting new CI types, which puts them in a strong position
to pursue their Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives.
Why did you choose CA UIM?
As we went through the process of developing CIS, we wanted
to build on a single monitoring platform. We chose to
standardize on CA UIM for three key reasons:
•Multi-tenancy support. With CA UIM we could efficiently
collect and manage data in a multi-tenant environment. We
manage private networks. Even though we share operational
tools among customer implementations, we need to keep
data separate. CA UIM enables us to efficiently manage
multiple clients, while segregating their data.
•Integration and coverage. CA UIM snapped neatly into our
global architecture. We’re managing infrastructures in 48
states and 37 countries, so we’re supporting massive
amounts of CIs and CI types—and the number of items
expands dramatically with the move to IoT. To efficiently
manage these environments, we couldn’t run dozens of
monitoring tools. CA UIM gave us a single tool that could
support all the CIs and protocols we required, including SNMP,
TCP/IP, ICMP, UDP and more.
•Security strategy support. It’s critical for us to minimize
security exposure for our clients. All of our services have been
designed to do no harm to the customer’s network security
posture. Other monitoring tools we evaluated all pulled data
out to a remote server or cloud service. This would have
added attack surface areas, which runs counter to our security
strategy. With CA UIM, we could collect all data within the
customer perimeter, which was vital in supporting our strict
security requirements.
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How are you using CA UIM?
Our main business model is based on the assumption that we
will lower defects, and our clients consistently see dramatic
reductions in tickets and failures. The question is how do we
continuously improve, so we can get as close to zero issues as
possible? We commit to stringent service level agreements. We
effectively are promising to deliver any application, anywhere
in the world, error free. To do that, we need to continually be
analyzing and improving performance. When we get an
anomaly or error, we need to quickly determine whether it was
with a server, circuit, database, client or cloud application.
CA UIM is one of the tools we rely on to triangulate the cause
of an issue. It’s essential in helping us measure behavior and
diagnose and triage issues.
What ROI did Alliant realize from its CA UIM investment?
CA UIM was vital in supporting our operational standardization
and efficiency. With CA UIM, we can support data collection
through standard protocols, and we can easily adapt to support
any device or technology our customers require—whether IoT
devices, sensors, input/output devices or pretty much
anything else.
With CA UIM, whatever customers can imagine integrating, we
can easily support. In the past, incorporating non-standard
item types was a custom, end-to-end integration project. With
our architecture and CA UIM, we’re decoupling that, so we can
plug any IoT interface on top and the network will work. This
will be instrumental in supporting our customers in the years
ahead, while ensuring low-cost, efficient operations.
What have you been able to do with CA UIM that you
couldn’t do before?
In today’s global economy, the IT industry has to adapt to the
consumption economics model. Quite simply, people want to
pay monthly, and only for what they use. We’re trying to align
with these customer expectations and make our service as easy
to consume as possible. Today, that means enabling customers
to subscribe to a complete service on a pay-as-you-go basis—
and it was critical that our vendors helped support this
approach. Two years ago, many of the software vendors we’d
talked with couldn’t wrap their heads around this consumption
economics model, but CA did. The company’s support of our
business model is one of the main reasons we’re working
with CA.
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CA UIM Powers High-Value Industry
Services for Alphaserve
COMPANY PROFILE
Alphaserve Technologies is a privately held firm of technology and business
professionals serving clients in 300 cities and 38 countries, ranging from
multinational blue chip firms to small boutique financial companies.
FAST FACTS
CONTACT
Website: www.alphaserveit.com
Phone: 212.763.5503
LinkedIn
Company Size: 200 employees
Founded: 2010
Locations: U.S., Europe, India, Philippines
CA UIM Customer Since: 2009
TOP AWARDS
•
•
Q&A with ...
Alphaserve Technologies awarded “Best hedge fund management firm
IT initiative for 2015” by HFMWeek
Alphaserve Ranked #2348 in Inc 5000 for 2015, #2493 in 2014
What value-added managed services does Alphaserve offer?
We deliver a comprehensive set of IT infrastructure management services to our
clients. There are several key factors that set us apart in the marketplace. First, we
take a highly focused vertical approach, serving customers in four key industries:
financial services, healthcare, legal and media. Second, we take this industry
expertise and we provide a strategic approach to our services, so we help our
customers maximize the performance of their most critical business services.
Finally, our clients are global, so we’ve invested in a global delivery model that
enables us to meet our customers’ requirements for international coverage and
around-the-clock support.
Why did you choose CA UIM?
Arup Das, CEO and CTO,
Alphaserve Technologies
Early on, we’d used many different monitoring products, which created several
issues. The systems weren’t integrated and they were complex to implement. In
addition, they were difficult to tune, so we were struggling with a lot of “noise”
associated with false alarms and redundant alerts. In addition, the solutions we’d
implemented left us lacking effective server monitoring capabilities. For all these
reasons, we were looking for alternatives that would help us eliminate
these obstacles.
We adopted CA UIM in 2009. We chose CA UIM for a number of reasons. The
solution gave us the server monitoring capabilities we were lacking. After reviewing
the solution, and seeing how the system offered strong system and network
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monitoring, an extremely efficient architecture and a great deal
of openness, we thought, “this is awesome.” Perhaps most
important was the solution’s synthetic transaction monitoring
capabilities, which have proven to be critical for our business.
How are you using CA UIM?
We have several globally distributed network operation centers,
and we offer a complete range of managed IT services,
including level 1-3 help desk services, monitoring, remediation,
ticketing and more. CA UIM plays a fundamental role in our
ability to deliver all these services to our clients.
One of the key factors that really distinguishes us in the market
is the ability to bring industry expertise to our core markets,
and to help optimize our clients’ most critical business
services. We use CA UIM to help monitor our clients’ business
services from end to end. With CA UIM, we can build custom
synthetic transaction monitoring services, and then routinely
execute those transactions and generate monitoring data on
the end-to-end process as well as each specific step within the
workflow. With CA UIM, we can provide objective, continuous
measurements of end user service levels and track how
performance and availability metrics compare to service level
agreements. Further, the solution enables us to deliver this
intelligence to customers via on-demand dashboards, which
customers find incredibly valuable in managing their
environments and businesses.
What ROI did Alphaserve realize from its
CA UIM investment?
For any MSP, the fundamental challenge is this: As I bring on
new services and contracts, how do I continue to be profitable?
In our business, we have to maintain 70 percent internal gross
margin on service delivery. If we don’t, it doesn’t matter how
many customers we add or what we charge, our profits won’t
be high enough to sustain our growth.
We run a lot of analytics on our NOC, and we’ve been able to
consistently maintain internal margins above 70 percent—and
CA UIM has a lot to do with that. CA UIM has been essential in
helping us deliver high value services that enable us to sustain
premium pricing levels and CA offers effective pricing and
packaging for service providers.
Most importantly, through the solution’s intelligent alarm
suppression, monitoring templates and streamlined
architecture, CA UIM has been instrumental in our boosting
operational efficiency. Without the solution’s sophisticated
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capabilities for tuning alarms, we would have had to double
the amount of staff we had in our NOC as we grew our offerings
and customer base. CA UIM easily saved us more than 30
percent in headcount increases as we’ve grown our business.
The bottom line is that CA UIM has helped us expand our
revenues and our profits.
What have you been able to do with CA UIM that you
couldn’t do before?
CA UIM has enabled us to deliver higher value services more
profitably than we could before. With its ability to support
synthetic transactions, CA UIM has been vital in delivering
high-value specialized services to customers. The solution gives
us not only end-to-end insights, but also supports our ability to
tie together infrastructure visibility with our industry expertise
to deliver proactive insights that deliver significant
business benefits.
For example, we have been working with a leading hedge fund
management firm for several years now. With CA UIM, we were
able to set up end-to-end monitoring of the company’s vital
trading services and establish intelligent, automated alerting
that helped us ensure any potential issues immediately get
escalated to the right business and technical staff. One night,
our monitoring triggered alerts about a storage system nearing
capacity. Given our understanding of the client’s infrastructure
and business, we knew if this issue wasn’t addressed, the issue
most likely would have halted the company’s trading
operations the following day, which would have had massive
financial implications for the business and its clients.
With CA UIM, we could ensure that automated alerts were
generated, so staff could pre-empt the issue—before there was
any negative business impact. We have developed similar
business process knowledge—and delivered these kinds of
benefits—for customers in every industry we serve, including
financial services, healthcare, legal and media.
In addition, CA UIM stood apart from our prior tools because it
offers pre-packaged and fully customizable monitoring
templates, which are also essential in helping us streamline
our operations. With these templates, we can standardize
implementation and ongoing maintenance, so we can expand
our services without expanding our staff.
Finally, CA UIM offered the openness and flexibility that
enabled us to do intelligent tuning of thresholds and alarms, so
we could minimize the alarm noise that administrators had to
contend with. Our prior solutions lacked these capabilities.
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CA UIM Gives Capgemini Brazil Unified
Visibility of Technology and Global Business
COMPANY PROFILE
Now with 180,000 people in over 40 countries, Capgemini is one of the world’s
foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The
Group reported 2014 global revenues of EUR10.573 billion.
FAST FACTS
CONTACT
Website: www.capgemini.com
Phone: 650-825-2300
Twitter
LinkedIn
Company Size: 180,000 employees, with more than 8,500 in Brazil
Founded: 1967
Locations: Headquartered in France, locations in 40 countries; 90 technical
service centers in Brazil
CA UIM Customer Since: 2011
TOP AWARDS
•
•
Q&A with ...
Capgemini Wins Financial Services Partner Innovation Award at
Dreamforce 2015
Capgemini Positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2015 “Magic Quadrant
for SAP Implementation Services, Worldwide”
What value-added managed services does Capgemini Brazil offer?
We operate as a one-stop shop for our clients’ IT and business requirements,
offering a comprehensive range of services in such areas as applications,
infrastructure hosting and management and business process outsourcing.
Our team has a strong focus on infrastructure management. We can analyze our
clients’ infrastructures and business requirements, select solutions, implement and
host solutions and support those solutions on an ongoing basis. Being part of
Capgemini, the team based in Brazil serves the needs of local customers as well as
a global customer base, including large enterprises with internationally
distributed operations.
Why did you choose CA UIM?
Edemilson José da Silva, Senior
Infrastructure Specialist,
Capgemini Brazil
Over the course of the past 15 years, we’ve had extensive experience working with
a number of monitoring tools. The main thing that makes CA UIM stand apart is
exactly captured in the word “unified.” The solution gives us the ability to
consolidate monitoring of a lot of different technologies across widely dispersed
locations, using the same interface and the same approach. With CA UIM, we can
operate in a more standardized way—because we can work with a single
monitoring platform.
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With CA UIM, we’ve been able to monitor a large client’s entire
diverse infrastructure—which housed various server platforms,
including Windows®, IBM AIX®, Linux® and AS/400 servers;
hypervisors from Citrix, Hyper-V and VMware; Oracle, SQL
Server® and DB2 databases; Cisco network equipment; F5 load
balancers; security appliances; Vblock; EMC VMAX and Celerra
storage environments; applications like Microsoft Exchange®;
Web servers and more.
CA UIM also offers unified visibility across geographies as well,
which is critical given the global nature of our business. For
example, Capgemini has a major client based in Belgium. We
host their data center infrastructure in Europe, we have a
dedicated team in India that delivers level 1-3 support of the
infrastructure using CA UIM, and the team in Brazil is
responsible for maintaining the CA UIM solution, which is
hosted in our data center in Brazil. CA UIM offers the scalability
and robust architecture that enable us to efficiently manage
monitoring across these broadly distributed environments.
How are you using CA UIM?
Normally, many customers are operating in silos based on
different technologies, for example with separate teams
focused on operating systems, databases, storage, applications
and so on. These teams may each have a part of the
information, but when issues arise, this isolated visibility
makes it difficult to quickly determine where the cause
is originating.
With our consulting expertise and CA UIM, we can help provide
a unified view across these silos, and we can tie the
performance of specific infrastructure elements to business
services. An IT operator may see that a CPU is nearing a
utilization threshold. What’s more important is the fact that
the taxed CPU is resulting in slow page load times for a critical
business application. We work with clients to define these
linkages and then CA UIM helps us provide a unified view, so
we can more effectively manage the relationship between IT
and business performance, and escalate issues with an
understanding of their business impact.
Another point is that CA UIM offers incredible dashboard
functionality, featuring an extensive dashboard library and easy
customization. The solution’s service level agreement (SLA)
management capabilities also enable us to provide reports and
dashboards that help IT operations teams track the SLAs they
have in place with various business areas, so they get insights
they need to improve SLA compliance.
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What ROI did Capgemini Brazil realize from its
CA UIM investment?
CA UIM has helped us significantly improve the agility and
efficiency of our operations. For example, with prior tools, when
an operator received an alarm, they may have had to open up
several different windows and even log into other applications
to start troubleshooting. By contrast, with CA UIM, operators
can view an alert and, in the same window, drill down to get
the specifics surrounding the issue. This streamlined process
has helped reduce our troubleshooting times by 60 percent.
The solution’s broad coverage helps us address more customer
needs and expand business opportunities. Now, if a client
deploys a new technology or cloud service, and they don’t have
related expertise internally, CA UIM gives us the monitoring
coverage and best practices required to quickly support the
customer’s new service. For example, one client had a new
deployment of several Oracle database instances, but they only
had DBAs that were SQL Server specialists. With CA UIM, we
could quickly and efficiently support the customer until the IT
team was able to hire the Oracle specialists required.
What have you been able to do with CA UIM that you
couldn’t do before?
CA UIM literally enables us to monitor everything. With
CA UIM, there’s always a way to get the information we and our
clients need. Beyond the solution’s off-the-shelf coverage of
many technologies, CA UIM offers the flexibility to adapt to
pretty much any other system. We can automatically run any
application executables from the operating system’s
command-line interface, and use the output of those actions to
capture and process data, and start tracking performance and
generating alerts.
CA UIM can also run SQL queries against any SQL database,
which is wonderful, because we can provide dashboards that
consolidate both technical and business information. For
example, we have a client that runs business applications on
the CICS (Customer Information Control System) platform,
which operates on an IBM mainframe. With CA UIM, we can
monitor the transactions going on within CICS, and, in a single
custom dashboard, display the performance of the
underpinning servers and network components, end-to-end
transaction response times, transaction volumes and even
sales volumes for a given period. With other tools this simply
wasn’t possible.
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GDT Advanced Solutions Leverages CA UIM
to Optimize the Customer Experience
COMPANY PROFILE
CONTACT
Website: gdtadvancedsolutions.com
Phone: 844.438.3375
Twitter
LinkedIn
GDT Advanced Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of award-winning,
technology integration partner General Datatech, LP (GDT), offers a
flexible, broad range of services for businesses with increasing
dependence on technology.
FAST FACTS
Company Size: 501-1000 employees
Founded: 1996
Locations: U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Singapore
CA UIM Customer Since: 2013
TOP AWARDS
•
•
Q&A with ...
Anil Pudhiya Vettle, President,
GDT Advanced Solutions
GDT Named to Top 10 percent of CRN Solution Provider 500
GDT Takes Four 2015 Cisco Partner Summit Awards Including Cisco
Architectural Excellence for Service Provider Architectures
What value-added managed services does GDT Advanced Solutions offer?
GDT Advanced Solutions provides the knowledge and skills that help customers
maximize their use of technology so they can realize their business goals. We offer
a broad range of flexible, incident-based managed services, including reactive and
best-in-class proactive services. We give our customers a comprehensive view of
their network, let them see what’s there and what isn’t and improve system
availability. At the same time, we help them avoid unplanned expenses, stabilize
their networks, control their risk profile and optimize operations and management.
With a state-of-the-art NOC and tools, we offer custom solutions that specifically
address a range of customers’ needs—including availability monitoring, alert
management, service desk, incident management, MACD (moves, adds, changes,
deletes) services, vendor management, problem management and change
management. GDT Advanced Solutions frees up talent so staff members can focus
more of their time and effort on innovation and core initiatives.
Why did GDT Advanced Solutions choose CA UIM?
We were using multiple monitoring tools, which was proving costly and complex to
maintain, and inhibited our engineers’ productivity. We were looking for a solution
that would modernize our infrastructure monitoring capabilities, so we could
minimize downtime and reduce mean time to repair. The tool needed to provide a
real-time comprehensive view of our clients’ environments and help enable the
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fastest possible response to alerts and alarms. We also needed
a tool that was scalable and customizable and that offered
advanced reporting. The tool also needed to easily integrate
into our methodology, which is founded on the ITIL (IT
Infrastructure Library) framework. One of the driving factors as
to why GDT Advanced Solutions chose CA UIM was the
solution’s unified architecture. CA UIM provides us with a
holistic view that lets us move quickly to the root cause of
specific events and provides the meaningful data that helps us
maintain an accurate reporting history.
How is GDT Advanced Solutions using CA UIM?
We integrated CA UIM into our network managed services
offering. It took the team just 30 days to implement the
flexible and scalable platform, yielding rapid time to value. CA
UIM provides us with end-to-end visibility of the status of our
clients’ environment, across multiple platforms. We monitor
more than 20,000 elements via the solution. With the root
cause analysis capabilities of CA UIM, we can now swiftly
identify and correct problems before they become performance
issues. We are now able to customize features, such as
templates for our Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise
(UCCE) environment. This enables us to gain an unparalleled
depth of application-level monitoring inside our contact center
environment, so we know in real time what the end customer
experience is like.
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What ROI did GDT Advanced Solutions realize from its
CA UIM investment?
As a result of the implementation, GDT Advanced Solutions has
improved mean time to repair by more than 20 percent for
many of our managed service clients. Implemented in under
30 days, CA UIM has helped us to dramatically improve service
quality, while reducing the cost of service delivery for our
customers. The addition of CA UIM to the new GDT Advanced
Solutions NOC helps our engineers effectively manage the
organization’s tenfold increase in services and provides a
comprehensive view of our clients’ networks so issues can be
rapidly identified and resolved. This enables our team to
proactively respond to real issues instead of simply reacting to
alerts and alarms.
What have you been able to do with CA UIM that you
couldn’t do before?
By consolidating to one tool—CA UIM—we eliminated the cost
and complexity associated with maintaining multiple solutions.
By underpinning our network managed services with a unified
monitoring solution, we have been able to:
•Gain end-to-end visibility of heterogeneous client
environments
•Mitigate downtime and reduce mean time to repair
•Function more effectively and efficiently
Figure B. Administrators in the GDT Advanced Solutions network operations center rely
extensively on CA UIM.
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OneNeck Uses One Solution to Monitor
its Customers’ Hybrid IT Environments
COMPANY PROFILE
OneNeck IT Solutions LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Telephone and Data
Systems, operates nine state-of-the-art data centers and offers a full suite of
hybrid IT solutions, including hosting solutions, ReliaCloud® enterprise cloud
services, managed services, ERP application management and IT hardware.
CONTACT
Website: www.oneneck.com
Phone: 855.ONENECK
Twitter
LinkedIn
FAST FACTS
Company Size: 600 employees
Founded: Formed in 2014, with separate entities doing business since 1993
Locations: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin
CA UIM Customer Since: 2011
TOP AWARDS
•
•
Q&A with ...
OneNeck IT Solutions named to 2015 CRN Fast Growth 150 list
OneNeck IT Solutions recognized by Cisco for Excellence in
Customer Satisfaction
What value-added managed services does OneNeck offer?
OneNeck is an expert provider of hybrid IT and cloud solutions. One of the unique
things about us is that we can provide hardware and hosted solutions along with
application and outsourcing services, so our customers don’t have to rely on
multiple providers. We work with our customers to understand their infrastructure
requirements and then develop and deliver the optimal approach for addressing
those requirements.
We can deliver cloud solutions in multiple form factors. No matter how a customer
chooses to implement their infrastructure—whether on premises, all in the cloud or
any hybrid mix of the two—we provide a single point of accountability for
performance and availability.
Clint Harder, Chief Technology
Officer and Senior Vice
President—Cloud and Managed
Services, OneNeck
We serve mid-market and enterprise customers in a range of industries. Our focus is
on helping businesses in a number of highly regulated vertical markets to address
their controls and compliance requirements, including the Payment Card Industry
Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and more.
Why did you choose CA UIM?
For any service provider that supports customer systems, monitoring is obviously
table stakes. It’s not a matter of whether we needed monitoring but which tool
would best meet our unique business needs. We wanted a monitoring tool that
aligned with all our key requirements and objectives.
14 | PROFILES IN PARTNER SUCCESS | NOVEMBER 2015
“Using CA UIM
benefits every area
of our business.
Fundamentally, CA
UIM is core to our
organization’s
ability to deliver
services to
customers.”
ca.com
We’re a large service provider that operates nine geographically distributed data
centers and we also manage many remote customer environments. Given the
breadth of the services and environments we support, it was critical to find a tool
that provides broad technology coverage. Quite simply, we wanted a solution that
could reduce the number of monitoring tools and infrastructures we were using.
We also wanted a tool that was mature, aligned with managed services and
multi-tenancy, and capable of supporting customer needs at varying levels.
We chose CA UIM because it gives us a single tool that offers the coverage we
need. With CA UIM, we can efficiently monitor all our distributed data centers and
customer environments. In addition, we can easily customize the solution to
address the specific checks and lookups our customers need. The solution’s
efficient, hub-based architecture enables us to deploy collectors remotely, while
leveraging a scalable, centralized alarm processing and data
collection infrastructure.
How are you using CA UIM?
Today, we’re using CA UIM as our standard monitoring platform. We use the
solution to monitor our company’s data centers, our cloud and shared services
infrastructures, and hundreds of our customers’ dedicated infrastructures. In that
latter case, we can monitor and manage every layer of our customers’ computing
stacks, from networking infrastructure and hardware all the way up to tracking
application performance and transaction times.
We also customize CA UIM to deliver creative solutions for monitoring
infrastructure, servers and applications across the breadth and depth of
industries our customers operate within.
What ROI did OneNeck realize from its CA UIM investment?
Using CA UIM benefits every area of our business. Fundamentally, CA UIM is core
to our organization’s ability to deliver services to customers. It’s instrumental in
helping us deliver against SLAs. It enables us to significantly reduce downtime
and offer customers more sophisticated reporting services. This gives our
customers the confidence to add new high-value services, such as application and
transaction monitoring.
What have you been able to do with CA UIM that you couldn’t do before?
None of our prior solutions delivered the visibility and coverage we needed to
support all our data centers and customer environments. Early on, we were using
five monitoring technologies and running seven unique monitoring instances.
Because of its unified coverage of hybrid environments and its flexible
customization, CA UIM is enabling us to go from using five tools to consolidating
on one. As a result, we have been able to eliminate the duplication of services
and reduce licensing, infrastructure and maintenance costs. In addition, using a
single platform allows our operations team to more efficiently monitor all of our
customers’ applications across the country.
15 | PROFILES IN PARTNER SUCCESS | NOVEMBER 2015
Conclusion
Share this Document
Around the world, hundreds of top service providers have chosen CA UIM for a
multitude of reasons—the following are just a few:
•Receiving phenomenal customer service
•Gaining true market differentiation
•Offering customers visual, tangible views that convey the business value of IT
•Harnessing a consolidated view across technology domains
•Delivering innovative new services that weren’t possible before
What will your reasons be?
Follow the links below to sign up for a free trial of CA UIM, or to learn more about the
solution. See what a powerful, comprehensive and advanced monitoring solution can
do for your business. Whether your goals are efficiencies, growth, differentiation or
improved service levels, CA UIM can help.
•CA UIM free trial sign-up page
•CA UIM product Web page
•CA for Service Providers Web page
•CA UIM for MSPs Video
•CA Service Provider Central Page on Flipboard
Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for
companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy.
Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to
development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide
to change the way we live, transact and communicate – across mobile, private
and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com.
Copyright © 2015 CA. All rights reserved. This document is for your informational purposes only, and does not form any type of warranty.
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