Hypersoft Information Systems · 1700 Montgomery Street, Suite 111 · San Francisco, CA 94111
The Exchange Analyser: Case Studies (1-4)
This document outlines four basic situations in which the Exchange Analyser TM was utilized in
order to resolve specific yet commonly found problems in organizations running large MS
Exchange messaging installations.
1. Service Levels:
Century Chemical Company, manufacturing ultra pure chemicals, utilizes
Hypersoft® Exchange Analyser™ to perform full monitoring and analysis of the
company’s vast messaging system on a daily basis. That makes the company really
confident in reliability of their e-mail system.
Century Chemical Company, formed in 1995 as a result of the merger of three
smaller firms, produces a mixture of ultra pure chemicals used in the manufacturer of
microchips. Century’s largest plant, located in Pleasanton, California, employs
approximately 5,000 people. Century employs another 7,500 people in two central
manufacturing plants, one on the East coast with 5,000 and one in the Midwest with
2,500. In order for Century to meet the expected increasing demand for their
chemicals nationwide they also established 8 smaller locations with a total of 3,000
administrative, sales and R&D employees spread throughout the nation. In all
Century Chemical Company employs a total of 15,500 people, half of which require
email for daily correspondence. Five years ago, when Century merged with the two
smaller firms they did so with the intent of competing with other chemical companies
nationwide. In order to do this, they would have to quickly tie all entities of the
newly formed company together with a massive internal messaging installation so,
all locations could operate profitably, efficiently and in a coordinated fashion.
A major problem confronting Century Chemical Corporation is associated with its
new structure. Initially, management had a very difficult time understanding why
their internal messaging system wasn’t working as planned. Each location had its
own Exchange messaging server so, they couldn’t figure out why some messages
would take days to meet their destination or sometimes not at all. In a fit of pure
frustration, management rounded up all the IT professionals who were responsible
for managing the email at each of the 11 locations nationwide. Upon further
investigation, they found out that each one of them rarely if ever communicated or
reported to anyone other than when a specific problem arose in their particular
region. Thus, there were no guidelines or goals to assess their individual
performances as long as everything worked most of the time no one really cared.
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However, Century was starting to lose their hold on the competition and they knew
much of it was to blame on the faulty messaging system, but no one knew where to
lay the blame.
Like any other department within an organization, management felt they needed to
establish a means of evaluating their IT professionals at each location. They further
evaluated the process and began setting up the guidelines for a targeted service level
to be met at all times. Essentially, the service level agreement required 95% of all
mail originating from a particular server be delivered under 15 minutes, and all mail
to be delivered or rerouted after 24 hours. However, they weren’t sure how to obtain
this kind of information on a continual basis, in a consolidated format for daily
review at Century’s main headquarters in Pleasanton.
The solution was to find a software instrument that would monitor and report on the
entire messaging system without lots of effort and consolidate the information into a
central location for further reporting and analysis, identifying each messages origin
and final destination, as well as the time it was sent and received. The information
had to be presented in a clear and concise format that could be understood by even
the least technically inclined individual, as most of Century’s Sr. Management had
very little experience with computers and traditionally used charts and numbers to
justify managerial decisions.
From the first meeting with a Hypersoft consultant to discuss a solution for the newly
established service level agreement, it was obvious Century Chemical Company
would greatly benefit from a product like the Exchange Analyser, as the software
delivers exactly that sort of data the company needed. But, many were initially
worried that a product of this kind would cause even further delay and bottlenecking
in the system because it would consume such a large amount of the system resources
to perform a task of this size on a daily basis. However, they were astonished to find
out that it would create even less then 0.01% of mail traffic, and would most likely
free up more of the system resources by identifying strains on the messaging system
that would otherwise have gone undetected. The Hypersoft consultant was so sure of
this product he gave Century Chemical Company the option of using it free of charge
for thirty days. After that, if they weren’t completely satisfied with the Exchange
Analyser they would only pay for the time it took for the consultant to install the
product. Needless to say, this was a win-win situation and management was quick to
take the visiting Hypersoft consultant up on the offer.
Now Century Chemical Company has experienced consistent performance and
reliability with a restored confidence in their messaging system. Special small
Agents, which are part of the Exchange Analyser, installed on every company’s
server, collect and send information from tracking logs to the monitoring computer
where the Exchange Analyser processes it and stores into an SQL database. So much
so, they’ve recently expanded their operation with ten more servers located
worldwide. Since the time of its induction, the monthly service level agreement has
been consistently met, and the day-to-day target service level an unprecedented 98%
of the time, reducing the annual cost of maintaining the network by almost 30%.
-2Hypersoft Informationssysteme GmbH
2. Routing Problems:
In operation for over fifty years, “-------” is one of the largest providers of solutions
that automate and integrate the investment management process through software
products, services, and integration. Based in Palo Alto, California, the organization
employs 20,000 people worldwide.
In 1998, as the organization began placing increasingly greater demands on its mail
system in use since 1993, reliability and timeliness of message delivery began to
suffer. In the beginning, the organization relied on electronic mail to transfer vital
payroll and financial information for the company and most of its 20,000 employees.
Now, the mail system has become such an integral part of the daily business that by
early 1998 it was used at some 50 locations worldwide and by 14,500 people – just
under 75% of the total workforce. Although payroll information was only rarely
delayed, frequent bottlenecks in message-transfer-agent servers caused a number of
problems. In general, senders and receivers could never be certain when their mail
would arrive. And, mail destined for the Internet might be backlogged for hours.
Initially, the organization called in several IT consultants to diagnose the problem.
Then, with few conclusions to draw on, they contemplated just expanding the
corporate communications bandwidth. But, that approach was considered too costly
and not necessarily a solid long-term solution considering they couldn’t even identify
the underlying problem(s) with the mail system, but were continuously left solving
the interrelated symptoms. Hence, they did not know whether it was a flaw or
weakness in the mail software or hardware. They needed something to monitor and
report on the entire messaging system, but it would have to have the capability of
reporting on all servers and connectors individually and irregardless of how the
system is performing on a whole. This would allow IT administrators to observer
each messaging server’s performance on a case-by-case basis. Then, all information
could be consolidated from the entire messaging system for further backtracking and
analysis.
When organizations run multiple messaging servers it can be an extremely daunting
task to keep tabs on each server and all mail that is routed through it, as well as the
entire installation. Thus, it can be next to impossible to identify bottlenecks and
insufficient bandwidth that could have a substantial affect on the entire messaging
system’s performance. This can cause IT professionals to get swamped and
misdirected with the continual task of trying to solve the correlating symptoms of a
particular faulty server instead of correcting the underlying problem.
-3Hypersoft Informationssysteme GmbH
3. Traffic Loads:
A company with a talent for buying underperforming businesses and turning them
into winners, Global-Works added a heap of potential in fiscal 1997, completing 28
complementary acquisitions and joint ventures. The company operates through 350
small, decentralized business units that actively practice teamwork with customers
and suppliers. These units produce an extensive range of equipment for the
automotive, construction, food and beverage, and general industry markets
worldwide, and are organized into three segments: engineered components, industrial
systems and consumables, and leasing and investments. Sales rose 4.5% last year to
$4.7 billion, while income shot up 14%. The organization employs some 25,700
people worldwide.
In today’s fast paced workplace communication technology is shaping the way
organizations do business, becoming more decentralized than ever before. However,
in order for management to make effective day-to-day decisions they must first have
a firm understanding of all aspects of a department or unit’s operation. This includes
the amount of email generated daily, weekly and monthly, as well as where it’s being
sent and how much of the company resources are being consumed in the process.
With over 350 decentralized units (autonomously) working on different projects for
different customers and suppliers around the world, it literally became a “growing”
problem for the company to consistently track the communication and production of
each unit. Also, to accurately facilitate the bill back of e-mail time and expense to
appropriate departments and clients. Without a costly overhaul of the current
messaging network or a substantial increase in the technical staff, they would have to
seriously reconsider the current operating structure of the company.
In addition, Global-Works needed instrumentation that could be easily implemented
on their current messaging installation with the least amount of downtime. The
company estimated each hour the entire network was down it would cost them an
additional $15,000. So, it became extremely important that whatever solution
Global-Works settled on it would have to encompass an architecture that would
accept this usually difficult parameter and present the least amount of hassle come
time of deployment.
The Exchange Analyser was the answer from above. A week after the described
problem had really begun to worry Sr. Management at Global-Works we received a
call from Jon Adams, Sr. Project Leader over Client/Server Systems. He informed us
of the problem and mentioned he had visited our site. Mr. Adams admits he had
received a call from one of our people a couple months back but never cared to
follow up or investigate the call, he figured that if it was worth checking out his
technical staff would have already done so. But, one evening while he was home
‘surfing’ the web with his daughter he remembered ‘Hypersoft’ and happened by our
site for a visit, and that’s where it all began.
This time the guy at the top did more than delegate what needed to be done, he did it
himself! The next day when Mr. Adams met with his technical staff they were
shocked yet relieved to hear about his findings. With some further investigation,
Global-Works invited us for a visit to test out the product and to perform a small-4Hypersoft Informationssysteme GmbH
scale demonstration with our own computers. Although they had many questions
and initial doubts about the Exchange Analyser’s capabilities, this was familiar
territory and we simply let the product do the talking and listened very keenly to
firmly understand what their major concerns and greatest needs were regarding their
existing messaging system. Once this was clear, we were able to appropriately
curtail the presentation, focusing it on their objectives, not ours. We left that day
with smiles across the room and a renewed confidence on the faces of many, because
they then realized this was it!
Two weeks later we had the Exchange Analyser in place throughout the entire
network, with no affect on daily communication/operation. Now, each messaging
server had an Analyser Agent that independently monitored the activity and
consistently reported it to the main module at Corp. Headquarters for further report
generation, exactly where you will find Mr. Jon Adams hailed by his technical staff
for a job well done!
4. Message Tracking:
Providence Insurance Company has provided Automotive, Home and Health
insurance to people across the United States for over 20 years. They have 500
offices and 35,000 employees nationwide. Almost 65% of the total workforce at
Providence use email on a daily basis. A year ago they had all internal messaging
servers linked throughout the US to make one large network (WAN), to be monitored
out of their corporate headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut – this was supposed
to help the company speed up claims processing and the activation of new policies.
Much of the paper work that was once processed via regular mail could now be
quickly scanned and sent to headquarters for final review, now instead of days this
process only took a matter of hours.
The idea seemed simple, link all individual messaging servers throughout the country
and everything could be monitored from a single location. However, they didn’t
prepare for the inevitable difficulties of managing such a large network from one
location. With over 30 servers spread across the country it became an extremely
time consuming task to account for each and every mail sent through the system, as
well as tracking its movement through the network. And, when client information
began coming up missing and unaccounted for they knew there was a problem that
would have to be addressed immediately, if they were to stay in business.
The Exchange Analyser was initially developed with the idea of helping IT
professionals and management track their messaging systems on a continuous basis.
The primary function of the Exchange Analyser is to collect message tracking logs
and summarize this information into a centralized database for reporting and
analysis.
-5Hypersoft Informationssysteme GmbH
-6Hypersoft Informationssysteme GmbH