Business Impact Summary

Business
Computacenter is Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services. Its German operation offers a full range of IT services to public sector and corporate organisations, including desktop, datacentre and network managed services.

Solution
CA SPECTRUM® Network Fault Manager (NFM) provides Computacenter with automated root cause analysis to enable it to identify and resolve customers’ network issues more quickly. It also provides detailed historical reports that enable Computacenter to evaluate and improve its performance.

Challenge
As part of its managed network services, Computacenter must meet customer expectations as well as fulfill contractual performance agreements. To guarantee high network availability, Computacenter needs to monitor thousands of customer devices round-the-clock and resolve any faults.

Result
Improved network management capabilities have enabled Computacenter to increase the efficiency of its managed services, boost customer satisfaction and safeguard service level agreements.

Business

Helping customers maximize their investment in IT
Computacenter is Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services, with operations in the UK, France, Benelux and Germany. Computacenter Germany provides a full range of IT services — from procurement and integration to comprehensive managed services for the desktop, network and datacentre. Computacenter Germany has a central Logistics and Service Centre near Cologne and 22 regional offices. Its customers include both government and corporate organisations, such as Dresdner Bank, AMB Generali and the German Stock Exchange.

Challenge

Safeguarding service level agreements
The majority of IT managed services provided by Computacenter are subject to contractual service level agreements (SLAs). Meeting these SLAs is not only critical for Computacenter but also its customers, who rely on the company to keep their IT infrastructures and networks highly available.

Uwe Wächter, a Senior Consultant for Computacenter, comments, “Network downtime can have a devastating impact on our customers’ businesses. To meet contractual agreements and ensure we maintain our reputation for excellence, it is crucial that we can monitor customer networks round-the-clock.”

Computacenter monitors thousands of switches, routers and servers on behalf of its customers. Its existing monitoring tools, however, were no longer capable of meeting its needs. In particular, Computacenter needed to improve the efficiency of network fault management. “Without adequate information regarding network incidents, we were unable to easily pinpoint the exact location of an issue,” comments Wächter.

The company was also unable to determine at first glance whether an issue was unique, or simply symptomatic of a previous problem. This meant that help had to be enlisted from highly qualified network experts just to qualify an incident, which was costly and inefficient. 

To improve service quality and transparency, Computacenter also wanted to provide its Customers with the ability to view the status of their own networks.

Solution

Automated and simplified fault management
Computacenter started to evaluate network monitoring solutions in 2002. After researching a number of systems, it eventually selected a CA Network & Voice Management solution, CA SPECTRUM® Network Fault Manager (NFM).

CA SPECTRUM NFM featured excellent root cause analysis tools and provided reporting Capabilities that would help us ensure we were meeting SLAs. We were also impressed with the solution’s intuitive One Click interface,” comments Wächter.

Implementing CA SPECTRUM NFM took just four weeks, and is now used by Computacenter to detect more than 20,000 network incidents every year.

SPECTRUM NFM’s architecture means that Computacenter can monitor multiple Heterogeneous customer networks simultaneously. The CA solution is highly scalable, making it easy for Computacenter to provision new customers. CA SPECTRUM NFM automatically detects networked assets, which is essential considering that the number of devices monitored by the solution has increased ten-fold since implementation.

The most important function for Computacenter, however, is CA SPECTRUM NFM’s root cause analysis, which has simplified troubleshooting, eliminating the need to involve network experts to qualify incidents. As Wächter explains, “The CA solution pinpoints underlying infrastructure problems and suppresses symptomatic alarms so that the network management team is not overwhelmed by meaningless information.”

CA SPECTRUM NFM also provides historical SLA reports to help Computacenter evaluate its performance and drive service improvements. The solution ensures that customers and network administrators can only access views of the networks for which they are responsible.

Results

Greater customer satisfaction
By enhancing fault management, Computacenter is able to respond more effectively to incidents on its customers’ networks. As Wächter confirms, “With CA SPECTRUM NFM we are able to resolve network issues before they impact users. Better network availability and performance equates to happier customers.”

Improved network management capabilities have enabled Computacenter to:

• Increase the ef.ciency of its managed services

• Safeguard service level agreements and the company’s reputation

• Boost customer satisfaction

• Facilitate future growth

“Because of a higher efficiency of our network managed services, we can deliver better quality services to more customers, thereby improving competitive advantage and increasing profitability,” comments Wächter.