OmniAnalyser™ monitoring and reporting helps Pirelli to design its messaging system effectively

	"With the implementation of OmniAnalyser™, Pirelli has better control and knowledge – also retrospective – of the messaging system performance. Besides, we succeeded to let IT Security Department conduct data management, research and analysis activities autonomously — it no longer requires administrative intervention". Flavio Belloni, Enterprise Infrastructure & Global E-mail Support Manager of Pirelli Group.

General Presentation

Pirelli Group is a global provider of tires, telecom and energy cables and systems. It was founded in 1872 in Milan. Now Pirelli operates on the international basis, being present in 25 countries with 80 factories, more than 36 thousand employees and a marketing network covering over 120 countries around the world. The company is one of the world leaders in the markets of infrastructure for energy and data transmission, and it ranks among the world's top tire manufacturers.

Business Need

Pirelli’s infrastructure counts 40 Microsoft Exchange servers around the world. To accommodate the requirements of cross-border and cross-continental business communication the company was looking for best technologies for messaging analysis and management.

In 2003 Pirelli Group discovered the necessity to solve four macro needs, says Flavio Belloni, Enterprise Infrastructure & Global E-mail Support Manager of Pirelli Group. 1. To monitor mail servers performance and collect appropriate statistical data on usage and trends in mail traffic. 2. To allow IT Security Department conduct autonomous analysis and research of the mail system. 3. To monitor delivered IT service levels. 4. To quantify the value of messaging communication in order to decide on its long-term development.

These needs involved different departments and businesses inside the Pirelli Group, but all of them were interested in more control, more security and in the transparent knowledge of service levels performed by the messaging systems.

Solution and Results

Pirelli discovered OmniAnalyser™ – a solution by Germany-based Hypersoft at a Microsoft event when testing of two other leading competitive products has already been in place.

OmniAnalyser™, which was finally chosen by Pirelli, is a software solution providing comprehensive information on corporate messaging infrastructure, server availability and health, mail traffic statistics, information store, public folders, replication and database contents. It delivers performance indicators that allow both macro- and micro-evaluation of delivered IT services. The generated statistics is used for performance control, for usage analysis and trends definition, for network optimization and, consequently, for the superior quality of the enterprise messaging services.

The request of Pirelli Group was taken by Securicomm Italia - Hypersoft’s official reseller in Italy, and a reliable partner in implementation and support of the solution.

In the end of 2003, Pirelli bought OmniAnalyser™ from Securicomm Italia. Securicomm installed and configured OmniAnalyser™ in Milan datacenter, which was to become the central location to host the reporting database and run reports for Italy and for all Pirelli’s international sites. The data from MS Exchange servers all over the world is collected by Hypersoft OmniAgents, which send information to the central analysis center via e-mail.

Hypersoft’s technology won, regardless of good evaluation results for the other two products, due to the following major reasons, explains Flavio Belloni.

First of all, the Agent technology that used e-mail data transport in compressed and secure format, allows to collect data from remote locations without loading networks or giving additional cross-site permissions; another advantage was the simplicity of installation and configuration in the mixed-mode environment (Pirelli worked with both Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5 servers); the technology for reporting “inactive” mailboxes was found superior to that of competitor products; great value was in the possibility to integrate data about other services (in this case Sybari Antivirus). Pirelli appreciated the update management and support, and finally the availability and fast reaction time to the Pirelli’s requests from Securicomm Italia and Hypersoft.

The introduction of OmniAnalyser™ allowed Pirelli Group to monitor the compliance of messaging service levels with requirements from business units, optimization of resource consumption, a higher security level for business communication.

As explained by Flavio Belloni, Pirelli uses some of Hypersoft’s numbers on monthly basis for statistical purposes, while operational and realtime reports allow system administrators to intervene timely, optimize hardware resources usage, allowing drilldown to the system’s parameters and performance. “There were noticed, for instance - adds Flavio Belloni, a significant number of inactive service mailboxes. With the implementation of OmniAnalyser™, Pirelli has better control and knowledge – also retrospective – of the messaging system performance. Besides, we succeeded to let IT Security Department conduct data management, research and analysis activities autonomously — it no longer requires administrative intervention”.

Among other frequently used statistics, Pirelli finds useful the reports on data volumes and number of messages flowing through corporate e-mail networks, top 15 Incoming/Outgoing messages from/to External Domains, the traffic between internal domains, the traffic for countries, and inactive users statistics (allowing to remove redundant resources, in accordance with company policies).

Pirelli Group has implemented OmniAnalyser™ technology to set up efficient service level management for its corporate messaging environments. It allowed to monitor retrospectively and real-time its complicated system of worldwide electronic mail communication, to evaluate and undertake strategic improvements in company’s IT environment and business chains. This scope of analysis and monitoring activity has been executed, as explained by Flavio Belloni — to reach the company’s initial goals (the reasons for buying OmniAnalyser™): control, security and service level.

Paola Pasqué – Securicomm Italia
in the kind collaboration with
Flavio Belloni – Enterprise Infrastructure & Global E-mail Support Manager of Pirelli Group.

Source: DataManager Magazine, 2005.