Moving to Global Metrics and Billing Environment

Business Need

ETCS, a world-leading provider of global managed services, has decided to re-design its offerings in the area of enterprise infrastructure services in 2006.

Key element of this initiative was developing a service model based on the best practices across the industry, offering to customers not only the technical capabilities but also the vision of the most efficient way to operate infrastructure services. The company was planning on introduction of “productized” services portfolio, which would allow for increasing efficiency as the business grows and new customers sign up.

Solution and Outcome

The company has chosen Hypersoft’s OmniAnalyser™ and OmniContext™ software as core technology of metering and reporting for its infrastructure services offering.

OmniAnalyser™ and OmniContext™ are designed to provide distributed data collection mechanisms by logically not physically determining collection boundaries. Transactional agent-based data collection ensures strict statistics separation for every client, preserving overall data integrity and precision for billing and monitoring purposes. Advanced end-user simulation models specific user-actions that are typical for service in question unfolding the picture of end-to-end service quality as an essential part of service level measurements. Additionally, OmniAnalyser™ and OmniContext™ architecture was developed with a notion of leveraging economies of scale as the business expands and new customers are added. As soon as it is deployed, adding new services and clients requires only a minor spending and little extra effort. These features played a key role in the final decision.

In the beginning of the cooperation licensing model was aligned to match DBMS business model. Starting with only fifty servers four years ago ETCS enterprise infrastructure services quickly grew to running a license for more than four hundred servers operating for thirty customers worldwide and delivering statistics on perimeter, directories, collaboration, web and messaging services in “productized” manner.

In 2007 as the company was migrating to MS Exchange 2007, metrics were accordingly adjusted to support new platform by providing information about quality and usage. Moreover, statistics on IMF was introduced to support IMF security solution that came with Exchange 2007 as well as providing Proofpoint antispam metrics earlier on. All of those changes demanded little effort and costs of adapting were within reasonable limits. Presently the solution is being operated to analyse more than 600 servers providing billing and metrics for all fifty customers globally based on just two leverage instances of the Hypersoft software.

After the launch of the metering and reporting the following benefits became distinctly clear.

All of the reports sets are organized in an intuitively comprehensible manner – by product and service, which simplified service portfolio creation and management.

For monitoring service quality offered with different products End-user Experience reports set was perfectly suitable. It models user activity performing specific tasks, such as sending a message or working with database and shows how well the service is responding allowing to determine overall service quality. This helped the company to organize its service levels management more efficiently.

Server Availability reporting accurately monitored all servers in the infrastructure notifying on overall status of infrastructure. Real-time feature was especially helpful in instant problem recognition from a single location anywhere in the world, resulting in optimizing of service support.

Volume reporting provided with OmniAnalyser™ reports on various standardized usage statistics of databases, public folders, e-mail and web traffic and other services by collecting transaction details from different products and aggregating them to be used for billing or trending of IT use. Cost filter automatically transfers data into billing statistics in accordance with corporate policy.  

As OmniAnalyser™ and OmniContext™ package is an independent instrument it enabled ETCS enterprise infrastructure services to concentrate on the operational side of managed services provision, having Hypersoft solution as a separate component providing metering service for company’s growing client base.

Different scenarios of using metering and reporting component provided greater flexibility for the customers wishing to acquire relevant statistics, which matched ETCS “productized” services portfolio requirement. Furthermore, introducing new metrics for old and new clients was implemented with little struggle and only at a fraction of a cost of the initial deployment, and so leveraging across multiple customers. Since all metrics is stored and processed in one central location this resulted in increased savings and other financial benefits that enabled efficient expansion of company’s metrics service on a global scale.

Data collection and processing is fully automated, so there was no need for enterprise infrastructure services to monitor report delivery process; once configured – reporting and billing engine runs autonomously, delivering statistics by schedule.

Modular flexibility that came with OmniAnalyser™ and OmniContext™ narrowed the chances of having any problems during migration to new platforms which fulfilled one of the initial demands from the company side. With new products introduced (like MS Exchange 2007) the overall move to new reporting did not meet any unexpected challenges that could not be harmonized against. Moreover, due to central data accumulation reporting logically bound older and newer versions of platforms providing objective overall picture on quality, volumes and traffic during the migration period.

The general outcome of partnership with Hypersoft is enterprise infrastructure services relieved from managing its measurements so concentration on service delivery became the main goal. Automated operation, ease of adapting to new technologies and products as well as low operating and migrating overheads increased the overall return on investment, enabling channeling funds into global expansion of ETCS enterprise infrastructure services.

By providing a reliable productized metrics with low maintenance and upgrade overheads managed service provider leveraged its services against growing complexities of its clients’ portfolio and ensured sustainable controlled growth of the company on a global scale.