Hypersoft Applications

Cross-Platform IT Service Metrics

Measuring infrastructure service delivery

In 2007, RBP, a global pharmaceutical company, decided to implement comprehensive IT service management procedures throughout its global infrastructure in order to raise the level of the quality of the services, offered to its eight business units worldwide. As more and more business processes rely on information technology, transparency and quality of IT service delivery became one of the highest priorities for RBP.

In its search for the solution, capable of providing business measurements, which could be sufficiently scalable for its eighty thousand-strong world-wide organisation and at the same time sufficiently details to deliver auditable and reliable metrics, RBP partnered with Hypersoft Information Systems, a leading provider of IT delivery metrics for global organisations.

Business need

Corporate CRM, which is hosted in the three major data centres and used by thousands of RBP field sales representatives world-wide.

Directory services, based on Microsoft Active Directory with muiltiple forests

Global communication services, which include elements of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, as well as perimeter services (such as mail relay and content filtering), fax, and mobile messaging services

Backup and archiving services

The following key objectives had to be reached:

Define and maintain consistent quality of service, which would be measured according to the requirements of individual business units, their geographies, operating schedules, and typical usage patterns

Collect operational metrics for proactive incident and problem management by internal and external IT personnel

Produce and distributed operational metrics, which needed to be delivered to business units according to the service agreements.

Solution and Results

In 2007, RBP started implementing its move towards ITIL compliance, as well as changing corporate standards to comply with the other best practices of the global service delivery.

To implement a metric solution, which would address the existing business needs, RBP turned to Hypersoft’s OmniAnalyser™ and OmniContext™, having selected it as the main technology for its infrastructure service measurements.

OmniAnalyser™ is specially designed to provide automatic transaction-based end-to-end metering of IT services in large distributed environments. The rational aggregation functionality and advanced filtering turn raw data into relevant business statistics, required by IT service managers and other personnel involved; the intelligent end-user simulation, performed by the agents, dispersed worldwide, delivers objective figures of the service quality, experienced by the real end-users, thus giving solid ground for managing the service portfolio. Innovative processing techniques and user-friendly design distinguish Hypersoft solution as being the choice of industry professionals for all levels of the service delivery.

On deploying the metering framework, the company got a series of clear advantages, contributing to its global corporate service delivery goals.

Different reporting sets were used for monitoring CRM resources and their performance: they provided a full and complete picture of the CRM service quality in accordance with the corporate standards.

The CRM action sets were designed to represent typical activities performed by the field sales people. This provided true and realistic statistics on their interaction with the corporate portals, resulting in timely access to pricing, documentation, and other important sales information.

The action set reporting set supplied with more complex quality measurements that model such specific tasks, done by actual users, as filling out a form, requesting a call-back or searching for information in the company’s database.

As far as the communication infrastructure and specifically enterprise messaging and collaboration is concerned, RBP implemented comprehensive transaction-based data collection with OmniAnalyser™ to obtain a fully integrated set of metrics for its world-wide communication. The quality of service metrics include accurate data on the operations of the collaborative environment, such as message delivery time statistics and availability of collaboration services for specific categories of users and business locations. The volume of service data include summaries and individual details of e-mail and instant messaging traffic, usage patterns of public folder or shared workspaces, thus delivering precise figures for capacity planning and cost chargeback within the organisation.

For each of the services such as messaging, fax, archiving, CRM, collaboration (Microsoft Office Communication Server and Microsoft Sharepoint Services) and others, OmniContext™ and OmniAnalyser™ deliver an individual collection of key metrics, which represent the state-of-the-art understanding of the “right things to measure”, which are clear to non-IT users and at the same time technically meaningful for the IT personnel.

With the possibility of mapping service metrics to business units and directory attributes, which is natively integrated into OmniAnalyser™ software, RBP received virtually countless possibilities for identifying and analyzing the communication patterns both inside and outside the corporate environment. The capability of viewing business metrics by communication directions, levels and channels allowed for identifying service dependencies and correlations that were important for the quality of the service and overall customer satisfaction.

The service availability reporting was implemented in compliance with the definitions of services and service levels, maintained by the company. The non-biased quality metrics also included full integration with the planned and permissible server downtimes, thus keeping the measurements in line with the internal and external service contracts.

Due to the advanced Active Directory integration, it was made possible to logically divide the corporate environment into different regions and other functional units. This proved to be invaluable while monitoring and analyzing end-to-end communication and collaboration services for employees and customers of RBP.

The real-time topology, as the essential part of the solution, provided a permanently updated view of the current status for connectivity between regions and sites, as well as to external internet domains, as well as presented other relevant information for business users and for IT personnel to assist with proactive incident analysis. The threshold alerting, used for this report, monitors the overall infrastructure and warns in case there are service failures.

All services measured by OmniContext™ and OmniAnalyser™ are included in a high-level management scorecard, which is used on a daily basis to automatically track down the entire IT service portfolio. The easy-to-comprehend graphical interface gives an easily understandable view of the status of service delivery, thus allowing for proactive adaptation to the constantly changing service environments and maintenance of the service levels. OmniAnalyser™ also serves as a central repository for all internal and external service contracts, thus integrating the contracts and objectives with the actual operational metrics. This integrated services management allows for focusing more on the actual service delivery, without spending costly effort on the manual data aggregation and processing for the future analysis.

The deployment of Hypersoft products for the four critical IT service areas was completed within less than three months. The capability to integrate all data sets in one central database allowed for substantial savings in computing resources, labour, and time, while at the same time not losing the focus on the core service management objectives.

The operation transparency of OmniAnalyser™, its focus on the business-relevant metrics and robust process automation allowed the business to move to a measurable process of service delivery.