ZON Multimedia

The need

Disparate systems and manual processes made it difficult for ZON IT staff to proactively recognize infrastructure problems before customers were impacted and to quickly identify the root cause of service issues. “Whenever our engineering team bought a new network element, it came with its own management platform,” says Rui Ferreira, service director for ZON Multimedia. “We had nearly 10 different windows to monitor and received 1,000 critical alarms and 8,000 major alarms per week on average. It made it impossible to focus on what was really important.”

The solution

Working with IBM, ZON is moving to an Integrated Service Management model for its data center. “We are starting with fault and performance management to construct the necessary foundation,” explains Ferreira. “We then are moving to service quality management and customer experience management.”

The solution—which is based on IBM® Tivoli® Network Manager, IBM Tivoli Netcool®/OMNIbus, IBM Tivoli Netcool/Impact and IBM Tivoli Monitoring—automatically correlates, consolidates and enriches infrastructure events, displaying them on a single dashboard. This gives operational staff the visibility needed to rapidly identify and resolve emerging problems before customers are affected. Built-in automation enables the system to automatically restart network or server components if certain conditions are met. Early notification of emerging problems allows staff to proactively plan and schedule maintenance for greater control of service quality. Integration of event and trouble ticket information enables staff to trace the history of a ticket to the actual event for a more accurate assessment regarding outage times and service performance.

“With Tivoli software, we now receive on average only 22 critical events and 100 major events per week, a nearly 98 percent reduction from before,” says Ferreira. “This permits our network operations team to focus on the events that matter and better utilize our first- and second-line staff to reduce costs.”

In selecting IBM Tivoli software, ZON evaluated the total cost of ownership (TCO) between its existing HP installation and the IBM solution. “We compared three options,” says Ferreira. “If we maintained our current solution, if we upgraded the current solution, and if we migrated to IBM. The TCO showed the IBM solution to be most favorable in terms of reducing operating and capital expenses.”

A significant concern in implementing any new solution is training time for employees. According to Ferreira, the IBM platform also offered a faster return on investment in terms of training. “We measured the time staff needed to learn about the basic principles of each platform,” says Ferreira. “With the IBM platform, the time to train a new person was reduced from six months to just one month, with new team members able to solve nearly 90 percent of incidents presented.”

The benefit

• 98 percent reduction in the number of events each week
• 80 percent decrease in training time along with a reduction in operational and capital expenses
• Improved customer service with the ability to proactively plan and schedule maintenance to maintain signal and distribution quality

For more information

To learn more about Integrated Service Management solutions from IBM, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/tivoli