Johannesburg, 08 Mar 2017
There's a reason so many of the world's top companies choose Ensono to help them operate their IT infrastructures and support mission-critical workloads. Formerly Acxiom IT, Ensono has a 46-year history of exceeding customer expectations.
Ensono's exceptional quality has helped it garner much recognition, including the number one ranking in customer satisfaction for IT outsourcing in Data Monitor's Black Book of Outsourcing, and a 100% availability rating from Uptime Institute. The company thinks of itself as a seamless extension of its clients' IT teams, providing them with managed mainframe services, infrastructure management, and secure cloud solutions.
Effective monitoring is crucial to delivering the level of service Ensono's clients require and expect. It's a tough job, because the company has more than 68 000 mainframe MIPS, 10 000 servers, and 10 petabytes of storage under management.
Ensono deals with just about any brand of hardware you can think of and every type of operating system going back as far as OS/2 and all the way forward to today's latest and greatest. The company hosts everything from internal mail servers to e-commerce applications that accept credit cards and healthcare systems that store patient records. Ensono supports virtually every kind of database and application, which means it needs a variety of tools and technologies to help it manage the huge and diverse Ensono environment.
Transforming the monitoring environment
Since 2001, Ensono has relied on solutions from BMC Software to monitor major portions of the environment that it manages. However, it still deals with monitoring tools from other vendors, some of which are owned by clients and others that it has implemented to address specific client requirements. This patchwork of diverse tools worked well in the past. To support today's complex IT needs, however, Ensono needed a sophisticated, holistic monitoring strategy that covers mainframe to cloud and everything in between. With that in mind, Ensono is transforming its monitoring environment and standardising on a single solution that converges application and infrastructure monitoring and centralises visibility across diverse platforms. Its monitoring solution of choice is TrueSight Operations Management from BMC Software.
Historically, monitoring at Ensono has been infrastructure focused, with the emphasis on file systems, data tables, servers, and network devices. It also provides clients with end-user experience monitoring. Its new strategy takes Ensono to the next level: combining application and infrastructure in a single view through TrueSight Operations Management.
Over the next six months, Ensono is upgrading its current BMC monitoring solutions and phasing out non-BMC solutions wherever possible to achieve this centralised visibility into its environment. TrueSight gives Ensono the ability to bring its many different client systems and technologies into a consolidated view. This unification eliminates 15 different tools and consoles our support engineers have had to deal with in the past. They're enthusiastic about gaining visibility across platforms and clients and being able to drill down quickly into the many different hardware types, operating systems, applications, and other application and infrastructure components.
Speed, efficiency, focus
A key focus of Ensono's strategy is faster, more accurate root cause analysis so it can quickly get to the heart of problems and resolve them in less time. Identifying and prioritising critical issues can be extremely difficult in large environments like ours because of the huge volumes of tickets that are generated.
Historically Ensono has done a good job of creating rules that filter incoming tickets to tmake it easier to identify critical issues. But its goal is to do an even better job, and the company is making progress. For example, one of its clients was using a non-BMC monitoring tool that was producing about 10 000 tickets a month. Using BMC solutions, we've been able to reduce that number to approximately 100 a month. That's a huge win for us. It's our goal to cut ticket volume by 75 percent within the next 12-18 months.
The analytics capabilities in TrueSight, such as behavioral learning, are helping Ensono reduce event noise. For example, in less than five minutes, Ensono's IT operations staff can build simple application models that learn application behaviour. Those models will help to reduce false alarms by up to 90%. Additional TrueSight analytics capabilities including probable cause analysis and log analytics will help us pinpoint and contextualise the underlying cause of events to expedite troubleshooting.
Ensono is already beginning to see staff time savings as a result of the reduction in ticket volumes, primarily due to the fact that it is eliminating all the hours it had to spend manually closing out tickets. Traditionally, the company had to schedule someone for 10 hours every Sunday night to close those tickets. Ensono is excited about doing away with this manual task that created no value for our business or clients.
TrueSight also brings an extra level of predictability to Ensono's environment by helping to prioritise and focus. For example, users will know ahead of time when a database table is getting full or an application is running out of disk space. Event prioritisation indexing will enable Ensono to understand, for example, that it needs to work on a particular file system before it works on another issues or problems.
Good for Ensono, good for its clients
The Ensono holistic monitoring strategy is enabling it to deliver better service to its clients, which means they can deliver better service to their customers. That's why clients are so enthusiastic about our transformation.
Recently, the company met with two clients to discuss the advantages of the move to TrueSight. One, a vice-president of information at a distributor of maintenance and repair products, currently employs BMC monitoring solutions. His environment is heavily ticket driven, so he's excited about the advanced capabilities for improving ticket handling efficiency. The other client, a CIO at a global services company, uses monitoring tools from another vendor and is frustrated not only by the huge flood of alerts these tools generate, but also by the limited vendor support. As a result, he is excited to learn more about how advanced TrueSight capabilities can help his organisation.
Ensono is confident that the strategy it is putting in place, built on TrueSight Operations Management, gives it a strong competitive advantage and positions Ensono for the future. It has been providing monitoring services for years, but now it has elevated monitoring to a frontline service that's helping us expand and grow our business.
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