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Case Studies
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“The Money Pit”
Temporary Employment Agency
A multi-location agency providing temporary employees and managed HR functions experienced a decline in business activity due to the economic down turn. Their poorly documented network, use of inappropriate technologies and lack of controls caused excessive costs for the voice and data network.
The Knight Vision™ process was used to discover the current configuration, operating level, and costs for their voice and data activities. The process also revealed resource surpluses along with inappropriate carrier charges and helped to gain an understanding of the most appropriate solution. Based on the findings, we were able to re-design the network to fit the needs of the company by employing the most appropriate WAN technology for the data applications and the best mix of services for their voice applications.
This effort reduced the monthly voice and data network costs by 58% and improved overall control of the environment. In addition, we determined the company was entitled to a credit of $49,000 from a WAN provider due to billing errors
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“So Much Bandwidth, So Little Performance”
Regional CLEC/DLEC/ISP
A regional telecommunications carrier created out of the deregulated atmosphere in the telecommunications industry was struggling with the bottom line. Their network was the result of a non-rigorous design and growth through acquisition. As a result the provider found they were spending considerable resources delivering services to their customer base. Although they had incorporated lots of expensive bandwidth, their services suffered from poor quality in terms of response time and throughput with inefficient service delivery and frequent outages.
Our Knight Vision™ process was used to discover the current network configuration, the current operating service level of the network, and the current costs of delivering network services. We were able to redesign the network to deliver higher levels of performance while lowering the cost of delivering network services. With a greater understanding of the network we could identify unused or under used resources, the most appropriate equipment configuration settings, the best way to purchase bandwidth from Tier 1 and 2 providers, and the most effective way to deploy resources in their network.
We estimated the new design would provide improved throughput and response time characteristics consistent with industry best practices. In addition, our analysis recovered $36,000 per month from unused, underused and uncharged resources (including taxes) for a projected savings (over a 5 year period @ 5% Annual Rate of Return) of about $2,500,000. This represents an 18% savings per month adding to the bottom line in a slim margin business. In addition, we determined the reconfigured network had capacity for an additional $55,500 per month in retail services with no additional network expansion.
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“The Sieve”
Specialty Paper Manufacturer
A manufacturer of specialty paper products had grown to 15 locations through the merger and acquisition of other paper manufacturing companies. Their data network is used to support a variety of applications typical of a manufacturing company. Applications included Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Internet Access, Back Office (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, etc.) and E-Mail. Their network was decentralized, poorly documented, difficult to manage, expensive, served by multiple carriers, and plagued by security breaches and excessive down time. The firm was “black listed” on the Internet, due to security breaches, causing great difficulty with their email and web site.
Our Knight Vision™ process was used to troubleshoot the prevailing problems and determine the best configuration to improve the reliability, availability, and security, while reducing the costs and defining a pro-active management plan. We were able to determine the exact nature of the network's inner workings discovering; incorrect equipment configurations, incorrect billing from the WAN provider, incorrect provisioning from WAN provider, security holes and penetration efforts, performance problems, contributing factors to downtime and reliability, improperly deployed technologies, and cost saving opportunities. The redesigned network consolidated WAN services, implemented new security policies, and improved performance.
Our efforts led to raising their security levels to industry best practices and resumption of normal business activities including removal from the list of banned sites. We were able to redesign, re-deploy and add resources to the network as necessary to achieve increased reliability, availability, security, through-put and realize a 65% reduction in the cost of bandwidth for the network. The available bandwidth was more than doubled and we were still able to reduce the overall monthly costs by 15%. In addition, our analysis created a credit request leading to $22,000 in returned payments.
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“You want to run what on the network?”
In today’s environment we are challenged to look for increasingly efficient ways to utilize our network infrastructures for both voice and data. Convergence is certainly a method being offered up today as “the” pathway to higher levels of efficiency and manageability, but it is also a term that we are seeing and hearing more about in practically every forum and industry publication available today. So we must ask our selves some questions. Do we really know what it is? Do we know how it will impact our existing network? Is it an environment in which our business applications can or will exist?
The reality is, that almost all of our equipment manufacturers in the voice and data arenas have deployed product that is moving customers towards operationally converged backbones. Many of them are doing it with voice over and / or video over IP migration arrangements as a first step. Can they work? Sure. Do they work as well as we would like them to? Often times not. Why?
It takes a very concerted effort to evaluate, assess and blend the Traditional Voice and Video Applicational Environs into the world of IP. Although the manufacturers do a very good job at evaluating the requirements for the specific needs of their own product, they cannot be expected to also evaluate, assess and have knowledge of every other application running across your corporate infrastructure. Yet, this is one of the most critical steps in ensuring a successful migration. The applications that are converging on the IP backbone are typically given some considerable priority, but what effects will that incipient prioritization have on the rest of your business applications? Only through careful and skilled analysis can that be determined.
MSI, evaluates all aspects of the convergence envelope from ‘plumbing’ to ‘Application’ and recommends solutions that improve your bottom line while allowing you to sleep better at night. After all, if you expect the best from the rest of your corporate resources, you should from your network as well.
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We could Manage this better, if we only new how to do it!!!
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure. One of the by-products of our Knight Vision™ process is a current and target network service level envelope. This envelope provides the manager with the target values to manage toward. The goals of the network are expressed in quantitative terms and presented to the manager using a variety of visualization techniques.
Our training ties the service level envelope to the classical functions of network management, Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security (FCAPS). We define the process of guiding the behavior of the network to meet the mission goals of the corporation. Proactive management procedures are used to keep the network behaving within the confines of the desired envelope. Tools are discussed in the context of supporting the FCAPS effort and the procedures designed to affect positive network behavior.
Network managers are exposed to desired network behaviors, the effects of parameter changes and the ability to make decisions based on understanding the current conditions and desired results. In addition, these seminars are designed to teach “intelligence gathering”, mission planning, execution, and teamwork. This curriculum is designed to provide knowledge of how networks work, the role and use of tools and the skills required to control network behavior through the introduction of control inputs with an understanding the expected results in a combination of technology and process.
Attainment of these skills would produce skilled network managers possessing a blend of knowledge, procedures, planning and execution skills. Senior level managers would be able to pass some of the skills onto their junior staff.
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