Service Intelligence at Work:
Telecommunications
Success At A Glance
Industry:
Telecommunications
Primary business:
Communications, services, and media
Employees:
> 100,000
Challenge:
Implement fair and equitable
cost-allocations, based on actual
usage, rather than budget
allocations or estimates
Free IT resources for more strategic
projects, by identifying specifi c
cost-cutting opportunities
Solution:
Evident Enterprise and Evident
Internet products
Evident Professional Services team
Result:
Approximately $1.2M in cost
savings, within fi rst quarter of
product use
Better insight for IT optimization,
and new strategic initiatives
Alignment with Finance and
Business peers for IT cost-allocation
and budgeting
Figure 1: Sample data from an
Evident report. Profi ling
applications by usage and
costs highlighted immediate
cost-savings opportunities.
Company Profi le
A Fortune Global 500 telecommunications operator. The client offers local and long-
distance phone service, with tens of millions of access lines, and provides Internet
and other data services.
Challenge
The client was in the process of separating its business entities into legal and
fi nancially independent units. As such, it required an unprecedented level of IT
Service Intelligence, including the need to gather usage and cost intelligence,
for accurate IT cost-allocation. Moreover, the client utilizes Evident Software’s
technology to optimize its IT investments’ ROI, pinpointing cost-cutting
opportunities and freeing resources for strategic initiatives.
Results and Benefi ts
An estimated $1.2 million saved in one quarter by using Evident’s solution. The
Evident Enterprise solution allows the client to manage IT investments more wisely.
The client received fi nancial benefi ts by acting on Evident’s IT Service Intelligence
that identifi ed:
Prioritization of Applications
Profi ling application usage and costs revealed unusual activity in a non-critical
Transportation Management application. Network or systems management
tools currently in place were not able to capture the costs associated with an
unnecessary traffi c pattern, which was caused by a mis-confi guration with the
application’s authentication process. Evident’s usage and cost modeling revealed
the usual behavior, which improved the system’s performance and saved the
client an estimated $100,000 annually (See Figure 1).
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Intelligence to Drive IT Value
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True Capacity Requirements
A primary data center had just been
upgraded with new networking
links. It was therefore planned to
upgrade a secondary data center
to match the fi rst, since it served
as a backup for the primary one.
But not every application in the
primary center required fail-over
to the secondary data center. How
much capacity was really required
at the secondary data center? Using
Evident’s IT Service Intelligence,
actual usage and associated costs
could be modeled and analyzed. In
this case, the fail-over traffi c trends
provided the factual basis to support
a decision to not upgrade the data
center’s networking links, saving the
customer an estimated $780,000
in additional fees, which were then
allocated to more strategic projects.
Internet Cost-Savings
Evident Software staff recognized
that Internet use — as is the case
for many clients — could be a
signifi cant drain on IT resources; the
client agreed this might be the case
for them. They decided to profi le
Internet usage – by cost, rather
than network volumes. Evident
revealed the “unknown top-talkers”
— desktops or servers that IT cannot
immediately identify. Though
organizations typically have many
unknown assets in their global
environment, ‘top-N’ analysis turns
the spotlight on those with the most
likely cost and performance impact.
Typically, this helps IT work with the
business units to affect user behavior
that is particularly costly for IT. For
this client, one of the top three
turned out to be a Web monitoring
server that was downloading the
entire Web site daily to check for
errors and inconsistencies. The
owner of the server was unaware
it was still operating! It was
immediately suspended, saving the
client an estimated $120,000/year.
Server Utilization Trends
This client discovered a server was
running between 98-100% CPU
utilization. Evident’s IT Service
Intelligence provided a new way to
evaluate this: to monitor usage of the
server. They found that instead of
only having one daily fi le to process,
it was actually processing six fi les
— fi ve of which were being sent in
error. These errant fi le transfers were
ceased and the CPU percent dropped
to manageable levels, reversing the
planned server upgrade and saving
approximately $10,000.
The client also decided to analyze a
particular application and profi le its
traffi c patterns. Most of the traffi c
to the application server originated
from one particular location. The
local system administrator moved
the server from one computer center
to another, reducing WAN traffi c
estimated at $150,000/year.
What’s Next?
Based on the client’s early success,
Evident Soft
ware’s professional services
have been engaged to perform an
Expert Data Analysis, conducting
a more detailed analysis of the IT
Service Intelligence being gathered
by the solution. An expert team from
Evident Software will help the client
identify more opportunities to better
manage IT investments. The client is
eager to reduce spending on non- and
counter-productive resource usage.
The client has also upgraded to the
latest version of Evident Enterprise. The
client also integrated Evident’s data
with its fi nancial systems, to improve its
budgeting and analyses.
Approximately $1.2M in
cost savings were identifi ed
within the fi rst quarter of
product use.
Why Evident Software?
Evident Software enabled the client
to manage their IT investments more
wisely: improving performance,
reducing costs, freeing resources for
strategic projects, and providing insight
unavailable from other enterprise
management systems. During the
initial implementation, the client quickly
identifi ed cost-cutting opportunities and
has extended the scope of the project
to apply Evident’s IT Service Intelligence
more broadly across the enterprise.
Evident was the client’s vendor of choice
because of our success with other
Fortune 500 reference customers. As is
the case with other Evident customers,
the client needed this critical information
on IT usage, costs and their business
drivers, to manage IT like any other
corporate investment. With Evident, the
client is able to ana
lyze IT spend, and
better understand the costs of IT service
delivery to their customers.