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EMC SMARTS/COLT
Colt, a leading European provider of business communications, is focused on outperforming competitors in reliability and value. The company continues to set new standards for service and redefine the concept of customer care in the telecommunications industry.
To meet its ambitious service goals, Colt has invested in the technology, infrastructure, and staff to deliver comprehensive, end-to-end data, voice, and managed services. With the launch of Colt IP VPN Corporate, the company realised it needed a new management solution that supported new service offerings such as MPLS-based VPNs. Colt's strong emphasis on customer service, coupled with customers' expectations of near 100 per cent uptime, drove a requirement for effective network management that would maintain service levels and prevent network disruption.
Colt embarked on a thorough evaluation of several vendors within the network management space, using a live environment. One of the key requirements was that the product should be able to discover all the elements in a complex network. EMC Smarts was the only solution that met this need. EMC Smarts also demonstrated superior levels of accuracy in pinpointing network problems. In addition, minimal customisation was required compared with other network management software. By enabling automation, Smarts allows Colt to increase its competitive advantage by keeping operational costs at a minimum. The solution automates diagnosis of faults and helps illuminate which customers and services are impacted.
With its already proven track record for quality within Colt's European data centres during 2000 to 2002, EMC Smarts was easy to roll out across all of the company's IP services. In the data centres, EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager was quickly and efficiently installed in a matter of hours and rolled out to all locations and data centres across Europe, providing automated intelligent analysis of the network.
Colt deployed EMC Smarts MPLS Manager to manage its IP VPN Corporate product in an environment with over 30,000 devices. Leveraging the patented Smarts Common Information Model, MPLS Manager delivers cross-domain impact analysis of failures and offers visibility into the MPLS-based VPNs.
Colt is also now using Smarts to manage its recently announced Switched Gigabit IP product -- a high-speed managed Gigabit Ethernet IP network -- the first such product in the marketplace.
The ability to find the root cause of problems in the network saves Colt huge amounts of time. After just a few months of using EMC Smarts software, the company found that the average time required to resolve a network problem had been cut in half. When this is multiplied across each problem on each customer network, it adds up to real business benefits.
Re-allocating personnel out of the intensive rules-writing and customisation required by other network management software has improved productivity of network administrators and systems engineers. Unlike the software Colt was previously using, EMC Smarts IP Availability Manager automatically diagnoses and analyses authentic problems that may affect services. The company used to dedicate around 1300 person-hours annually to these tasks. Now, this work has been reduced to virtually zero hours a week, so more time can be spent on other areas of the business such as contract expansion.
EMC Smarts has played a key role in helping Colt monitor and analyse its network more efficiently. With Smarts proactive diagnosis of authentic problems, Colt can now guarantee that a problem will be fixed before it impacts the customer. Perhaps the greatest benefit to end users is that the high-quality service levels they expect and demand are guaranteed, so they can concentrate on running their businesses with confidence.
Details: tel: +44 208 758 6750
e-mail: mlist@smarts.com www.smarts.com
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