Benefits: Less downtime, better management
“SteelCentral Aternity has enabled us to deliver against all our success criteria,” says Somogyi. “Performance, the monitoring of applications, fast page load times...it has excelled in every use-case.”
He says there is less downtime for users, devices and applications are quicker, and it’s enabled the team to stay one step ahead of any performance issues. Upgrades are managed better, as Somogyi is able to test issues on a smaller user group before rolling out more widely across the organization.
“There are a couple of areas where we’ve seen real benefit to the bank,” he explains. “We had an issue with a new piece of software at our call center that was causing some devices to crash when activating. With SteelCentral Aternity, we identified the problem within a few hours, whereas previously it would have taken approximately five days to solve plus another half a day to fix.
“Secondly, we implemented a new security agent that runs on all clients that had created some performance issues. These issues were not easy to identify with other monitoring tools but Aternity gave us absolute clarity.”
“All of this means our end-user trade is uninterrupted, and our customers can enjoy an efficient and more positive experience from the call center. This has a positive impact on the bank’s revenues and reputation.”
Where other monitoring technologies only extrapolate, emulate, or estimate what the end-user sees, Somogyi says SteelCentral Aternity allows him to understand how end-users experience and interact with their applications, devices, and network. “Using Aternity, we can see issues in real-time. We’re then able to drill down, solve the problem, and show people what the root cause was. We can then be absolutely clear with our advice.”
He says this has had a positive, knock-on effect. Somogyi and the team are seen as faster, more effective and more authoritative in their advice. “We’re now faster to fix and quicker to send reports which has resulted in better collaboration with our users.”
Maximizing the value of Aternity
In 2019 Raiffeisen will upgrade to a newer version of Windows 10. Somogyi says Aternity will be pivotal to the successful roll-out of this upgrade, and to future application decisions.
“We favor web-based applications. We’re already monitoring Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, and can check users’ browsing experience. We’ve added the monitoring of five other applications since implementing Aternity, and we’ll add more next year.”
Somogyi says the bank recognized the strategic benefits of its investment in Riverbed’s end-user experience monitoring solution. “We were never going to invest in new technology and not fully adopt and use it. We felt the benefits and value would be huge if we did things properly. Aternity has given us insight into the experience of our end-users that we didn’t know we were missing before. It’s not enough to simply buy the solution, it’s also important to accept advice on how best to optimize it for your organization.”