Benefits: Effective support and better user experience
The impact, says Jeremy, is far-reaching. Worldwide support is more effective and more consistent. End-users experience fewer issues with devices and applications and management have solid metrics to inform future investment.
“Aternity gathers the information and presents it in a format that is easy to understand,” says Jeremy. “We might have known there was an issue – certainly the most vocal users would let us know but now we have the data to back it up. Aternity adds metrics to perception.”
At an operational level, Aternity enables his team to benchmark performance and alert support whenever, and wherever, there is a deviation. Whether it’s the number of dropped Skype calls in a given week, or the performance of Excel at the Amsterdam office, there is a clearer understanding of what good performance looks like, he says, and when it is time to intervene: “We can now be more proactive because we don’t have as many fires to put out. With SteelCentral, we’re monitoring the heartbeat of the business; if there is an issue we’re often ahead of it.”
By extending SteelCentral to support teams, he continues, he has been able to speed up troubleshooting: “Very often a user knows there is an issue, but can’t articulate the problem. SteelCentral enables the support team to check, say, the last time a device was rebooted, or the type of network connection. It gives us a head start on resolving the problem.”
These metrics, he continues, will also help ensure the more effective delivery of future IT projects: “Investment costs money, it may be disruptive. Now that we can determine the end-user experience, we have a better chance of judging the value of a new project to the business.”
Riverbed’s solution provides immediate insight into how application performance affects productivity. It allows Simmons & Simmons to instantaneously assess how long users wait for business-critical applications, by analyzing application usage, time spent running in the foreground, active time, wait time, and crashes.
“With SteelCentral we can be confident in the work we’re doing,” Jeremy says. “Visibility into the impact of change is a key benefit. When we’re making changes that may affect the end-user, we can test, pilot among a small user group, and be satisfied we haven’t degraded the service. Only then will we fully roll-out worldwide.”
Creating a community of SteelCentral Aternity users
Today, SteelCentral Aternity monitors desktop users at Simmons & Simmons and Jeremy expects to be monitoring all mobile users in the future:
“Desktops are the core of the business, but we know 50% of users are accessing emails on their mobile device. Mobiles are part of a lawyers’ everyday life. We can deploy applications to mobiles securely, so it makes sense for us to understand how these apps are performing.”
He also wants to broaden the use of SteelCentral. Rather than just being a solution for those in IT management, he wants to make it available to a wider user group: “We want to create a community of users,” he says. “With Aternity, it’s a lot easier to spot a problem or trends and the more this becomes part of the daily business of support, the better we’ll be.”
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