BT: BlackBerry MSP Uses BoxTone to Deliver High Quality Service at Lower Cost
The Company
Headquartered in London and operating in 170 countries globally, BT is one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions and services. Its principal activities include networked IT services, local, national and international telecommunications services, and higher-value broadband and internet products and services. In the UK, BT serves over 18 million business and residential customers, as well as providing access and backhaul products to the communications and internet industry. The company is also one of the largest suppliers of networked IT solutions and services to the UK government. Increasingly, BT is being called on to manage complex BlackBerry® deployments as the popularity of the smartphones accelerates across its enterprise client base.
The Challenge: Proactively Manage BlackBerry Smartphones for Government Officials
For a large British Government Agency, BT provides a BlackBerry platform managed service comprised of 600 BlackBerry smartphones provisioned to 2 BlackBerry® Enterprise Server for Microsoft Exchange; two corresponding email attachment servers; 2 servers for the BlackBerry Router; and 2 SQL Servers. The users are senior government ministers and civil servants who demand unparalleled BlackBerry service quality and support.
However, other third-party service providers manage the Microsoft® Exchange email servers and wireless carriers through which BlackBerry email flows, placing critical components outside of BT’s control. And no matter what the cause of a BlackBerry outage or slowdown, BT knew that as the key Managed Service Provider, the Government Agency would likely seek its help first; and that it needed to proactively deliver the managed service, anticipating and preventing problems before they became apparent to users.
But as the team began to more actively monitor performance and troubleshoot issues, they often found themselves manually grappling with individual BlackBerry smartphone user service level information contained in lengthy, detailed log files. What it needed was virtual real-time alerting on issues across all BlackBerry communication links, whether under BT’s control or not; consoles with “at a glance” system health and drilldown capabilities; Tier 1-level visibility to individual user issues; access to troubleshooting diagnostics and knowledgebase; and comprehensive reports to remediate chronic issues.
The Solution: BoxTone for BlackBerry
After investigating several solutions, BT chose BoxTone for BlackBerry management and monitoring software. Explained Rich Young, the BT technical engineer in charge of the BlackBerry deployment for the Government Agency, “BoxTone is simple to configure and its graphical interface makes it easy to see any problems. In addition, the standard BlackBerry Enterprises Server logs require a great deal of interpretation. BoxTone automatically sorts, filters and analyzes this log-level information, proactively alerting us to what’s important while providing the meaning of any error messages along with suggested resolutions.”
BoxTone software measures every email and data flow, reconstructing every hop across the Government Agency’s entire BlackBerry platform, including the wireless carriers, RIM Network Operations Centre, Microsoft Exchange Servers, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and BlackBerry smartphones. In virtual real-time, BoxTone automatically analyzes and correlates this data across user groups, infrastructure measurements and learned baselines. This truly unique approach from BoxTone enables IT administrators to better understand the collective and individual experiences of their end users.
BoxTone software addresses the need for proactive BlackBerry monitoring and alerting, notifying administrators in virtual real-time of any problems with an individual smartphone or with the end-to-end supporting platform. BoxTone’s Web-based engineering, operations and technical support consoles show the location of the problem on the platform, allowing the IT group to quickly isolate issues; while comprehensive reports and knowledge-base driven diagnostics enable technical support and administrators to quickly troubleshoot issues, and to make the changes needed to prevent more chronic issues from recurring.
Through the managed service on this project, BT uses BoxTone to monitor both the health and availability of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server as well as individual users. Said Alan Calverley, gateway team leader for BT for the project, “We monitor all the individual BlackBerry smartphones. If the BoxTone system detects a problem, its graphical interface displays the user in a red critical state; we can then drill down to information from the last 24 hours or more to see if that user has had any problems sending or receiving emails. We can also see immediately if the BlackBerry Enterprise Server is sending and receiving messages.”
If the team does uncover an issue, BoxTone assists with its troubleshooting efforts. Said Calverley, “If there’s a problem with an individual user, we look at the user summary in BoxTone and drill down to the user performance details. If we see any service count errors on the Server, we can drill down to investigate them. What used to be a labor-intensive troubleshooting effort now takes dramatically less time and is far more effective, thanks to BoxTone.”
And while BT does not have responsibility for the Government Agency’s Microsoft Exchange servers or for the wireless carriers that provide BlackBerry data services, BoxTone’s visibility to these critical BlackBerry communication links means that if issues do arise, BT can quickly inform the appropriate third-party service provider of the issue, its location, and a suggested resolution. This means collectively the various managed services companies can deliver higher quality of service and faster response times – all at a lower cost to serve.
The Results
BT’s managed services team for the project can now proactively manage individual BlackBerry smartphones along with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to which they are provisioned. Said Calverley, “Without BoxTone, we might not know there was a problem until a user called and told us; now we can see the issue before the user is aware of it and investigate it proactively.”
BoxTone also simplifies and speeds up the troubleshooting process. Said Young, “Without BoxTone, we’d need to spend more time going to the BlackBerry website or Google to figure out what a particular error message means. BoxTone acts like an expert system. It incorporates a lot of knowledge about BlackBerry Enterprise Server errors that enables it to automatically interpret error messages and provide suggested fixes. That means that we don’t waste an expert’s time looking at things we don’t need to. They immediately have an indication of where the problems lie.”
For BT, that means in its MSP role, it can deliver a high quality of service at a lower cost to serve – a win-win for BT, the other service providers involved, and the Government Agency.
And with BoxTone firmly in place, BT is confident that it is doing all the right things needed to ensure that the Government Agency’s growing BlackBerry platform will continue to deliver the superior service levels that users demand.
Read more case studies >>>