Synopsys: Shortens BlackBerry MTTR from Days to Minutes Using BoxTone
The Company
With over 5000 employees and revenues of more than $1 billion, Synopsys, Inc. is a world leader in semiconductor design software, intellectual property (IP), design for manufacturing (DFM) solutions and professional services that companies use to design systemson-chips (SoCs) and electronic systems.
The Challenge: Managing Six Stovepipe Links
The Synopsys IT team supports BlackBerry smart phones for the company’s sales force, engineers and executives worldwide. Because the BlackBerry platform spans six separate “stovepipe” links, both within and outside the firewall, troubleshooting outages was quite complex. The six links span:
- Over 1,700 BlackBerry users
- More than 10 wireless carriers worldwide
- The RIM BlackBerry network
- Internal networks that connect 78 sites worldwide
- More than 15 internal BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES)
- More than 20 Microsoft Exchange Email servers worldwide
“Finding the cause of a problem was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Vipul Vishwanath, senior manager of IT at Synopsys. “Whenever we had an outage, six different teams managing six different silos of operations were looking at each other for answers. As our sales and executive teams started relying more on the BlackBerry, the pressure mounted for achieving operational excellence and matching the service levels like other critical IT services, one requirement of the solution was to proactively find what was going on in the infrastructure and applications and arrive at the root cause without losing time.”
The Requirements
As the IT team searched for a solution, they wanted one that could:
- Determine which of the six silos was not working in tandem with the others
- Allow the BlackBerry system manager to drill down on the problem silo to find the root cause of the problem; for example, if the problem was with a carrier, IT wanted to easily determine which one.
- Provide proactive alerts for problems with a particular user’s BlackBerry, a group of BlackBerry users, or with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server or email connection
- Track acceptable trends or situations to avoid flagging them as errors or Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. Examples of acceptable trends include planned quarterly delays by a few minutes due to l system maintenance or an executive who lives outside the coverage area and is out of range every evening.
Why BoxTone?
After searching the market and inviting many companies for product demos and evaluations Synopsys chose BoxTone for BlackBerry management and monitoring software because it addressed all of its objectives.
Synopsys particularly liked the fact that BoxTone could provide clear visibility of all mail flows, and, when a problem occurs, BoxTone would show specifically where a message has stopped in the process of the mail flow and then enable IT to drill down to find the source of the problem.
The Implementation
Synopsys found BoxTone easy to install. Said Vishwanath, “The deployment was quite simple. BoxTone gave us training and an onsite consultant helped us with the implementation and configuration. We got the software up and running the same day.”
The Solution
Using BoxTone for BlackBerry, Synopsys has set up proactive alerts that are integrated with IT managers’ emails and pagers and provide real-time warnings of problems with:
- Individual BlackBerry smartphones for specific groups of key executives
- The health and availability of the BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, including all BES services
- Email flow for every critical link: measuring and correlating flow from the Microsoft Exchange servers, to the BES messaging agents, through the various BESs, outside the firewall to the RIM NOC, and then delivered via a wireless carrier to the end user’s smartphone.
Said Vishwanath, “We created our own map and groups of key executives and sales representatives and track their BlackBerry smart phones. When monitoring servers and email traffic, Synopsys uses BoxTone software to proactively notify IT of any unplanned carrier outages or slowdowns. If an outage does occur, IT uses BoxTone to determine which link in the BlackBerry platform is causing it and to drill down further to isolate the root cause and resolve them.”
Results: Proactive Management, Faster Troubleshooting, Reduced Costs
The biggest benefit BoxTone has provided Synopsys is the ability to proactively keep its BlackBerry platform running smoothly. Says Vishwanath, “Executive end users at Synopsys increasingly rely on mobile devices to get their jobs done. They want to take their BlackBerry smartphone for granted, which means they need to work, 24 X 7, with no excuses. If there’s a problem, I need to know about it before they do because if our management capabilities are not at this level, it can be detrimental to the company. Using BoxTone for BlackBerry’s proactive management capabilities, we know about impending problems with someone’s BlackBerry before they do.”
BoxTone’s end-to-end visibility into the Synopsys BlackBerry deployment has also dramatically reduced the time it takes to troubleshoot and repair any problems that do occur. Says Vishwanath, “We have reduced troubleshooting time by 70 percent. For example, if it used to take us a day to find and fix a problem, we now know the source of the problem immediately and can fully investigate and resolve the problem in a few minutes. Faster troubleshooting has also allowed us to redeploy two administrators who had previously helped manage our BlackBerry network.”
Synopsys also runs monthly reports on inactive BlackBerry users. If it finds someone who hasn’t used his or her BlackBerry for more than 60 days, it can take back the unit and assign it to another user. This eliminates unnecessary charges for unused assets.
Overall, using BoxTone for BlackBerry software, Synopsys has achieved its goal of proactively managing its BlackBerry platform, has dramatically reduced the time it takes to repair problems that occur, and has lowered BlackBerry costs related to operations.
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