BoxTone - The Expert in Mobile User Management

BoxTone — The Expert in Moble User Management

BlackBerry ROI: The New Math

Company
Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Company is one of the leading educational publishers in the United States, with more than $1.4 billion in sales. The Company publishes a comprehensive set of educational solutions, ranging from research-based textbook programs to instructional technology to standards-based assessments for elementary and secondary schools and colleges. The Company also publishes an extensive line of reference works and award-winning fiction and nonfiction for adults and young readers. In 2006, Houghton Mifflin merged with Riverdeep, bringing together one of the most respected print publishers with the leader in interactive courseware. With origins dating back to 1832, Houghton Mifflin combines its tradition of excellence with a commitment to innovation. To learn more about Houghton Mifflin, visit www.hmco.com.

The BlackBerry Network
Houghton Mifflin supplies more than 850 BlackBerry smartphones to its sales force, executives, and IT group. The BlackBerry network includes 2 BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for Microsoft Exchange and 1 BlackBerry Enterprise Server for IBM Lotus Domino connected to 8 email servers and two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile).

The Challenge: Going from Reactive to Proactive
Until recently, Houghton Mifflin's messaging technologies IT team monitored the health of its BlackBerry network by launching echo emails every one half hour; if the team didn't receive the message on their own BlackBerry smartphones they would know to check for problems. However as Chip Brady, manager of Messaging Technologies, Corporate IT at Houghton Mifflin says, "The system was kludged together. It wasn't very effective or proactive."

If this rudimentary monitoring system did uncover a problem, the group had no way to determine precisely what was causing it -- whether it was the BlackBerry smartphone, the carrier, the BES or the mail server. "We'd start at Point A, go to Point B and cycle through various different scenarios looking for a log jam," says Brady. "As a result, if users called in we couldn't necessarily tell them the cause of the problem. This didn't give our sales force and executives a great deal of confidence in our ability to manage the network." It also meant that it took a long time to solve problems and made it difficult to prevent them.

The Houghton Mifflin IT organization needed a solution that would allow it to proactively monitor and troubleshoot problems across all communication links of the BlackBerry network, including, most importantly, each individual user's BlackBerry smartphone.

The Choice: BoxTone for BlackBerry
Houghton Mifflin selected BoxTone® for BlackBerry management and monitoring software. Says Brady, "At the time we selected BoxTone, other solutions were available that could manage individual mail servers and network operation centers (NOCs). But we wanted a comprehensive solution that could proactively monitor the entire BlackBerry environment from smartphone to carrier to BES to mail server. BoxTone was the only solution that allowed us to monitor what was going on with all those systems from a single GUI."

Houghton Mifflin also concluded that BoxTone would best complement its investment in Neverfail for RIM BlackBerry, a high availability and disaster recovery solution that provides fast, seamless failover and switchback capabilities, along with automatic resynchronization between a primary and secondary BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Says Brady, "The combination of BoxTone and Neverfail was a natural. Both solutions are designed to ensure that our high-value BlackBerry users have superior BlackBerry experience wherever they may go. And we are now more confident than ever that we have a rock solid BlackBerry platform built for user and application growth."

How BoxTone Works
BoxTone software measures every email and data flow, reconstructing every hop across the company's entire BlackBerry system. In real time, BoxTone automatically analyzes and correlates this data across user groups, infrastructure measurements and learned baselines. By aggregating individual availability and performance data in this way, IT administrators can better understand the collective and individual experiences of their end users.

With BoxTone, auto-generated, real-time alerts proactively advise the Houghton Mifflin IT group when and where service level thresholds are violated. When incidents occur, they can now much more quickly troubleshoot service issues -- whether they occur within the internal BlackBerry system or outside the firewall, such as within the carrier network. Intuitive Web-based consoles, which visually map the end-to-end BlackBerry system, coupled with BoxTone's knowledgebase-driven diagnostics, further drive faster issue isolation and resolution.

Houghton Mifflin is also turning to BoxTone to manage BlackBerry service levels by user group - such as sales professionals or executives by region - and by carrier. By comparing trend data for these different groups and network components, Corporate IT not only can understand whether a disruption or slow-down is regional or nationwide, but can make adjustments to any under-performing regional networks.

Results
BoxTone has succeeded in addressing all of Houghton Mifflin's requirements. Says Brady, "If there's a problem, we know ahead of the users and can notify them. In the best case, we can fix problems before anyone is impacted; at worst, users know we're on top of the issue."

The Corporate IT group can now better track BlackBerry issues for individual users. When a problem occurs with an individual smartphone, the BoxTone platform can tell the service desk the specific smartphone and configuration in question -- rather than having to rely on users to provide that information or send in their smartphone. IT can also track activity on the smartphone remotely. For example, says Brady, "If we see that messages have started to build up on a particular user's smartphone, we can contact the user and find out if they are having issues. If it turns out they have lost their BlackBerry, we can send them a new one and kill the old one so private company data is not circulated inadvertently."

In addition to faster, more proactive troubleshooting, BoxTone has provided Houghton Mifflin with significant asset management capabilities, to great effect. For example, once deployed, BoxTone's auto-discovery capabilities enabled the IT group to quickly discover that a number of smartphones on the BlackBerry server had been terminated. "BoxTone showed the problem so we were able to eliminate that overhead and recover our assets," says Brady.

Conclusion
By using BoxTone, Houghton Mifflin has been able to more proactively manage both the entire system and individual users to provide the best possible service to the business. Says Brady, "Our IT group is not a 24 X 7 shop in terms of business hours, but our end users, who are high ranking executives and income-generating sales representatives, need to be able to rely on their BlackBerry at all times. BoxTone allows us to manage the system and users proactively so that we can be sure our services are working properly 24 X 7."

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