Why BoxTone Wins So Many BlackBerry Support RFQs and RFIs

Before you issue that comprehensive RFQ for BlackBerry management, monitoring and support software, may we make a few quick suggestions.

Make sure you ask for more than simple “up/down” visibility to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Don't settle for limited SNMP-based metric. Ask if the software will offer more than simple configuration troubleshooting. Ask if you'll need to provide mail server privileges. Or put agents on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Ask how the software scales. Then ask more.

BoxTone likes the tough questions. It's why more organizations use our software than any other to manage, monitor and support mobile users provisioned to the BlackBerry platform for Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino.

To give that RFQ teeth, refer often to the page below. Print it out. Keep it handy. Could save you a lot of pain, time and money.

RFQ Question: Will your software make me truly proactive?

And by proactive, don’t just ask if the vendor can alert on up/down, catch infrequent configuration problems or wait for SNMP traps or 24 hour batch reports. We mean ask if the software can: 

• Measure and trend every user’s email and application flow – by individual, group and component – to determine what’s normal; alert when service trends from normal; and alert again when issues clear.
• Correlate user-level performance with critical application-level and infrastructure-level data points to find, fix or escalate issues in 3 minutes or less.

The Bottom Line: To be truly proactive, you need technologies like BoxTone SmartMP™ that use high-volume data collectors, analyzers and mobile pattern-specific rules engines to instrument and measure the actual real-time performance of all users 24x7 – hop-to-hop and end-to-end.

RFQ Question: Will your software give me the 10 key capabilities I need to manage, monitor and support my BlackBerry users?

Of course there are more than 10. But these are a great place to start. Ask the vendor, “Can you …”

• Identify when a small subset (>5%) of users are having issues and why?
• Calculate normal delivery times for all of my users? How about one user – like my CEO – hop-to-hop for his last 20 email? Or users with worst delivery times?
• Determine when a handful of users are impacting service for hundreds?
• Identify high-use and low-use users?
• Uncover which BES-Mail server pairs are the most problematic? Or better yet, identify all exceptions/errors for all my BES servers in the last 24 hours and who was impacted?
• Generate a WARNING alert if hung threads, pending messages, carrier performance issues, and BES-mail server performance issues trend from normal?
• Audit/verify IT Policy push and activation/wipe success versus fail?
• Track changes to the device history to find, for example, specific app downloads that impacted individual and group service levels?
• Identify users on extended holiday?
• Tell me your plans to add new modules based on ITIL standards?

The Bottom Line: Only a vendor who instruments and measure the actual real-time performance of all users 24x7 – hop-to-hop and end-to-end – can answer these critical questions. And demand familiarity with IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. BlackBerry is mission critical, right?

RFQ Question: Does your software have the 10 key technical architecture items to make me successful immediately and long term?

Ask the vendor, “Can you …”

• Provide a single view of all my users across multiple BES-SQL Domains (or just 1 BES at a time)? Scale to 5,000 smartphones and beyond? Deliver views to myExchange or Domino mail servers, wireless carriers and RIM SRP?
• Deploy without using manually installed, configured, versioned and managed agents (translation: agentless)?
• Deploy without needing Active Directory [AD] administrator security rights, which could open my organization to risks and cause us to fail CSO audits?
• Collect, filter, trend and alert off of log-level data (MAGT logs, policy logs etc) to go truly user-level, or do you rely on SNMP alerts?
• Give me more than simple RIM knowledge base links – but intelligent, edited answers based on the best of the RIM knowledgebase and your real-world experiences?
• Create custom groups – say field sales, VIPs and support – each with its own alert thresholds and SLAs?
• Show me a performance database with an historical data warehouse that can display real time data for every minute of the current day and archived data for months? Or to see performance data do I have to wait 24 hours?
• Deliver role-based screens, consoles, dashboards and reports purpose-built for the BlackBerry administrator, messaging team, help/service desk, security/compliance, and telecommunications/procurement?
• Deliver new modules that can be cost-effectively added over time as our needs change and grow?

The Bottom Line: Most vendors take an SNMP-based approach known to be chatty and delayed, without guaranteed delivery, and that lacks actual individual and group user level performance or historical performance. Make sure your vendor offers a scalable, agentless centralized platform with modular approach that includes real-time correlated data collection from logs and infrastructure with an embedded historical database.