BlackBerry ROI: The New Math

Synopsys: Shortens BlackBerry MTTR from Days to Minutes

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.

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.

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.”

Read full Synopsys case study >>>

Download PDF version >>>

View more case studies >>>