Axeda Helps Egenera Reduce Resolution Cycle Time from Days to Hours while Meeting Customer Service-Level Agreements

Case Study

The Company Challenge

Egenera has been shipping its data center virtualization system since 2001, bringing unmatched experience and innovation to more than 250 enterprises, service providers, and government agencies worldwide. Traditional systems vendors have left a legacy of data center complexitylayers of hardware and software that require armies of people to manage and scores of services to configure and run. Egenera was born out of one customers realization that overcoming IT pain points would require a greenfield approach. Company founder Vern Brownell, former CTO of Goldman Sachs, engineered a new server architecture that simplifies data center infrastructurereducing complexity, increasing agility, improving availability, and lowering TCO. The Egenera BladeFrame systems unique virtualization software dynamically allocates and repurposes servers to applications as needed without manual intervention. With its integrated system of diskless processing resources and virtualization software, the BladeFrame has set a new standard for simplicity and business value in the enterprise data center.

To remotely monitor the Egenera Systems, minimize customers total cost of ownership, and meet SLAs in delivering service and parts to customer sites within four hours

Solution
Use Axeda ServiceLink to remotely monitor and service Egenera Systems in ensuring high availability and meeting customer SLAs

Results
Customer satisfaction rating of 4.75 out of 5 in meeting SLAs (an increase from 3.1 out of 5, which was their previous rating with their internally developed solution) Response times on customer calls or Web requests for service reduced from an hour to under two minutes Resolution cycle time reduced from days to hours

The Axeda solution equips us with the proactive service capabilities needed to cost-effectively provide our customers with high availability of our Egenera Systems. This kind of service is essential to successfully compete in data center utility computing, since our sales teams can now use Egenera Service as a silver bullet to help close orders.
CJ Rotella, Director of Service Operations at Egenera

At Emory, decisions about IT infrastructure are made based on long-range business requirements. To deliver the sophisticated services our user community expects, with the zero downtime medical applications demand, and do it all while spending less requires a visionary approach. We found that Egenera is the only platform available today that delivers the resource virtualization needed to support our vision for utility computing.
Joe Medley, Director, Infrastructure Support Services at Emory Healthcare

The Challenge
Since 2004, Egenera has experienced explosive hyper-growth in the worldwide adoption of their utility computing products. To maintain this level of growth, Egenera sought to improve the serviceability of their systems and lower the total cost of ownership for their customers by leveraging a proactive remote service model. At the time, their monitoring system was based on send mail, a primarily reactive method of alerting Egeneras service and support team of system issues. Specifically, the company aimed to reduce the time required to update their systems with software patches and releases. They also sought to cut down the unmanageable number of messages generated by their current system (measuring in the millions) and open support cases that could be tracked and assigned. Since SLAs required Egenera to deliver parts and service to a customer site within four hours, they needed a proven remote service solution that would allow them to identify issues. This proactive service would be critical in supporting the financial services, government, telecommunications, and medical industries, as well as service providers, with complete data center virtualization via their utility computing model of hardware, software, and service products.

Axeda has the feature set that we required to design, deliver, and deploy remote service to our rapidly growing customer base. Most importantly, by working closely with Axeda Professional Services, we rolled out our solution within our scheduled deployment schedule of 3-4 months, says CJ Rotella, Director of Service Operations at Egenera. Axeda Professional Services has now helped us meet two of our major development and deployment timeframes. Our experience with them has been great. Egenera relies on Axeda ServiceLink to schedule software updates and deliver patches, provide customers with reports of equipment inventory, events, and usage over a 90-day period, while monitoring all systems worldwide from a central location. Today, more than 68% of all customer requests come through the monitoring system and 92% of all customer transactions are Web-based. The development staff at Egenera used the flexible Axeda API to easily integrate Axeda ServiceLink with their ePeople CRM system. With this integration, the CRM system now receives and aggregates alerts into open cases that are assigned to service and support teams. This combination of technology has reduced the millions of random messages generated from the previous system down to fewer than 400 manageable cases per month and has also enabled the service and support teams to maintain a complete maintenance history for each system.

The Solution
Egenera replaced their internally developed solution with Axeda ServiceLink. Today, their service and support organization remotely monitors the performance of their customers Egenera systems on a 24x365 basis at widely dispersed customer sites, identifying and resolving irregularities to maximize application availability.

Egenera seeks to provide customers with a simplified data center environment, enabling them to reduce capital and operational costs and achieve greater business agility, explains Al Lanzetta, Vice President of Worldwide Enterprise Services at Egenera. Axeda complements the Egenera value proposition by enabling proactive remote monitoring through an efficient and scalable solution.

Axeda Helps Egenera Reduce Resolution Cycle Time from Days to Hours while Meeting Customer Service-Level Agreements

The Results
Using Axeda ServiceLink, Egenera has achieved quick response to customer issues, providing true proactive remote service, while maintaining flat staffing levels in their service team over the past three years. They have accomplished all this while growing customer deployments at exponential rates. By adopting this improved remote service model, Egenera has cut response times on calls or Internet requests for service from an hour to under two minutes, reduced resolution cycle time from days to hours, slashed the amount of time to update systems with software patches and releases by 82%, and now proactively resolve the majority of issues prior to any customer involvement. This has enabled Egenera to achieve a customer satisfaction rating of 4.75 out of 5 on response, installation, replacement parts, and software updates. Today, Egenera meets all SLA requirements, which include: 100% Severity 1 100% Severity 2 97% Severity 3 99.97% part replacement on-time delivery (4 Hours on-site) with service personnel Next steps for Egenera include building a stable hosted site, creating reporting dashboard summary pages on the CIO product, and expanding the Axeda Agent to deliver eco-system analysis across their customers infrastructures.

Axeda ServiceLink Supports the Egenera Family

The BladeFrame combines the utility of stateless servers with powerful software that virtualizes processing, storage, and networking resources into a computing fabric. Now, businesses can provision systems and allocate resources in minutesnot days, weeks, or monthsto optimize mission-critical applications in real time.

Axeda Helps Egenera Reduce Resolution Cycle Time from Days to Hours while Meeting Customer Service-Level Agreements

About Axeda
Founded in 2000, Axeda is the secure remote service and support company. With a rich history of innovation and more than 50 customers worldwide, Axeda enables product manufacturers and service providers to deliver a new generation of high-value remote service to their customers. Fortune 500 companies worldwide proactively service their products with Axeda solutions to ensure maximum uptime at the lowest possible cost. In 2006, Axeda became the first and only remote service application provider to receive the prestigious VeriSign Security Certification. This certification has helped accelerate deployments into the worlds most secure environments, enabling our customers to achieve broad customer acceptance. Axeda ServiceLink gives your customers increased product uptime with a lower total cost of ownership. Meanwhile, your company is able to grow revenue and obtain higher customer satisfaction ratings with reduced cost of service delivery. With more devices under management than any vendor on the market, Axeda has the experience to ensure you achieve your goals quickly. Our Maximum Resultssm service program is our commitment to establishing a long-term partnership with you by maximizing the speed of deployment as well as the value created per deployed device. We believe in the strategic importance of remote service programs and how they can help you grow revenue. Results begin immediately, but the long-term payoff requires a strategic plan and an experienced partner. Axeda is that partner.

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