Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on the necessity of planning in attempting to merge data and systems across disparate operations.

1. Redcentric Uses Advanced Configuration Database to Bring
into Focus Massive M&AAcross Multiple Networks
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on the necessity of planning in attempting to merge data
and systems across disparate operations.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: HP.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover
Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your
host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and
how it’s making an impact on people's lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT
to improve IT performance, gain new insights and deliver better user experiences,
as well as better overall business results.
Our next innovation case study interview explores how Redcentric PLC in the UK has tackled a
major network management project due to a business merger. We'll hear how Redcentric used
advanced configuration database approaches from HP to scale some 10,000 devices across two
disparate companies and managed them in a single system.
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To learn more about how two major networks became merged successfully, we're joined by
Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric in Harrogate, UK.
Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Edward.
Edward Jackson: Hello.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your company and this merger. What two companies came
together, and how did that prove to be a complicated matter when it comes to network
management?
Jackson: The two companies coming together were InTechnology and Redcentric. Redcentric
bought InTechnology in 2013. Effectively, they were reasonably separate in terms of their setup.
Redcentric had three separate organizations, they had already acquired Maxima and Hot Chilli.
And the requirement was to move their network devices and ITSM platform base onto the HP
monitoring and ITSM platforms in InTechnology.
Gardner

2. It’s an ongoing process, but it’s well on the way and we've been pretty successful so far in doing
that.
Gardner: And what kind of companies are these? Tell us about your organization, the business,
rather than just the IT?
Jackson: We're a managed service providers (MSPs), voice, data, storage,
networks, and cloud. You name it, and we pretty much deliver it and sell it as part
of our managed portfolio..
Gardner: So being good at IT is not just good for you internally; it's really part
and parcel of your business.
Jackson: It's critical. We have to deliver it and we have to manage it as well. So it's 100 percent
critical to the business.
Gardner: Tell us how you go about something like this, Edward, when you have a big merger,
when you have all these different, disparate devices that support networks. How do you tackle
that? How do you start the process?
Data cleansing
Jackson: The first phase is to look at the data and see what we've got and then start to do some
data cleansing. We had to migrate data from three service desks to the
InTechnology network, and to the InTechnology ITSM system. You need to look
at all the service contracts. You need to also look at all the individual components
that make up those contracts, and effectively all the configuration items (CIs), and
then your looking at a rather large migration project.
Initially, we started to migrate the customer and the contact information. Then, slowly, we started
to re-provision devices from the Redcentric side to the InTechnology Managed Services (IMS)
network and load it into our HP management platforms.
We currently manage over 11,000 devices. They are from multiple types of vendors and
technologies. InTechnology was pretty much a Cisco shop, whereas at Redcentric, we're looking
at things like Palo Alto, Brocade, Citrix Load Balancers and other different types of solutions. So
it's everything from session border controllers down to access points.
It was a relatively challenging time in terms of being able to look at the different types of
technology and then be able to manage those. Also, we've automated incidents from Operations
Manager to Service Manager and then notifying customers directly that there is a potential issue
ontheir service. So it's been a rather large piece of work.
Jackson

3. Gardner: Was there anything in hindsight that you did at InTechnology vis-à-vis the data about
your network and devices that made this easier? Did Redcentric have that same benefit of that
solid database, the configuration information? In doing this, what did you wish you had done, or
someone else had done, better before that would have made it easier to accomplish?
Jackson: Unfortunately, the data on the Redcentric side of the business wasn’t quite as clean as
it was on the InTechnology side. It was held in lots of differnet sources, from network shared
drives to Wiki pages. It all had to be collated. Redcentric had another three service desks. We had
to extract all the data out of them as well. The service desks didn’t really contain any CI
information either. So we had to collate together the CI information along with the contacts and
customers.
It was a rather mammoth task. Then, we had to load it into our CRM tool, which then has a direct
connection automatically using Web Services and into Service Manager. So it initially creates
organizations and contacts.
We had a template for our CIs. If they were a server CI or a network CI, it would be added to a
spreadsheet, and would use HP Connect-IT to load into Service Manager. It basically
automatically created CIs against the customer and the contacts that were already loaded by our
CRM tool.
Gardner: Is there anything now moving forward as a combined company, or in the process of
becoming increasingly combined, that these due diligence efforts around network management
and configuration management will allow you to do?
Perhaps you're able to drive more services into your marketplace for your customers or make
modernization moves towards perhaps software-defined networking or other trends that are
afoot. So now that you are into this, you are doing your due diligence, how does that set you up
to move forward?
New opportunity
Jackson: It opens up a new sphere of opportunity. We were pretty much a Cisco shop, but now
we have obviously opened up to a lot more elements and technologies that we actively manage.
We have a lot of software-based type of firewalls and load balancers that we didn’t previously
have -- session border controllers, etc and voice products that we didn’t deliver previously -- that
we can deliver now due to the fact that we've opened up the network to be able to monitor and
manage pretty much anything.
Gardner: Any words of advice for other organizations that may have been resisting making
these moves. You were forced to do it across the board with the merger. Do you have any advice
that you would offer in terms of doing network management and modernization sooner rather

4. than later, other than the fact that people might just think good enough is good enough, or if it's
not broken, don’t fix it?
Jackson: When you're looking at a challenge like this, you have to make sure you do your due
diligence first. It’s down to planning, an "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail" kind of thing, and
it’s very true.
Enable your network to enable your business
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You need to get all the information. You need to make sure that you normalize it and sanitize it
before you load it. The cliché is garbage in, garbage out, so there’s no point in putting bad
information into a system once again.
We have a good set of clean data now across the board. We literally have 150,000 CIs in our
CMDB. So it’s not an insignificant CMDB by any stretch of the imagination. And we know that
the data from the Redcentric side of the business is now clean and accurate.
Gardner: How about proving this to the business? For you guys, MSP might not be as critical,
but for other enterprises, it might be a bit more of a challenge to translate these technical benefits
into financial or economic benefits to their leadership. Any thoughts about metrics of success that
you've been able to define that would fit into a return on investment (ROI) or more of an
economic model? How do you translate network management proficiency into dollars and cents
or pounds or euros?
Jackson: It’s pretty difficult to quantify in a monetary sense. Probably the best way of
quantifying the success of the project has been the actual level of support that customers have
been given and the level of satisfaction that the customers now have. They're very, very happy
with the level of support that we have now achieving due to Redcentrics ITSM and business
service management (BSM) systems. I think, going forward, it will only increase the level of
support that we can provide our customers.
As I said, It's quite difficult to quantify in a monetary sense. However, when churn rates are now
as low as 4 percent, you can basically say that you're doing something good.
Fundamental to the business
In terms of things like the CIs themselves, the CI is fundamental to the business, because it
describes the whole of the service, all the services that we offer our customers. If that’s not right,
then the support that we give the customer can’t be right either.

5. You need to give the guys on support the kind of information they need to be able to support the
service. Customer satisfaction is ever increasing in terms of what we are able to offer the
migrated customers.
Gardner: How about feedback from your helpdesk, your support, and remediation of people. Do
they find that with this data in place, with it cleansed, and with it complete that they're able to
identify where problems exist perhaps better, faster, and easier. Do they recognize whether there
is a network problem or a workload support problem, the whole helpdesk benefit. Anything to
offer there?
Jackson: About 80 percent of the tickets raised in the organization are raised through our
management platform, monitoring and performance capacity monitoring. We can pretty much
identify within a couple of minutes where the network error is. This all translates into tickets
being auto raised in our service management platform.
Additionally, within a few minutes of an outage or incident we can have an affected customer list
prepared. We have fields that are defined in Service Manager CI’s that will actually give us
information regarding what devices are affected and what they are connected to in terms of an
end to end service.
We run a customer report against this, and it will give you a list of customers, a list of key
contacts and primary contacts. You can convert this into an email. So for a network outage,
within a few minutes we can email the customer, create an incident, create related interactions to
that incident, and the customer is notified that there is an issue.
Gardner: That’s the sort of brand reinforcement and service quality that many organizations are
seeking. So that's enviable, I'm sure.
Is there any news being generated from HP that’s of interest -- products, updates, something
that's going to make your job even easier going forward?
Jackson: We're looking at a couple of things. One of them is Propel, which is a piece of software
that you can hook into pretty much anything you really want. For example, if you have a few
disparate service desks, you can have a veneer over the top. They'll look all the same to the
customers. They'll have like an identical GUI, but the technology behind it could be very
different.
Enable your network to enable your business
Download the brochure
Maintain an efficient, secure network
It gives you the ability then to hook into anything, such as Operations Orchestration, Service
Manager, Knowledge Management, or even Smart Analytics, which is another area that we are
quite keen on looking at. I think that’s going to revolutionize the service desk. It would be very,
very beneficial forRedcentric.

6. There are also things like data mining. This would be beneficial and also help the auto creation of
knowledge articles going forward and giving remedial action to incidents and interactions.
Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how
Redcentric has used advanced configuration database approaches from HP to scale thousands of
devices across two disparate networks and create a single entity due to a merger and an
acquisition.
I'd like to thank our guest. We've been joined by Edward Jackson, Operational System Support
Manager at Redcentric in the UK. Thanks so much, Edward.
Jackson: Thank you.
Gardner: And thank you to our audience for joining this special new style of IT discussion.
We've explored and discovered solid evidence from early enterprise adopters of how big data
changes everything, for IT, for businesses, for governments, and as well as for you and me, and
we've seen how even in the realm of network management big data and analytics is a huge topic.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on the necessity of planning in attempting to merge data
and systems across disparate operations. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All
rights reserved.
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