Case Study: Superpartners optimises IT operations with HP and JDS

Taking a Proactive Approach and Gaining End-to-End Visibility

In supporting such a large user base, Superpartners is keenly focused on ensuring its business processes and technology operations deliver value to the business. Prior to implementing HP Business Availability Center, the company had outsourced monitoring of its infrastructure, which proved limiting. And with the growth of the organisation’s application portfolio, the need to comprehensively and proactively monitor the health of its systems became increasingly apparent.

Gary Evans, Chief Information Officer, Superpartners explains, “We needed to gain a better understanding of our environment and we wanted to become proactive and respond more effectively to incidents. The early warning systems that we had in place just weren’t enough. We also wanted a more accurate way to determine if we were meeting our Service Level Agreements. Put simply, we needed a comprehensive application management solution and HP Business Availability Center met our requirements.”

Partnering to Fast-Track Time to Benefit

To facilitate deployment, Superpartners engaged HP Business Partner, JDS Australia, experts in software testing and monitoring with HP solutions. JDS provided specialist services in application monitoring to help Superpartner realise value from its HP investment. Steve Smith, General Manager (Victoria) JDS says, “Superpartners was quick to recognise the benefits of application monitoring, particularly in terms of enhancing their end-user services. In a matter of weeks they were monitoring the availability and performance of their application, and gaining true end-to-end visibility into what was happening behind the scenes. By having access to vital and detailed information about their systems, they can now be appraised of issues ten minutes before their end-users experience an outage, and begin resolution.

“Overall, Superpartners is realising the benefits of proactive visibility and access to a consolidated end-user and infrastructural view of their application performance. They have achieved much improved SLA compliance and have considerably reduced risk. We are delighted with the outcome and believe that the collaborative approach we established with Superpartners is the key to success.”

Fast Resolution of Problems, Productivity Gains, and Reduced Risks

A comprehensive business application management solution, HP Business Availability Center has allowed Superpartners to monitor the health of its systems. Specifically, the organisation is keeping a close eye on the end-user experience, continuously isolating problems and assessing the status of key services and applications.

Gary explains, “HP Business Availability Center has enabled us to see the actual performance of our systems as experienced by our customers. It provides us with an early warning system and we can drill down to the transaction level to examine potential issues. We now have the ability to pinpoint exactly where a problem might be and potentially fix it before our end-users experience degradation in our systems.

“In addition, HP Business Availability Center has helped us better understand the complexities and interdependencies of our IT infrastructure including networks, systems and applications. In turn, this provides us with the information we need to diagnose, isolate and fix problems quickly to maintain business continuity. As a result, we have improved the quality of our services and are benefiting from increased productivity by having the ability to concentrate resources where needed and by achieving quicker resolution time. We have also enhanced SLA compliance and we can now report on both infrastructure and application availability. Finally, the synthetic monitoring that HP Business Availability provides reduces our application deployment risk and we have gained confidence that our applications will perform as intended.”