Managed Services Enabled Strategic Focus of IT Resources, Part II

As noted in Part I, global sensor manufacturer Measurement Specialties Inc. (MSI) faced multiple challenges with its managed network services provider. It suffered from excessive downtime, and the team of IS/IT director Bob Andreini spent too much time solving problems that were the responsibilities of their provider.

Andreini brought in Virtela, a Greenwood Village, Colo.-based managed network services provider that works with multiple vendors of networking equipment, including Cisco. It devised a mesh network using Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology that eliminated the point-to-point problems that plagued MSI previously.

He describes it as a seamless network with multiple subnetworks, "almost like a black box. Someone in Fremont, Calif., can send something to our site in Shenzen, China via the most logical route over the network."

Automatic Backup
At the same time, MSI's downtime has disappeared. Virtela set up a back-up DSL circuit at each of MSI's sites, so that if anything does go wrong, the back-ups kick in automatically. "We can't even tell when it happens," says Andreini. "Usually we only find out after we get notification from Virtela's operations center." The cost of the DSL lines is only a couple hundred dollars a month, and he estimates that MSI now enjoys more than 99% reliability.

Even with his difficult experience, Andreini was still sold on outsourcing his network services. "I didn't want to beef up on network engineers internally, because that technology is so complex. Having a partner that could take care of that was very attractive."

Dramatic Time Savings
Having a managed network services provider also gives Andreini "dramatic time savings. When every event took two days of firefighting, we were unproductive in other projects. It was very disruptive, and took the equivalent of at least two full-time people. Having a managed network services provider means I can have my staff focus on the strategic IT needs of the business, not running the infrastructure."

The moral of the story is that it's important to look closely at your managed services provider. Don't look just at their services, but at their business model and their telecom relationships. Determine how their plans suit your company, and your plans for your company's growth. As MSI found, it was able to shift from an unsatisfactory provider to a satisfactory one and reap the benefit of reliability.

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Managed Service Nightmare - Lessons Learned, Part I

By any measure, Bob Andreini's network was a nightmare. Even though he had outsourced the management of the network, downtime was measured in days. His team regularly mediated finger-pointing between international telecom providers. Even the configuration of his infrastructure left a lot to be desired.

Andreini, the global director of IS and IT at Measurement Specialties Inc., a $200 million manufacturer of sensors with 12 locations around the world, knew something had to change.

His company had grown through acquisition, adding sites in locations in Galway, Ireland; Versailles, France; Dortmund, Germany; and Bevaix, Switzerland, a village of 3,500 outside of Neuchatel. But this growth also meant an increasing patchwork of network connections.

Reliability was a challenge, especially with an IT staff of 35 and only ten of those people devoted to the infrastructure -- able to work only part-time on this key task.

Downtime Here Meant Downtime There
A hub-and-spoke infrastructure meant that all communications went through MSI's corporate headquarters in Hampton, Va., some by point-to-point connections, others through VPNs. "If we had trouble in Hampton, we had trouble across the whole network," says Andreini.

Part of the problem, he admits, came from the telecom provider's own growth problems. It didn't always have the best relationship with telecommunications providers in the countries where MSI did business.

"We ended up with higher communications costs, because they couldn't get good resell rates." And because it didn't have good relationships, where there were problems, there was a lot of finger-pointing. "We would eventually have to have our IT people figure out the problem," sighs Andreini. Then the guilty party would admit it was their problem, sometimes as much as two days later.

Unmanaged Services
Some of Andreini's team even had to spend time learning about Cisco router configurations because their provider, which was supposed to be providing maintenance, had outsourced it to yet another company.

Solving MSI's network management problems took multiple steps, including signing on with another vendor of managed network services. MSI worked with the new company, Virtela, a Greenwood Village, Colo.-based company, and its team to create a new infrastructure. Together they took a close look at what kind of infrastructure would serve the global firm best.

In part II: how MSI solved its managed service problems.

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