Case Study: UTStarcom

UTStarcom provides a world of better end-to-end communication with Zenoss

Overview

Implement a world class IT management solution that would enable the deployment of service level management that would help set up, maintain and track service level agreements between UTStarcom IT and the business organization.

Implement a proactive IT monitoring and management system that enables UTStarcom IT to detect issues before they impact business users.

UTStarcom selected Zenoss Enterprise as its IT management solution with Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Availability and Performance Monitoring as well as Network and Events Management capabilities.

Business Value

• Zenoss Enterprise enabled UTStarcom to establish service level agreements with its business organization to support the company’s aggressive growth objectives.
• Using Zenoss Enterprise helped UTStarcom IT become proactive and detect performance issues worldwide before they impact business users.
• Linux based Zenoss Enterprise provided an affordable IT management solution for UTStarcom’s heterogeneous IT environment, eliminating the need to deploy multiple solutions.
• Zenoss Enterprise bridged the gap between UTStarcom IT and Help Desk by providing a twoway automated integration between the company’s IT management and ticketing systems. This enabled UTStarcom IT to quickly and efficiently fix costly system failures.

Managing Growth

UTStarcom operates in the fast growing global market for IPTV, broadband wireless and wireless equipment markets. In particular, UTStarcom experiences high growth in the convergence of IPTV and wireless broadband in emerging markets such as India and China.

“We required the ability to monitor system usage, performance, event collection and alert notification, with basic reporting,” says Ari Bose, CIO of UTStarcom. “Current systems in place were geographically localized doing basic state monitoring and lacked the ability to scale to an enterprise solution.”

Ari Bose realized that in order for UTStarcom IT to keep pace with the company growth objectives, he needed his team to implement service level agreements with business and deliver proactive IT management. “We were operating in a reactive mode with no application or infrastructure visibility,” says Ari. “With 70+ corporate applications supporting the business, spread over 500+ systems, it became apparent that a system was required that would enable us to be proactive in how we support our infrastructure, applications and end users.”

UTStarcom’s vast IT system leveraged both Linux and Windows technologies and the IT department required a single solution that can be used to manage both environments. Ari Bose and his team selected Zenoss Enterprise as their end-to-end IT monitoring and management solution.

Exhaustive Evaluation

Evaluating solutions from Cisco, Juniper, Oracle, BMC, IBM (Tivoli), ProactiveNet, Computer Associates and HP, it became obvious to UTStarcom IT that these offerings were expensive with recurring annual costs. Furthermore offerings from these vendors were great at out-of-the-box support for brand specific products, but required costly consultancy to support multi-vendor environments. An alternative approach was adopted to explore open source software and develop in-house expertise to support a multi-vendor environment. The IT team evaluated GroundWork, Big Brother and Nagios, but Zenoss Enterprise was the only solution that fulfilled most of the requirements along with:

• Flexibility to adapt with UTStarcom’s evolving needs
• Customizable views for managers and engineers
• Multi-vendor hardware, OS and application monitoring
• Ability to monitor and process performance along with state changes
• Ability to provide value added consultancy services
• Ability to deliver on features

Immediate Benefit of Zenoss Enterprise

UTStarcom received immediate benefits from the deployment and use of Zenoss Enterprise. These benefits fell into two distinct categories:

Quantitative Benefits

Zenoss Enterprise’s global management system provided management of service level agreements and reliability by generating availability graphs for each infrastructure element. This helped UTStarcom to improve response times for critical events by real-time
email notification and reduce man hours spent in troubleshooting by identifying the source of the alerts. Zenoss also allowed increased business uptime by proactively monitoring performance parameters and notifying of any deviation in trend or exceeding
pre-determined threshold values.

Qualitative Benefits

Zenoss Enterprise’s global management system provided the ability to gain control of the infrastructure by monitoring, inspecting, regulating and governing individual components. This enabled UTStarcom to be efficient in terms of supporting user base, enforcing best practices and ensuring conformance to standards.

Zenoss Enterprise Benefits for UTStarcom

• Implement an enterprise solution with zero licensing costs
• Automate state and performance monitoring for multi-vendor devices and applications
• Ensure visibility through summarized easy to read dashboards for all users
• Centralize dissemination of real-time information among functional groups through web portals
• Ability to alert and notify users of any state change, threshold or security violation
• Adapt to and enable “follow the sun” support model
• Introduce proactive maintenance and corrective activity in order to reduce unscheduled downtime
• Reduce troubleshooting time by providing detailed information for engineers
• Generate availability data for accurate SLA reporting within scorecard
• Eliminate ambiguity through real-time inventory reports for cross reference and future planning

Sr. Director of Infrastructure and Architecture Rick Nottingham’s Perspective

“Everyone in my team has Zenoss as one of the applications running on their desktops, all the time. We do that because Zenoss is our first alert mechanism. We use Zenoss to tell us when there is a potential user impacting performance problem before the end user knows about it. That is a far cry from where we were just a few months ago. We typically waited for end users to call us when there was an issue and that made for a lot of unhappy people. By the time they would get around to calling us, they would have already been down an hour or more. Now when Zenoss sends us a proactive alert, we route that to our ticketing system to automatically create a ticket. This helps us track the established service level agreements we have between IT and the business organization. Once my team resolves the issue, we close the ticket in the help desk system which automatically updates Zenoss. This helps us enforce the agreed-upon service levels, ensure that the issues have been effectively resolved, and store our best practices in Zenoss to avoid future issues.”

At A Glance

Industry:
IP Networking and Wireless (Telecom)
Year Founded:
1991
Stock Exchange:
NASDAQ (UTSI)
Number of Employees:
6000
Revenues:
$2.7 Billion
HQ:
Alameda, California

UTStarcom is a global leader in the manufacture, integration and support of IP-based, end-to-end networking and telecommunications solutions. The company sells converged broadband wireless and wireline products, an integrated IPTV solution, and a comprehensive line of handset and customer premise equipment to operators in both emerging and established telecommunications markets worldwide.

UTStarcom’s Key Initiatives:

• Operational Efficiency Using Service Level Agreements with the business organization
• Worldwide growth strategy in IPTV and Wireless Broadband

Previous IT Solutions used:

• Big Sister
• MRTG
• Nagios
• What’s Up Gold
• Cricket