TechValidate Research on CA Infrastructure Management

Introduction

This case study of a Global 500 professional services company is based on a October 2013 survey of CA Network Flow Analysis customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service. The profiled company asked to have their name blinded to protect their confidentiality.

Challenges

• Performance problems that took too long to resolve
• The network being routinely blamed for application performance problems
• A lack of reliable data to justify additional network capacity spend requests
• Difficulty properly prioritizing QoS for key applications that impact our business
• Difficulty in determining network capacity needs for new applications and services
• Uncertainty whether adding more network capacity would resolve performance problems

Use Case

• Predominantly uses the following networking hardware in their environment:
  • Cisco
• Most concerned about the following traffic traversing across their network:
  • VoIP

Results

• Better application performance
• Increased customer/user satisfaction and loyalty
• Better informed infrastructure investment decisions
• The ability to validate the impact of change on network infrastructure
• Improved problem resolution (i.e. reduced MTTR, number of issues, etc.)
• Better visibility into how well the network delivers applications to the users
• Improved network capacity planning for growing application and media traffic
• The ability to configure and validate quality of service policies for business critical applications
• Better aligned their infrastructure management priorities and resources with business goals
• Improved value and perception of network infrastructure and services as the “backbone” for delivering critical application and business services.

Introduction

This case study of a federal government is based on a November 2013 survey of CA Spectrum customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service. The profiled organization asked to have their name blinded to protect their confidentiality.

Challenges

• Purchased CA Spectrum in order to:
  • Speed fault isolation and resolution
  • Pre-empt service issues before user impact
  • Support for a broad range of vendors and technologies
• Solved the following challenges with CA Spectrum:
  • Improved the productivity of their IT staff
  • Improved MTTR
  • Increased visibility across their network – physical and virtual
  • Reduced change and configuration errors
  • Identified the source of problems quickly

Use Case

• Has 1,001 -5,000 monitored devices.
• Is monitoring and managing the following with CA Spectrum:
  • Physical Servers
  • Virtual Machines (VMs)
  • Network Devices

Results

• CA Spectrum is differentiated from competitive products in the following ways:
  • Range of vendors and technologies supported
  • Breadth of monitoring/management functionality
  • Scalability
  • Flexibility
• Rated the following Spectrum features in terms of how easy they are to use:
  • overall ease of use: very easy
  • out-of-the-box functionality: Easy
  • platform support OOTB: Easy
  • discovery configurations: very easy
• Increased the productivity of their IT staff by 25% to 49% with CA Spectrum.
• Improved their MTTR by 25% to 49% with CA Spectrum.