NeuralStar delivers for Microsoft
Improving customer service and vendor accountability

When does better network management become a competitive advantage? For Microsoft, it’s using NeuralStar to improve profitability and customer service,

Microsoft’s Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) is responsible for ensuring around-the-clock communication for employees, partners and other Microsoft constituents across some 300 locations around the world, including 10 worldwide customer call centers. Operators monitor voice and data communications from an array of heterogeneous equipment with vastly different protocols, including thousands of routers, PBXs, ATMs, DWDMs, DACS and SONET transport nodes, from a multitude of vendors, such as Fujitsu, Marconi, Alcatel, Nortel, EADS, and Cisco.

And when it comes to service providers, one Microsoft manager explains, “We’re working with just about every telecom company in the industry—each with proprietary alarming and availability reporting systems.”

In selecting NeuralStar to serve as a single point of control for this converged network, the company had clear goals in mind: increase uptime, speed network performance, streamline operations and reduce costs,

As one Microsoft network manager put it, “We quickly discovered that NeuralStar can monitor everything from a router to an ATM switch to a PBX system to a SONET node, adding, “SYS Technologies stands heads above on monitoring the transport layer.”

NeuralStar’s historical database and reporting features were used to tailor a tracking, analysis and reporting mechanism that provides the detailed information  needed to better manage business processes and make more informed decisions. Drop-down menus were created using NeuralStar’s customization capabilities that run under Internet Explorer and assign every alarm to a customer call center, peg each issue to a particular carrier or vendor and identify whether or not it has customer impact. Using NeuralStar’s open database to interface with Visual Studio .Net Report Generator and SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft can now track and report network availability statistics in exactly the form they need, including reports that show operations at any customer call center with outages down to the second.

With these capabilities, Microsoft managers track the performance of each carrier and how well they are meeting their SLAs, all in living color. Before NeuralStar, vendor reviews were largely subjective with limited ability to quantify outages in terms of duration, impact and collateral damage. Now they have authoritative data and quantitative measures. As one manager explained, “It’s all about customer service and satisfaction. It’s about having the phone lines up and not dropping customer calls. It’s about making good decisions and negotiating better contracts that will save us money.” Using NeuralStar-supplied data, for example, Microsoft’s circuit order group is changing the way it negotiates contracts with the carriers, using strategies such as implementing bonuses or penalties aligned with the performance numbers in NeuralStar, creating customer satisfaction indices, assigning metrics for availability and provisioning time and requesting re-provisioning if a circuit is under performing.

NeuralStar is improving customer service in other ways as well.

With the GNOC receiving well over a million network alarms every day, issues like effectively categorizing and filtering alarms, setting thresholds, performing correlations and automating processes become true necessities. Having three primary PBX platforms, each with its own proprietary alarm protocols, makes all of that even more challenging. Before NeuralStar, each PBX’s alarms went to a modem that was programmed to watch for critical outages and forward them to a monitoring center. A technician would have to analyze each alarm to determine if it was meaningful or a false positive, whether there was a repeat pattern or a time window, and whether there was a correlation with another alarm that made it more critical.

NeuralStar has added logic to the process based on Microsoft’s rules and policies. For example, if both an alarm and a clear alarm are received within a certain period of time, it’s a non-event. Or if an alarm happens in a maintenance window, it’s a non-event. These NeuralStar-enabled thresholds and correlations supply more meaningful information so managers can rationalize the alarm streams, evolving from hundreds of PBX alarms a day down to a couple of dozen that are critical. That makes it easier to find and fix real problems that impact customers.

Proactive management of the network infrastructure is one of the great successes the operations team has achieved. “For us, the biggest advantage of SYS Technologies is the ability to respond rapidly and proactively to an incident,” commented one manager. “We can see there is a problem before the customer has to call. Better yet, we have already found the root cause and are working to fix it--before it impacts the customer. In the past, we relied on customers to be our eyes and ears. Now we have the information we need to take proactive actions that make end-to-end service even better than ever before.”

• NeuralStar’s Windows®-based solution is compatible with Visual Studio .Net®, supporting Microsoft’s ability to integrate with business management tools. It’s secure, browser-based client is compatible with Internet Explorer® to support information sharing and collaboration.
• Microsoft uses NeuralStar to integrate data from a wide variety of network devices and protocols, producing highly granular custom reports on availability and performance by location, vendor, equipment, and whatever management data is necessary for better performance, auditing and accountability.
• Microsoft uses over 150 drivers to monitor diverse network elements, including customized drivers, all of which were up and running in less than one week. According to one Microsoft manager, other network management platforms could not get drivers working at all for particular devices or uses.
• Integration with trouble ticketing systems provides budgeting and performance managers with accurate data and metrics automatically, including dynamic updates, saving money and resources that were once committed to manual data collection and analysis.