Empowering front-line support to deal more effectively with performance
and productivity issues, Xangati today announced a new Virtual
Task Manager application that brings rapid
problem identification (RPI) directly to front-line support teams in
both enterprise and service provider organizations. The Xangati Virtual
Task Manager is the first support application that enables help desk
personnel and customer support organizations (CSOs) to radically improve
their responsiveness and problem resolution success rates by providing
live views of all end-user interactions and active symptom replay for “cold-case”
analysis.
With this new application, Xangati RPI creates a seamless handoff
between front-line support and the network operations group, enabling
the collective team to more rapidly get to the heart of end users’
application, network performance, and availability issues. By decreasing
the mean time to resolution, service providers can increase customer
satisfaction and as a result, subscriber loyalty. For enterprises, a
faster resolution of helpdesk issues directly translates to increased
productivity among enterprise users and a greater confidence in IT
personnel.
Key features of the Xangati Virtual Task Manager application:
Live activity view of each end user’s
networked application interactions, including top communication peers
and top applications
Active symptom replay and detailed activity history for fine-grained
analysis and reporting
Dynamic click-thru drilldowns into any related application, server, or
peer
Proactive alerting for significant changes in behavior
Agentless support that enables IT to profile and maintain history for
100,000 end users per RPI appliance
A demonstration of the Xangati Virtual Task Manager can be found at http://www.xangati.com/taskmanager/.
“Subscribers are never happy when they call
about Internet application performance problems because their perception
is the network is always at fault,” said
Harris Miller, manager of data engineering at EATEL, a
telecommunications company offering phone, Internet and TV services to
Southern Louisiana. “With the Xangati Virtual
Task Manager, we can now proactively alert our customers to virus or
spambot problems that could drag performance down —
before they even notice the problem developing. We are reaching out to
customers that have issues, and the response has been overwhelmingly
positive. More importantly, we are saving thousands of dollars a month
in upstream bandwidth by proactively containing these issues.”
Only the Desperate or Brave Called Support —
Until Now
According to the Yankee Group, broadband service providers can
experience first-year installation and support costs of up to $700 per
subscriber for advanced services like IPTV. This is largely due to the
fact that it is extremely challenging for service providers to deliver
the high-quality service that subscribers expect in the context of all
the other applications the subscriber is using on the network. And with
heated competition among service providers, maintaining a high
customer-satisfaction rate is a prime strategy for building customer
loyalty and retention. The service-provider CSO is often the front-line
agent responsible for customer happiness.
The problem is similar within enterprises. Forrester estimates that it
takes six calls to the help desk before the source of a problem is
identified. This could be why users in general are loathe to contact
their front-line support with performance issues as it generally
requires a great deal of their time and patience to troubleshoot
problems. Users are often put on extended hold or must wait for
callbacks to learn the root source of their performance headaches and
how to address them. Customer satisfaction drops with every minute that
passes before an application performance issue is resolved.
A primary reason for these poor results is that neither support
personnel nor end users have a complete picture of the user’s
overall networked application activity. This limitation restricts the
front-line agent to performing only the most rudimentary of desktop
support services — which is a
challenge, given that most of today’s
mission-critical applications are network based.
With the Xangati Virtual Task Manager, support personnel now have live,
comprehensive visibility into what users are doing second by second and
can quickly discover the facts behind application performance and
availability issues. In many cases, this visibility provides enough data
for the front-line support group to directly remediate the problem.
Should any issue require escalation, the next-level support team can use
the same interface to review a history of the issue, so no further time
is lost in tracking down the cause.
“Previously, reactive escalation issues
occupied close to 100 percent of our senior engineers’
time. The Xangati Virtual Task Manager has cut that by half,”
said Frank Koniszewski, IP network engineer for PrimeLink, a fully
integrated telecommunications company located in upstate New York. “Now
we can show subscribers the facts about what is happening on their home
network that could affect performance. In one case, the Xangati
application enabled us to track down a recurring performance problem to
an X-Box gaming server the subscriber’s
teenage son had installed surreptitiously. Whenever the son fired up the
server to play games with his friends, the home Internet connection was
flooded and became extremely sluggish. We did not have that level of
visibility before Xangati.”
“Our customers have asked us to create a
bridge between the front-line support and network operations
organizations to integrate RPI into the troubleshooting process from the
beginning,” said David Messina, vice
president of marketing at Xangati. “With the
Virtual Task Manager, the support personnel now can take action and
provide value for their end users beyond the desktop support they
provide today.”
Pricing and Availability
The Xangati Virtual Task Manager application is available as a free
software upgrade to current Xangati RPI appliance users. New customers
can purchase an RPI appliance with the Virtual Task Manager application
for an entry-level bundled price of $35,000, U.S. list.
Multimedia Resources
To find out more about the Xangati RPI solution and Virtual Task
Manager, refer to the product literature: http://www.xangati.com/web2/download/Xangati_Brochure.pdf.
To view a video demonstration of the Xangati Virtual Task Manager,
direct your browser to http://www.xangati.com/taskmanager/.
Tags and Keywords
Rapid Problem Identification, RPI, problem identification, virtual task
manager, rapid problem identification appliance, application performance
management, networked application performance management
About Xangati
Xangati’s rapid problem identification
technology enables IT organizations to be the first to respond to
application and network performance problems and ensure high
productivity across enterprise and service provider networks. The
privately held company is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For
more information, visit the company website at www.xangati.com.
PrimeLink was established in 1997 and is a full service
telecommunications company providing a wide array of advanced voice and
data services.
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