Samlink Case Study
Country-Wide Banking Services
Oy Samlink Ab is a leading supplier of banking services, both online and on-premise, to banks, credit institutions, and investment service companies in Finland. The company provides IT solutions for all phases of financial operation: banking services, such as loans, savings, and card transactions; systems for on-line and self-service banking; and value-added services, such as data storage and reporting, accounting systems, and financial management services. Samlink's client banks serve more than one million users in 460 branches, and over 500,000 on-line users. The company employs 280 people in six offices throughout Finland.
A Business-Critical Network
As an Application Service Provider, Samlink depends on an extensive MPLS network leased from ISPs, as well as a number of VPN connections. Day-to-day operation of the network is, of course, critical to Samlink's business, but the company's competitive position depends on the ability to roll out new applications in response to customer demand. Their existing toolset, based on portable protocol analyzers, couldn't give them the information they needed to efficiently manage existing applications and plan for new ones.
"The analyzers were never in the right place at the right time,” says Jussi Rãsãnen, System Specialist-Network at Oy Samlink Ab. "We needed a solution that was on the job 24-by-7, and that could give us not only real-time information about application slowdowns, but historical information for capacity planning and new application rollouts.
Network Insight, End-to-End
For assistance, Samlink turned to Bemecon Oy, a Finnish solution provider specializing in systems management. After a careful audit of Samlink's IT needs, Bemecon recommended and installed an ACE Live appliance at Samlink's primary data center in Helsinki.
"ACE Live almost immediately gave us a new view of our network and applications,” says Jussi. "We could see application slowdowns anywhere on our network, and monitor network load changes and track their cause. And since it can monitor all our traffic from a single point, we don't have to worry about being in the right place at the right time: the data we need to solve a problem is always waiting for us.”
The ACE Live appliance was put to work immediately for one of the IT team's primary needs: monitoring the MPLS network. "We use [ACE Live] to investigate trends in our MPLS usage,” comments Jussi, "and discern who is using our capacity, and for what.”
He also notes how useful the historical information supplied by the appliance is for capacity planning. "We can now much more accurately judge whether or not to add bandwidth in preparation for a new application rollout.”
Proactive, Not Reactive
Mr. Râsânen also reports a notable improvement in his team's troubleshooting capabilities. "The [ACE Live] appliance has given us a new way to look at the overall condition of the network and how that affects important applications. We can often see signs of trouble before they become serious enough to affect our users.” Equally important is the rapidity with which the team can respond to serious issues. "We know who the problem is affecting, and how important it is to our business, and we spend less time troubleshooting and more time on strategic projects like new application rollouts.”
Asked to sum up the ACE Live benefits to his team, Jussi says: "[ACE Live] is the most comprehensive yet easy-to-use application performance management tool we have seen. Equally important is its rapid time to value, which derives from its ability to greatly accelerate problem-solving, and reduce the number of IT personnel who need to be involved.”
Bemecon
Bemecon, a leading Finnish solutions provider, brings more than 100 years of collective IT experience to its client engagements, both in Finland and internationally. The company offers comprehensive services in the field of IT Systems Management, combining consulting, product sales, and training to deliver complete solutions that match customer needs.
"[ACE Live's] ease of deployment and extremely rapid return on investmentÑfaster than any other product we've worked with—make it a must-have tool not only for our customers, but for our consultants. The comprehensive nature of the data enables us to vividly demonstrate the need, not only for "[ACE Live], but for other products, in business-oriented terms that customers understand.”
Sakari Haapaniemi
Managing Director
Bemecon Oy
"[ACE Live] is way ahead of other network monitoring tools in its ability to quickly establish what part of the network is having issues and then drilling down to deliver a very specific look into the nature of the problem. Even before we got through the evaluation period, the appliance proved itself by helping us resolve an optimization issue with one of our critical Citrix applications.”
Roger Smith
IT Projects Manager
The Trafigura Group