Ehealth Case Studies

eHealth Case Studies

1) Verizon Business Uses CA eHealth Solutions in Private IP Reporting Service to Better Serve Converged Customer Environments

An IP Network that Spans the Planet In January 2006, Verizon and MCI completed a merger and became Verizon Business, offering advanced IP, data, voice and wireless solutions to large businesses, government and international organizations. The vision: To create one truly seamless, local-to-global IP network.

Verizon Business’ Private IP global network reaches 116 countries today. The company serves approximately 94% of the Fortune 500 companies, and is a leading communications provider for the federal government. Verizon Business is a unit of Verizon Communications.

Business Challenge: Improve Network Performance With Comprehensive Reporting Solutions

Verizon Business’ Private IP service has become its fastest growing service, with triple-digit growth for four years running. Private IP puts customer traffic on one reliable network using Quality of Service (QoS) routing, enabling customers to quickly and securely bridge their public and private networks around the world.

Customers can choose from among five Classes of Service (CoS) that will prioritize traffic based on voice, video or data. Verizon Business quickly recognized the opportunity to drive additional growth by offering its Private IP customers proactive network management tools. In particular, Verizon Business began offering detailed network performance reporting functionality through CA eHealth solutions implemented by CA’s Managed Services team.

Time was of the essence in delivering this reporting service to market via its Customer Center portal. By leveraging CA’s Managed Services team to design, install and operate the new web-based tools, Verizon Business was able to offer customers the reporting service in only five months.

CA eHealth Solutions Help Verizon Business Customers Maintain Critical Router Uptime “Using CA eHealth technology, Verizon Business has built a comprehensive reporting package complementary to our Private IP service,” Michael Marcellin, director of IP and Ethernet Networking at Verizon Business, pointed out.

Verizon Business Private IP customer, Reynolds and Reynolds Company, provides software solutions and managed IT services to the automobile industry. It leverages the CA eHealth solutions’ reporting technology in Verizon Business’ Private IP to help its customers — auto dealers — proactively stay a step ahead of potential network downtime that can cost them lost revenue. For example, CA eHealth reports show Reynolds and Reynolds a comprehensive snapshot of the uptime and performance of critical customer routers. As Dean Heyne, product manager with Reynolds and Reynolds explained: “Verizon Business’ Private IP WAN analysis, powered by CA eHealth, gives us the tools we need to help keep our customers’ networks up and running.”

Four Reporting Packages to Meet Customer Needs

Verizon

Business’ Private IP customers can choose from four levels of network reporting

offerings — all based on CA eHealth technology — to proactively manage network resources, improve capacity planning and bandwidth utilization, identify network performance issues, and address emerging problems before network services are impacted.

Danellie Young, senior manager for Verizon Business’ Private IP, worked closely with the CA Managed Services team to define the reporting packages for enterprise customers. The basic package, Standard Reporting, features prescheduled weekly CA eHealth reports for WAN interfaces and sub-interfaces, LAN interfaces, and router performance. The second level, Standard Select Reporting, features drill-down reports including At-A-Glance, Top N, Trend and

What-If Capacity Planning reports. The third level, Enhanced Traffic Management (ETM) reporting, features detailed reports for QoS, NBAR and Response. The premium reporting service, Enhanced Traffic Management Select, features eHealth Live Status, Live Exceptions and Live Trend reports, giving customers on-demand access to data.

As part of Private IP WAN analysis, CA eHealth reports leverage historical data from CA eHealth E2E Console, which collects vital system information from customer routers. Using end-to-end historical data from the CA eHealth database, CA eHealth reports help Verizon Business customers analyze trends, calculate averages and evaluate the overall ‘fitness’ of their IT environments. Customers can also see network traffic, CPU usage, memory capacity, QoS configurations and packet loss for a particular router, which helps IT managers identify impending problems before network services are disrupted.

With actionable data on network devices, network traffic and application response, Verizon Business’ Private IP customers are now well equipped to optimize network performance. “This is an extremely valuable customer retention tool,” said Young. “And by working closely with CA we were able to roll this model out quickly, with a lower total cost of ownership.”

Demand for the reporting service is outpacing Verizon Business’ expectations. Young reports that the vast majority of Verizon Business’ customers have

selected and purchased the premium CA eHealth reporting package — positive proof that customers understand the value of this comprehensive toolset.

Scalability + Volume = Increased Revenue Scaling to meet the needs of service providers is a challenge in itself, but the eHealth reporting solution has successfully and smoothly scaled to meet and drive further demand of Verizon Business’ Private IP. “From a service provider perspective, scalability is a critical factor in the technology selection process,” Kimberly Bennett, Private IP product manager for Verizon Business, explained. “Our ever-increasing Private IP service volumes create a challenge above and beyond that of an enterprise rolling out performance monitoring tools.”

Bennett pointed out that CA’s solution has rapidly scaled to support thousands of new devices per month — and she credits the exceptional service and ongoing engagement of CA’s Managed Services team in making the offering a success. “Selecting CA eHealth was the right decision,” she said. “The software and CA’s Managed Services team have helped us win customers and accelerate the growth of Private IP.”

2)

The

Business

Impact

Of

P e r f o r m a n c e Management e H e a l t h

CA’s

Network

So f t w a re

a t

U ni sys

As a worldwide information technology and services company, Unisys has

more than 37,000 employees operating in more than 100 countries. 2005, the company generated close to $6 consulting, systems

In

billion in revenue from

integration, outsourcing, infrastructure services, and

server technology.

The IT infrastructure is integral to the operations of most enterprises. In fact, it's often the most important part. For Unisys, it is absolutely critical because the infrastructure supports all of the firm's internal operations as well as all of its Web activity, including numerous business-to-business clients. The infrastructure not only must be available on a 24 x 7 basis but also must provide consistently high levels of performance to avoid user dissatisfaction with poor application response times.

To gain a competitive edge, Unisys set itself a goal of 99.9% service and application availability, and for the past year, the company has met this goal, thanks in part to its use of eHealth software from CA to manage its internal network.

With its CA eHealth solution, Unisys has been able to reduce both the number and duration of downtime incidents as well as the percentage of users affected by each downtime incident. "We've halved the number of downtime incidents," says Jim Miller, director of Network Operations for Unisys. "We’re also able to pinpoint problems faster and get our people involved sooner in resolving and fixing the problem. Over the past three years, our

mean time to repair faults has dropped by 50%."

According to Miller, eHealth has also helped to reduce downtime by identifying single points of failure in the infrastructure, which could then be redesigned with built-in redundancy.

Unisys

was

also

able

to

redesign the infrastructure to reduce the percentage of users affected by each downtime incident.

The Unisys IT infrastructure includes hundreds of servers and sites worldwide. Miller's team uses eHealth to manage more than 27,000 network elements. Before deploying eHealth, Miller had 20 people monitoring the network and responding to alerts. Now he needs only eight people, even though the network has grown tenfold. Besides reducing the number of people required for support activities, eHealth has also made the IT staff more productive. Says Miller, "Our staff is more focused now on building tools and other high-value activities instead of spending their time on nonproductive manual tasks."

Miller reports that eHealth has also cut down on the percentage of trouble tickets escalated to higher-paid personnel. "Three years ago, only 55% of the tickets were closed at the initial support level," he says. "Today, that figure is 90%."

Before eHealth was deployed, Miller had no ability to conduct trend

analysis or determine bandwidth utilization. Now he can look for errors before they occur and create daily trend reports for the engineers to determine what changes are needed in the infrastructure. For example, the engineering staff uses the reports for capacity planning, allowing them to plan network upgrades before performance and bandwidth become an issue. The eHealth trend reports let Unisys engineers focus on devices with the most potential to fail and schedule corrections without end-user impact.

In addition to pinpointing the areas in need of improvement, the trend reports help to make the business case for acquiring the resources needed for the upgrades. Rightsizing and redesigning the infrastructure has not only cut costs considerably but also reduced network latency, improving application performance.

Unisys deployed eHealth initially to proactively monitor and provide alerts on network devices as the company started standardizing on its router environment eight years ago. Prior to deployment, most outages weren't obvious until someone called with a problem. Now the IT staff knows about the issue immediately, and it can alert the end users and begin triage within seconds.

Besides the savings in IT staff and user productivity and the reduction in revenue lost due to downtime, eHealth has eliminated the expense of the

various

tools

used previously,

many

of

them

homebuilt

and

difficult

to integrate into a

cohesive management system. Previously,

administrators had to contend with multiple screens covering different parts of the infrastructure, which was highly inefficient.

Miller believes eHealth has given Unisys a competitive advantage by assuring service and application availability, which is the lifeblood of its business, and by improving application performance. Also, by enabling new applications to be deployed quickly with warranted response times, eHealth has given Unisys the agility to adapt its infrastructure promptly to changing business needs, an important capability in today's highly competitive and dynamic business climate.

For the operations and engineering staffs, eHealth software has become the place for one-stop shopping for performance management, isolation of incidents, utilization and trend

analysis,

internal users, who are, after all,

and

providing

reports

to

the organization's customers. Plus, it

has given management a real-time view they never had before and a way to quickly obtain a status update.

3) Improves Pension and Health Plan Service Using CA's eHealth Solutions Business Problem In order to satisfy members, SAG-PPHP must ensure timely delivery of pension

and health insurance benefits for the acting community without adding staff.

Behind the Scenes The Screen Actors Guild-Producers Pension and Health Plans (SAG-PPHP) provides health insurance, retirement and pensions for actors and actresses twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Benefits and pensions provided by SAG-PPHP cover over 60,000 participants. SAG- PPHP standardized on CA’s eHealth Suite in early 2003 to ensure timely efficient delivery of quality pension and health benefits for members. CA’s eHealth Suite was deployed to manage the entire technology infrastructure that supports the benefits for over 60,000 members. “We monitor our web processes from start to finish with the eHealth Suite,” says Kevin Donnellan, Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services for SAG-PPHP. With CA’s Application Response, SAG-PPHP measures actual end user experience to ensure that Hollywood’s finest receive the best services. With SystemEDGE™ monitoring critical systems, stars can focus on what happens in front of the camera.

Selection of CA Nader Karimi, CIO for SAG-PPHP, explains why they selected CA. “Whether you are a small or large company, you can work with CA to get great value from your infrastructure.”

SAG-PPHP

chose

CA’s

eHealth

Suite

for

its

ease

of

implementation, flexible management capabilities, integrated end-to-end solution view and low maintenance costs. Kevin Donnellan, the Director of MIS at SAGPPHP, estimates that if they selected another solution, they would need three to

four times the number of staff to manage it. The agency selected the eHealth Suite to manage its internal and external infrastructure components including applications, servers and networks that enable employees to process medical claims and members to authorize payments to physicians. In addition, the infrastructure enables actors to perform eligibility inquiries, make payments, review pension status and access other benefit-related information from anywhere in the world. By using the eHealth Suite for capacity planning, including network transportation and server storage, SAG-PPHP ensures the reliability of its member services. “The best thing about the CA eHealth Suite is that it’s the one powerful tool that brings it all together,” continued Mr. Karimi. Before using the fault management capabilities of the eHealth Suite, Kevin said it took ten times longer to be notified of a problem within their infrastructure. With the fault management capabilities provided by eHealth Live Health™ “We are able to use eHealth solutions to be proactive and highly responsive to the needs of our participants,” continues Mr. Karimi.

Benefit Information on Location Actors and actresses are on location as far away as India or Australia but still must be able to manage their personal matters remotely. With extremely busy members, having an available and responsive system is a requirement, not an option, for SAG-PPHP. “We must provide the absolute best services possible for our members at the lowest cost, and CA is critical parts of making this happen,” said Mr. Karimi. “Our participants expect dependable levels of service and our

primary responsibility is to manage their benefits efficiently. CA’s eHealth Suite ensures exceptional availability and performance of our IT infrastructure, allowing us to be a reliable resource for members around the clock.”

Migrating to a Paperless Benefits System Going forward, SAG-PPHP plans to enhance its benefits system with an electronic system that will speed up electronic claim processing and payments. The cost savings associated with this application will be significant for SAG-PPHP and will control SAG expenses, which ultimately results in lower administration costs. This new system will be highly dependent upon a reliable, scalable, and robust infrastructure, and SAG-PPHP is confident that its use of the eHealth Suite will help them provide network stability, server availability and application responsiveness for overall project success.

The Best Service for Hollywood’s Finest Hollywood movie stars expect dependable levels of service. SAG-PPHP must provide exceptional availability and performance or they will lose credibility with the acting community. The eHealth Suite has allowed SAG-PPHP to migrate to paperless benefits system with confidence that the performance and availability of this new system will be on target. They are able to reduce the number of staff needed in their call centers and the number of adjusters needed in their agency. This ultimately saves them in operational costs. Most important, SAG Pension & Health member satisfaction has increased due to the highly

reliable access that members have to benefits information from anywhere, at anytime.

Business Results SAG-PPHP has been able to save money with the help of eHealth Suite by: • Satisfying members with 24/7 availability of their benefits system without paying $100,000 for additional staff • Maintaining the solution with 1/4 the staff needed for other solutions • Enabling them to reduce call center staffing requirements by offering services via the web • Allowing them to implement a paperless benefits system that is reliable