4-page Case Study - Posted 4/6/2009

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Enterasys

Networking Provider Saves More than $200,000 after Unifying Its Infrastructure

Enterasys develops, markets, and supports its IT networking and security products from more than 40 locations around the globe. Through steady growth, the company’s application infrastructure had evolved into a collection of incompatible solutions that were cost prohibitive and inefficient to maintain. Employees had limited collaboration tools, which impacted overall productivity and customer service. Then Enterasys standardized on Microsoft® server and desktop business productivity technologies, replacing point solutions with user-friendly software on a single operating system platform. The company is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees, hosting, and administration costs. Today, Enterasys is building a competitive advantage by delivering strategic tools that employees use to work more efficiently and build customer-centric business processes.
   
    

Situation

Based in Andover, Massachusetts, Enterasys began as Cabletron Systems in 1983. The company designs and deploys wired and wireless networks and management software, as well as advanced security applications for intrusion prevention and access control. Enterasys performs network installation, maintenance, support, and outsourcing services, and markets its offerings to the commercial, government, education, and healthcare sectors. The company has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. Enterasys is part of Siemens Enterprise Communications Group, a joint venture between the private equity firm The Gores Group and Siemens AG.

Like many successful organizations that experience several years of rapid growth, Enterasys had acquired an IT infrastructure characterized by multiple point solutions and redundant applications. Enterasys management knew that this complex, heterogeneous environment had outlived its ability to carry the business forward and it was anxious to optimize the company’s IT infrastructure to maximize employee productivity and ensure superior customer service.

“‘There is nothing more important than our customers’ is the core principle that defines our corporate culture,” says Chris Lavoie, IT Application Development Manager at Enterasys. “My team is responsible for delivering IT tools and solutions for customers and partners to make it easy for them to do business with Enterasys, and to make it easy for employees to develop, market, and support Enterasys products. However, our IT environment had severely hampered our ability to help our workforce bring our customer-centric culture to life.”

Fragmented Online Experiences

Enterasys had approximately nine Web-based environments, including an intranet built on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003; a PERL- and UNIX-based Internet site; and a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) environment for the company’s Dragon software support portal. Multiple Web environments, coupled with a workforce distributed among 40 global offices, resulted in a fragmented user experience and forced employees to develop manual workarounds for business processes such as bringing new employees on board. Enterasys staff, partners, and customers had to use different passwords to access different applications that offered different user experiences and little interoperability. “We needed to streamline the user experience by consolidating and optimizing our infrastructure based on flexible, integrated enterprise-level applications,” says Lavoie.

IT faced similar challenges. Redundant systems required multiple passwords, security, and user provisioning policies to monitor. The IT staff had to monitor and administer a growing number of servers and applications, as well as perform security updates and application upgrades. “We were overburdened by ongoing maintenance with multiple environments on different technologies that required a broad skill set,” says Dan Wakefield, IT Operations Manager at Enterasys. “We wanted to deliver strategic IT solutions to the business, but we were constantly diverting valuable resources to perform routine tasks.”

Disconnected Employees

Enterasys employees faced other difficulties in fully realizing the company’s goals for worker productivity and customer focus. On the road, sales representatives juggled different e-mail accounts to stay in touch with customers. People had to search for information among siloed applications, and no tools were available to help employees find colleagues or subject matter experts. Most of the time, people phoned or sent e-mail messages to colleagues that they needed to reach. In a global organization, this was not an efficient method of connecting with fellow employees.

In terms of the company’s intranet, few opportunities existed for business users to create collaborative workspaces to improve virtual teamwork or liaise with partners. The IT department assumed responsibility for online content, so business owners had to wait for IT staff to perform site updates. “Even so, we didn’t have the granular control over who could access what information to ensure document and data security,” says Wakefield.

Enterasys needed an integrated IT environment of enterprise-level, flexible, and secure technologies that people could use to work more productively, without altering their everyday business processes.

Solution

Enterasys chose to unify its IT environment using a suite of business infrastructure optimization technologies from Microsoft. The company endorsed its decision by renewing its Microsoft Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) Suite agreement in July 2008. The Enterprise CAL Suite is made up of 11 Microsoft products that provide Enterasys information workers with tools for communication and collaboration, and the IT department with granular control over the infrastructure. Enterasys also took advantage of Microsoft Software Assurance for Volume Licensing under its Enterprise Agreement.

“Enterasys feels that the Microsoft relationship is very important. We want our research and development, engineering, and sales departments to work with the latest and greatest productivity tools that will be interacting with the software and networking hardware that we sell,” says Wakefield. “We liked the ease of having everything under one Enterprise Agreement, and the Software Assurance piece gives us access to the latest product upgrades and

We have reduced staff required to support our business productivity environment by 50 percent…. This frees up a lot of time to spend on higher-return projects. Rich Casselberry Director, IT Operations, Enterasys

The company also gained significant savings from signing the Enterprise Agreement. Because Microsoft had acquired ProClarity since Enterasys signed its previous Enterprise Agreement, the company was able to roll its ProClarity licenses into the new agreement, cutting those costs by 50 percent. “When we signed the new Enterprise Agreement, we dropped a competing Exchange anti-virus solution for Microsoft Forefront,” says Wakefield. “So we ended up saving approximately $30,000 in recurring license costs.”

Building Collaboration

The company has a mixture of Windows Server® 2003 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems in its environment and is running Windows® XP Professional on the majority of its personal computers. It had upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in 2007. The IT department made Microsoft Office 2007 part of its standard desktop image, installing it on all new desktops or laptops immediately following the release to manufacturing date. All employees had the option to upgrade and today the company is 95 percent deployed on Office Professional Plus 2007. The combination of Exchange Server and Office Professional Plus 2007 enables employees to manage their e-mail, faxes, and voice mails from their inboxes.

In January 2008, the IT team deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, complementary server and client programs that enable real-time communications. With this additional software, Enterasys staff gained presence awareness and instant messaging capabilities with any colleague in the company.

“We integrated Exchange Server with our PBX system through our Dialogics gateway so that people can access their Office Outlook® inbox and calendar from their phones, and can redirect phone calls to their voice mail, cell phones, or their office phone, as needed,” explains Wakefield. “And we took advantage of the External Connector License available through our Enterprise Agreement when we deployed Office Communications Server 2007. Now we can establish federated relationships with partners and customers.”

Enterasys also migrated its intranet and extranet to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The IT team used Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the front end for two new Microsoft .NET-connected applications on the extranet for employees, customers, and partners. The first .NET-connected application is a replacement for a hosted training and e-learning solution, for which Enterasys had been paying licensing fees. The second .NET-connected application is an online case management application designed for customers and partners to manage their service cases and return-materials authorization processes on Enterasys products. Previously, customers and partners performed these tasks using hosted solutions, for which Enterasys paid external licensing fees. Enterasys decided to build a better service using Microsoft technologies.

Lavoie and his team developed ASP.NET web solutions in the SharePoint environment that exposed functionality and data from Salesforce.com. Additionally, the team standardized on Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 as their integration engine between systems and Windows Communication Foundation, part of the .NET Framework 3.0, as their platform for service-oriented development between applications and to increase interoperability.

“Our strategy going forward is to leverage our SharePoint extranet as our external interface—in conjunction with our Web services layer in the middle and BizTalk Server as our transactional message broker—providing the mechanism to tie the back-end systems and hosted solutions to the end user,” explains Lavoie. “Users log into SharePoint Server, and based on their role and relationship with Enterasys, they’ll gain access to the appropriate content and functionality, without having to remember multiple passwords.”

Internally, Enterasys business owners now are deploying and administrating their own SharePoint-based collaborative workspaces and departmental sites. Employees have created several ad hoc workspaces to expedite customers’ support issues and to facilitate new business projects with partners. “SharePoint Server quickly proved itself in our proof-of-concept solution, where we increased workflow efficiency ‘onboarding’ new employees by up to 60 percent,” says Rich Casselberry, Director of IT Operations at Enterasys. “Today, we are building more workflows through SharePoint Server. We have completed a peer-to-peer award process put together by our leadership team. We are also using Office InfoPath® to redesign and consolidate multiple forms used to make requests of IT. By using SharePoint Workflows to then manage the submittal process to completion we will create a more transparent, efficient, and intuitive experience for our end users.”

Regaining Control over the Infrastructure

In 2007, Enterasys IT staff members began using Microsoft System Center products to simplify operations management and the monitoring of its unified business productivity infrastructure. In line with the Enterasys mandate to keep customers at the forefront, the IT team first focused on monitoring the health of the company extranet. “We jumped on our externally-facing application, where we first deployed System Center Operations Manager along with our gateway, which sits between our two domains: one for the extranet and one for the intranet,” explains Wakefield. “Now we are monitoring our intranet, as well, and next year, we are going to start using the management packs for System Center Operations Manager to extend our management capabilities for enterprise applications.”

The company also has plans to deploy System Center Configuration Manager in 2009 to centrally manage software upgrades and security updates, so it can retire an outside vendor’s solution that it had been using to monitor its Microsoft SQL Server® 2000 and SQL Server 2005 database software.

The business productivity platform from Microsoft offers a choice of hosted services, so Enterasys IT staff can meet security requirements while conserving IT resources. Enterasys chose Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, an online service from the Microsoft Forefront™ client security product line. The hosted service protects Enterasys employees from spam and malware and provides the company with seven days of e-mail during and after an emergency situation.

Benefits

With its integrated business productivity infrastructure, Enterasys now has the tools and technologies needed to empower its workforce to work smarter and stay focused on the customer. Microsoft productivity technologies fuel adoption through an enhanced user experience that makes it easy for Enterasys employees to integrate the technology into their daily work lives. And for IT staff members, the new environment improves their capacity to deliver technology solutions and services that save money and provide strategic business value. “With the Microsoft suite of technologies, IT has become a respected business enabler at Enterasys,” says Lavoie. “We can put the tools in place to make it easier for employees to assist customers, as well as to sell and support our products.”

Reducing IT Costs

Replacing outdated point solutions with an integrated infrastructure with enterprise-level functionality is reducing overall IT costs at Enterasys. “SharePoint Server gave us workflow, collaboration, and search capabilities, so we could retire incompatible environments and focus our skills on developing feature-rich applications for employees and customers using less hardware,” says Lavoie. “We’ve been able to reduce the number of servers we administer, and we are not managing multiple passwords and user permissions to access different applications. We’ve reduced the physical, power, and cooling footprint in our data center.”

Enterasys is also saving more than U.S.$200,000 annually by passing over expensive alternatives to its easily managed Microsoft infrastructure and hosted services solution. This includes an annual savings of $48,000 gained by replacing the company’s external SQL Server monitoring service with System Center Operations Manager 2007.

“Since we replaced our hosted learning management system with a SharePoint-based solution, we are saving $85,000 a year,” says Lavoie. “SharePoint Server also gave us enterprise search capabilities that could have cost up to $50,000 dollars annually if we had gone with another search provider,” says Lavoie.
“And, because we were able to leverage SharePoint and develop a cutting-edge case management system we did not have to invest in additional CRM license fees, saving Enterasys tens of thousands of dollars annually,” Wakefield adds. “We saved $30,000 in licensing costs by not renewing our previous mail anti-virus/anti-spam solution and going with Exchange Hosted Services. Plus we expect to save about 10 hours a week for our IT staff in not having to monitor spam and malware.”

Delivering Strategic, Secure IT Services

Thanks to the efficiencies gained by consolidating diverse applications within an integrated Microsoft infrastructure, Enterasys IT staff members have more control over the environment so they can focus on providing strategic IT services to the business.

“We have reduced staff required to support our business productivity environment by 50 percent,” adds Casselberry. “That’s because we are no longer spending 70 to 80 percent of our time on routine maintenance. This frees up a lot of time to spend on higher-return projects.”

For example, the Enterasys IT team is boosting content management capabilities and keeping business information more secure by controlling documents through detailed policy management settings in Office SharePoint Server 2007, which is integrated with the Active Directory® Domain Service in the Windows Server operating system. “The flexibility of security in SharePoint Server is fantastic,” says Lavoie. “For example, we are able to target document libraries containing product price lists to specific audiences: only to partners in the Americas or only to partners in Europe and Asia. As confidence with document security grows, more and more people are setting up and using workplace sites, driving organic use of the solution across the company.”

IT staff members are taking advantage of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 to better monitor the health of the extranet, and they have already experienced the benefits of proactive alerts to keep customer-facing applications up and running. “With no training, we are using all the SharePoint Server Management Pack alerts,” says Wakefield. “There have been several alerts regarding low disk space, memory and processor usage, and ‘application hangs,’ and other problems that System Center Operations Manager notified us about so they could be resolved before customers were affected.”

Enhancing the User Experience

Enterasys chose a Microsoft business productivity infrastructure to quickly integrate new IT services and tools into everyone’s daily work processes. This strategy fuels adoption and reduces time-to-benefit for the new infrastructure. “Our workforce is made up of highly-trained engineers and service technicians who appreciate more autonomy to manage their daily business processes,” says Wakefield. “Today, business owners are more efficient working with SharePoint Server to administer their own workspaces, post documents, and set up alerts.”

Staff members are working more productively on customer sales, service, and support because they can easily integrate Microsoft technologies into their everyday work processes. Federation with popular, Web-based e-mail services means that sales representatives can maintain e-mail relationships with customers who use different e-mail services, while only managing one Exchange-based inbox.

“Our federation allows sales people to work with their customers easily,” says Wakefield. “Microsoft unified communication capabilities are breaking down the barriers to communication on a global scale, so people can contact each other, regardless of their device or location.”

Lavoie points out that the similar user interface and unified user experience among Microsoft programs makes them extensible and user friendly. Internally, Enterasys business owners are taking ownership of updating and posting their content to the intranet and employees are quickly adopting the new unified communication tools that integrate with the SharePoint collaboration and content management platform and the 2007 Microsoft Office programs. Externally, one of the benefits of migrating the two customer- and partner-facing applications on the extranet to Office SharePoint Server 2007 is that it eliminates the disjointed experience of shifting from one user interface to another.

“Microsoft tools offer a consistent look and feel because the products are interoperable,” says Wakefield. “For IT, that simplifies management. For business users, that contributes to increased productivity and adoption. I like to spend most of my time in Office Outlook, where I can access the other systems I need. I can start an instant message conversation; I can update my tasks and my calendar in my SharePoint site; I can take folders offline, and they’ll show up in Outlook; and I can synchronize data between my phone, desktop computer, and laptop.”

Boosting Customer Service

Customers and partners are also finding that Microsoft technologies make it easier to do business with Enterasys. Recently, sales and service staff used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to quickly solve a customer support issue. To resolve the issue, Enterasys services staff created a SharePoint workspace and invited the relevant supplier, partner, and customer contacts to participate in an ad hoc troubleshooting session. “It took only 15 minutes to build the online workspace, invite the relevant participants, and start sharing data to solve the issue,” reports Lavoie. “SharePoint technology solidified our relationship with the customer and the suppliers, and we believe it will help drive a competitive advantage in the market.”

Bringing the Corporate Culture to Life

Finding technology that fits how people work is an immediate win. Finding technology that supports a corporate culture is a long-term advantage. This fit was demonstrated when the Enterasys cross-function leadership team used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to build a peer-to-peer award site and create a simple workflow that allows colleagues to nominate each other for noteworthy work efforts.

“Culture at Enterasys is more than what’s written on a piece of paper,” says Wakefield. “Microsoft technologies support our peer-to-peer awards, providing a tangible framework to empower and reward people for living the Enterasys culture. Technology that empowers our workforce will ensure our long-term success.”

Microsoft Optimization
With Optimization, you can build a secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall IT costs, make better use of resources, and become a strategic asset for the business. The Microsoft Optimization model—with basic, standardized, rationalized, and dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft using industry best practices and Microsoft’s own experiences with enterprise customers. The Optimization model provides a maturity framework that is flexible and easily used as a benchmark for technical capability and business value.

For more information about the Microsoft Optimization model, go to:
www.microsoft.com/optimization

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Enterasys products and services, call (978) 684-1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.enterasys.com