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Hardware With Global Reach
When you are one of the world's biggest laptop and printer manufacturers by market share, you depend on tens of thousands of employees, contractors, and partners situated in every corner of the world to help you get products to customers. Likewise, they rely on your enterprise infrastructure set up at offices, data centers, factories, and in the cloud to produce top-of-the-line hardware.
The manufacturing process is complex: design, sourcing, assembly, quality control, and delivery must all be done with precision across various locations. And maintaining visibility across the SD-WAN (Software-defined Wide Area Network) connecting offices, data centers and the cloud from an end users’ perspective helps this company ensure uptime and resolve issues quickly that may interrupt their supply chain.
Digitizing Processes Across the Spectrum
The massive scale of its operations initially propelled the hardware vendor's digital transformation. With more than 50,000 employees spread across six continents, the company benefitted from rethinking how it digitally integrated its workforce into a cohesive whole. Additionally, the pandemic catapulted this hardware vendor's digital transformation journey. Digital transformation thus became its fundamental ingredient to accelerated growth and sustained efficiency in a world where everything is distributed, from a remote workforce to on prem and cloud infrastructure.
To meet these challenges, the hardware vendor accelerated digital transformation across the spectrum of operations—from presales and sales to delivery and fulfillment to servicing and maintenance—with each step depending on applications with distinct API calls.
API Integrations Abound
The hardware vendor hosts its databases and environments within the Microsoft Azure cloud, which stores information about parts, diagrams, and other intellectual property. And workers must have access to these resources when they are needed so that they can be consistently productive.
API integrations and the network they run on are critical to this global 24/7 operation. When workers use Microsoft Dynamics to submit orders, run reports, or pull content, they depend on those API calls to reach and interface with the systems and applications that keep the production ball rolling. If a circuit goes down or the calls are performing poorly, it will increase downtime and reduce the value that employees can contribute—frustrating customers in the long run.
Alerts That Support KPIs
Initially, this hardware company adopted ThousandEyes to help them monitor their SD-WAN. As such, they built a multitude of tests for visibility into critical data centers and offices. But with the pandemic came a broader challenge: monitoring and remediating issues in significantly more diverse working environments.
The hardware company rose to the challenge by deploying ThousandEyes vantage points on end user devices where visibility was needed, whether the worker was at home or in an on prem physical location. ThousandEyes thus made it possible for the hardware vendor's IT teams to see, in real-time and from a single dashboard, problems with their network infrastructure or the remote user’s home network that could lead to disruptions in the digital supply chain.
"ThousandEyes tells us how to optimize a traffic pattern or path,” said the hardware company's global lead for automation and monitoring. “It provides a more accurate depiction of overall employee productivity, which is what we're trying to achieve as a soft KPI [key performance indicators]."
Moreover, the company's IT team innovatively configured a ServiceNow integration that pulled in ThousandEyes alerts through an API, allowing for the automatic creation of incidents in the company's ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) dashboard that could be remediated automatically or with little triaging.
“This way, we don't wait until a user complains,” said the company’s automation and monitoring executive. “We're able to get data about how a particular set of users is performing and get alerts when a particular population is having an issue.”
Less Manual Intervention, Better Connectivity
The integration between ThousandEyes and the hardware vendor's ITSM granted it more visibility and quicker actionability whenever a worker, process, network, and APIs are disrupted. With this knowledge and capability, they can proactively reduce the number of manual interventions required to manage their global workforce, saving significant amounts of time while lowering mean time to resolution.
"ThousandEyes enables our helpdesk agent to be more informed,” said the executive. “So, when a ticket is opened, they can close it sooner, and we get a more productive workforce overall."
While hardware vendors have a lot of work to do to keep up with the demands of today's tech-reliant customers, it is important that they also focus on taking care of themselves. Companies can retain an edge over the competition by prioritizing their own development and ensuring that their processes are streamlined and efficient. And ThousandEyes helps companies do just that by giving them visibility into all the activity happening across their networks so they can make better decisions about where to invest critical time and budget.
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