Introduction
Firstsource is a leading provider of client-based business process services globally from technology centers in USA, India, UK, Philippines and Srilanka. The business services are provided to various industrial verticals including healthcare, communication, banking, financial services and insurance. Several of clients are from the Fortune-500 list.
Since its inception in 2001, the focus has been on simplifying complex technology through innovative delivery methodologies to attain the highest level of customer satisfaction. With more than 20,000 employees to manage, including clients who are spread across the globe, the challenge is huge for the internal IT team.
“It is really impressive to see the way IT360 has transformed since 2010. Today the product is far more stable with enterprise-level features being added in every release. Technical support is something which I always have admired from ManageEngine. On the scale of 1-5 with 1 being the lowest and 5 being highest, I would rate technical support at 4.25. Still a lot of room for improvement and I am sure they will get there”
“One of the biggest challenges for us was to save the manhours, to speed up production and reduce the downtime which we weren´t able to achieve with HP-NNM and other evaluated tools. Compared to the past, today with IT360 my team is able to save up to 90% of man-hours, which is a huge leap in IT efficiency and productivity that we are able to achieve.”
“With recent developments in cloud-based technology, we have designed our own privatecloud infrastructure and it was very relieving to see the way IT360 supports it. The ESXi-based monitoring reports are one such impressive report which I use on a daily basis to check the health and availability. It is so exhaustive that I do not have to bother about anything else”
Operational Challenge
Firstsource has a wide network of clients ranging from different industries that have varied set of requirements. Mr. Parthasarthy Shanmugham, popularly known as Partha, is a Senior Manager, Technology. He has been with Firstsource since 2008 and now manages a team of 30+ engineers. He started the conversation by saying “I remember our early days when we had just a couple of sites. Today Firstsource has sites in five different countries with NOCs in Mumbai and Chennai, India. Our biggest challenge was connecting all of them together seamlessly. It was HP-NNM then and it was getting extremely difficult for us to adapt with changing technology.”
With aggressive growth, Firstsource started to expand its business. This created additional challenges for Mr. Partha and his team. HP-NNM was becoming an overhead for the company that wanted to grow ahead at a rapid pace.
“We used to have a very hard time in configuring the devices with HP-NNM. The latest move to virtualization was making the daily configuring and monitoring tasks even more cumbersome. On an average we used to take 4 to 8 hours to configure the device with HP.” - said Mr. Partha
Firstsource during this time was looking for a solution which could perform the job with minimum man-hours and give a unified view to their NOC teams.“After having an unsuccessful stint with HP-NNM we were on a hunting spree. We evaluated several tools in market from Solarwinds, Nimsoft, BMC, What’s up gold and BMC for a long time. Every tool was lacking in two aspects ease of use and quality of technical support.” adds Mr. Partha.
The ManageEngine Solution
During the evaluation stage Firstsource was introduced to ManageEngine’s Integrated IT Management Solution. IT360 was newly introduced to the market in 2010 when Mr. Partha noticed it. The integrated dashboard is what intrigued him and his management who later agreed for a detailed Proof of Concept (POC) stage. “We were completely aware that IT360 was recently introduced and we were one of the early adapters. It was surprising to see the granular details the product gave even at an early stage on a neat single console which we were looking for a long time.”, said Mr. Partha.
After a detailed POC, Firstsource decided to go ahead with ManageEngine IT360. They initially started with a few resources. Today IT360 with its central-probe enterprise architecture is being deployed in ten different sites in the UK, US, Philippines and Srilanka with its central server located at the NOC locations in India in Mumbai and Chennai. Today around 2300 devices with more than 1000 virtual servers are located in 54 different locations are configured in IT360.
More than 120 clients are being managed by Firstsource using IT360. The enterprise-level scalability has allowed Firstsource to scale their operations without worrying about the number of devices or sites. The failover or high-availability module of IT360 is being deployed in their NOCs to ensure 24/7 availability of services.
The ManageEngine Advantage
Firstsource’s IT-management team can now centrally manage the entire infrastructure without using several point solutions addressing a specific need. This increases the visibility into IT and helps in enhancing the efficiency and collaboration within teams.
The Real-time IT Advantage
The integrated dashboard gives Mr. Partha real-time visibility across all the sites. The KPIs and reports generated by the product allows his team and management to make accurate IT and business-related decisions. Following are the advantages which Firstsource team saw in IT360:
- Centralized dashboard for real-time IT visibility
- Unified reports for making accurate business related decision
- Vast breadth of support for different market-ready as well as support for custom-applications.
- Latest feature of self-diagnostics which proved to be extremely helpful for administrators to analyze the environment-related issues, reducing the MTTR.
ManageEngine, apart from its variety of products, is also known for its support. With around 65,000 customers worldwide ManageEngine maintains various mediums to support its customers. An active ManageEngine community forum is an example of one such medium.
