NCR

Company: Ipswitch Inc.Customer: NCRSubmitted by: MCC InternationalDate: June 1999NCR Corporation sells financial and retail terminals throughout the world and has a heritage of exemplary customer service and cutting-edge IT development spanning 116 years. With 32,000 employees and revenues last year exceeding $6 billion worldwide, NCR is reliant on its computer systems to be operational all year round.With minimising network downtime a priority NCR installed Ipswitch’s WhatsUp Gold at its sites on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the UK, Gert Bakker, Manager Telecoms Services, implemented the product in September 1999. “We installed WhatsUp Gold as a safety measure for the Y2K bug, to keep an eye on how our network was coping. I wanted to be able to see quickly which devices were up and, more importantly, which devices were down.”WhatsUp Gold monitors all of our mission critical network devices, from routers and switches to servers and hosts,” explained Gert. “This enables us to provide the high level of customer service that we believe is the most important section of the value chain and is at the core of our business proposition.”Since the implementation, we have re-established internal services quicker, resulting in less downtime for our users and less frustration for clients.

Using WhatsUp Gold has certainly made my job easier. I don’t have to manually check devices any more, or wait for the phone to ring and be told that they are down. We can now answer the users with the response that we are already working on getting the service back up, or sometimes even fix the problem before they are aware of it!”The latest version of Ipswitch’s WhatsUp Gold includes a more intelligent autodiscovery function resulting in more accurate network maps, new graphical reports to track downtime and monitor SLAs (Service Level Agreements), and the facility to view graphical maps via a web interface so network status can be checked through any web-browser regardless of location.At NCR, IT administrators need to know what’s on their networks and know right away when a mission-critical device like a server or router is down in order to quickly solve the problem. WhatsUp Gold is able to quickly identify a problem and in many cases allows administrators to fix that problem even before users or customers are aware.

“The most important feature of WhatsUp Gold for me is the alarming capability,” concluded Gert. “When the device is down a continuous alarm sounds, which alerts us early enough to take immediate action. After hours, the radio paging facility is used as well, so that we can always be made aware of problems.”