Shoosmiths, a top 30 UK law firm, hopes the implementation of the application performance management system will maximise employee billable hours and improve the level of service it can off clients.
The firm recognised the need to provide customers, as well as its own staff, with information quickly. According to the company, Mazu Profiler uses Network Behaviour Analysis (NBA) to analyse the typical behaviour patterns of dependences between users, applications, network and systems. The system can also analyse traffic to detect application performance and availability, congestion and security issues.
This gives Shoosmiths a clearer understanding of what is happening on its systems, from the back-end servers to users’ desktops.
Andrew Downie, infrastructure and operations manager at the law firm, told CBR that rollout of Mazu Profiler was underway. “We’ve begun to implement the system at the company, and expect to complete rollout by the end of the year. At the moment about five people have full access to the system; we’re trying to restrict access because we don’t want people misinterpreting the data,” he said.
Shoosmiths trialled the product towards the end of 2007 and spent a while testing the system. Downie adds that there was not too much training or set-up required. A Mazu engineer dealt with the issue of integrating Profiler into the company’s existing systems.
Downie said: “We didn’t test other systems, because Mazu seemed good for the size and budget of our company. You can pay an arm and a leg for this type of system.”
The old system did not give the company a satisfactory overview of what was happening throughout its network and did not allow them to proactively determine problems and respond accordingly.
“Whenever users travelled to a remote office and logged onto the network, they experienced significant delays when trying to access our systems, which also affected the response times for other local users. We realised that we needed a solution that could provide us with a deep and intelligent understanding of all the components, users and activity on our IT infrastructure,” said Downie.
Mazu Profiler helps Shoosmiths to identify the areas of its network that are experiencing trouble or that are not working properly, causing knock-on effects to other parts. Although Profiler can be used to drill down into the packets to determine how to fix the problem, Shoosmiths is using Observer from Network Instruments for this.
“Mazu Profiler builds a map of our system and provides analysis of issues. This has resulted in more productive staff, which means benefits to clients,” said Downie.
Shoosmiths has 113 partners and more than 1,500 personnel at offices in Basingstoke, Birmingham, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Nottingham, Reading and Southampton. Its clients include Blue Chip companies, leading financial institutions, public and private sector organisations, and foreign-owned corporates.
Mazu Networks, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in May 2000. It currently has over a dozen customers in the UK and around two dozen in Europe.
