The Challenge
SDI Presence had become a primary MSP for critical utility and municipal customers whose infrastructures were relied on to, among other things, safely transport hundreds of thousands of people each day and ensure the constant availability of emergency services throughout a major U.S. city.
As SDI Presence took on these complex customers, it needed to design and ultimately deliver advanced 24x7 monitoring solutions—often using customers’ current state data as the template for improvement. This data, however, was often incomplete, inaccurate, or completely absent.
To probe beyond current state data, SDI needed access to expert network operations center (NOC) engineers with the unique experience and skill sets needed to reveal the entire set of support requirements for new customers.
The company also needed more support resources to handle a higher volume of notification, escalation, and Tier-1 support activities.
To avoid the high costs and lead-time of building out these competencies and capabilities in-house, company leaders realized that partnering with an operationally mature, third-party NOC service provider could circumvent these challenges by delivering white-labeled support at precisely the level they needed for a fraction of the cost and without distraction to their core business.
INOC was selected as the NOC partner to fill these gaps.
The Solution
Together, INOC and SDI Presence arranged a custom support package that enabled INOC to augment and enhance SDI’s existing support team with efficient onboarding, notification, escalation, and select Tier-1 outsourced support tailored to fill in-house gaps without overlap.
Since partnering in 2005, INOC and SDI have implemented and refined a set of service solutions that have transformed what were once serious operational challenges into value-added services, strengthening SDI’s existing client relationships and enabling new ones. We’ve summarized a few of these solutions below.
- Providing enhanced service planning and transition support to ensure full monitoring coverage despite incomplete current state data for new customers
- Augmenting and sometimes taking over monitoring and management of low-level issues, freeing in-house resources for advanced problem solving and revenue-generating projects
- Creating custom responses that prioritized critical infrastructure to ensure timely actions are taken
- Handling overnight monitoring (when in-house support staff aren’t available), helping to proactively prevent network outages, and allowing SDI to offer 24x7 services without additional CAPEX and far less comparative OPEX (hiring staff, buying equipment, and establishing governance)
- Taking over certain administrative tasks, allowing the company to spend more time on resolving complex issues
- Designing and implementing custom solutionsto resolve unique problems, such as equipment malfunctions that would not otherwise display as events
- Providing custom solutioning to monitor environmental factorssuch as temperature and water conditions that could lead to disruptions
- Providing redundant NOC support centersin case a disaster or significant business disruption affected the primary site—a requirement for many government customers
More recently, INOC has helped SDI integrate cutting-edge machine learning and automation tools (AIOps) to unlock previously impossible efficiencies. Rather than burdening human engineers with the task of correlating tens or hundreds of alarms and events manually, machine learning steps in to do this far more accurately and in a fraction of the time.
When appropriate, AIOps also automates simple notifications and escalations and auto-closes tickets. This automation frees SDI’s engineers to focus elsewhere, hit SLAs with ease, and avoid being greeted by morning backlogs of off-hours work.
The Results
Since partnering with INOC more than a decade ago, SDI has achieved quantitative improvements across key performance metrics as well as qualitative improvements in the size and quality of customer relationships.
In the case of one new managed services customer whose outgoing service provider had not made available the current state data prior to transition, INOC was able to achieve 80% monitoring coverage within just five days—an accomplishment SDI’s Vice President, Tim Portokalis characterized as “light-speed.”
SDI has also shared a few of its quantitative results for this key public infrastructure client, which we highlighted below.
SDI has also shared a few of its quantitative results for this key public infrastructure client, which we highlighted below.
- 50% reduction in ticket volume
- 25% reduction in first-call resolution times (notification and escalation)
- 25% increase in monitoring accuracy (monitoring the right contextual variables)
- Significant overall reduction in onboarding times (80% monitoring coverage within five days in one case)
- Significant decrease in Service Desk call abandonment rate (2.2% to 0.4%)
- 17% increase in responsiveness to VIP end-users
- 99% compliance rate with VIP response SLA (compared to 82% with previous support provider)
Partnering with INOC, Portokalis says SDI Presence has been able to receive more “accurate, descriptive, and timely” information across their monitored environments—enabling the SDI team to more rapidly resolve issues. The company was also able to significantly reduce its ticket volume and offer reliable, 24x7 network monitoring to clients with demanding service level requirements.
