Business Challenge

Too often, organizations embrace emerging technologies without adequately assessing their IT infrastructure’s readiness to support them.  This tendency has been a source of tremendous frustration and expense for a number of companies that have implemented IP telephony over the past two years.

In this instance, however, a major life insurance company recognized the importance of assessing its network’s ability to support the advanced technologies they were considering, well in advance of initiating plans to implement them.  The company was considering IP Telephony—as a means to reduce telecom and datacom costs, and also IPTV—a technology designed to facilitate enhanced videoconferencing quality and capabilities, including easy re-broadcasting of video Web seminars.  The timing of the assessment was doubly strategic, as the company leased its network, and would soon need to decide whether to renew, enhance, or replace the assets it had in place.

Solution

Forsythe worked with the company’s IT team to assess its core network infrastructure, including layout and component configurations.  Using a variety of tools to measure utilization and evaluate performance, raw data were then analyzed in the context of real-world utilization scenarios, and compared to best practices.  This resulted in an overall picture of the company’s current network functioning.  These results were then compared to established benchmarks for operating the new technologies.

Results

Although Forsythe determined that the company’s overall network design scheme was excellent, some issues needed to be addressed to ready the network for increased capacity demands.  Forsythe identified, categorized, and prioritized these issues.  For example, at one location, core switches were operating at 80% utilization.  While sufficient for present operation, they would experience serious problems in the event of a new technology implementation.  Likewise, a server farm contained very outdated switches, still functioning, but not up to the challenge of increased load.   By making the necessary upgrades in advance, the company is setting itself up to succeed with its new technology implementations.  At the same time, by assessing its technology needs at a logical decision point, prior to end-of-lease, the company was able to upgrade its infrastructure most cost-effectively.