May 8, 2000

http://www.informationweek.com/785/ssmgmt.htm

Solution Series:
Management Becomes A Critical Factor

As E-business demands more of the network, IT managers seek higher service levels and lower costs

By Lenny Liebmann

hese are hard times for networks and network managers. For them, E-business initiatives mean skyrocketing traffic volume that's more critical and more diverse than ever. IT and network managers have to juggle both the need to ensure these networks can deliver the service levels that online applications require and an increased dependence on service providers and business partners. And, of course, they also have to keep costs from skyrocketing in the process.

The high demands of network-dependent E-businesses have managers seeking out whatever management strategies they can--consolidation, network-management application service providers, and new software tools. "E-business has obviously made network management a more critical discipline," says Roger Hull, CIO of First American Title Insurance Co., a $2 billion subsidiary of First American Financial Corp. Hull says the Santa Ana, Calif., company's customers--which include builders, mortgage brokers, and bankers in 30 countries--want a single, electronic point of contact for doing business with First American. "We can only give that to them if our network is responsive and reliable," he says.

In First American's case, cost efficiency became a must as increased E-business activity drove network-management costs up 67% in the past 18 months, when the company rolled out business-to-business applications and added more network connections.

A fragmented network-management staff was a big part of the problem. First American expanded to 988 offices nationwide through acquisitions, leaving widely scattered IT personnel in charge of different parts of its far-flung network. Hull found that six people were centrally managing 45% of the devices on the network, using remote-management tools, while it took 45 people to manage the remaining devices manually. "It became pretty clear that by using the right remote-management tools, a relatively small staff could manage the whole network," he says.

Hull initiated a network-operations-center consolidation project that will eventually let his entire 12,000-user network be managed from headquarters. The center, designed and implemented with the assistance of Lucent Technologies Inc.'s NetworkCare business unit, should save First American $1.5 million. "We're going to bring the overall cost of managing the network back down to where it was 18 months ago, but we'll be supporting an overall volume of traffic that's four times higher," Hull says. "And we'll be doing a much better job."

The network is primarily frame relay, with more than 700 routers and a mix of Windows NT and Unix servers. Lucent built the network-operations center, which includes remote-management tools, restructuring of the center's staffing, training, documentation, and knowledge transfer. According to Hull, it's not just cutting staff that's reducing costs; a smaller, centrally located staff makes fewer mistakes. "The more people you have, the more difficult it is to enforce policies and procedures," he says. Even more important, Hull says, the network-opera-tions center will let First American respond much more quickly to emerging E-business opportunities. "You can 'turn on' new products and services much more rapidly with a well-managed network," he says.

As an example, Hull points to a recent rollout First American accomplished in just five working days--rather than in the one-to-three months that such an implementation would have required in the past. The new line of insurance, known as Eagle9 UCC, provides coverage to lenders for loans where virtually all forms of personal property can be taken as collateral. In addition to providing comprehensive protection even for highly complex financing deals, this new policy makes it simpler for First American's customers, who now have a single point of contact.

While preaching against geographic and organizational fragmentation of network management, Hull also cautions others to avoid artificial boundaries between enterprise network management and other IT functions, such as systems administration, application monitoring, and even software development. "If you don't consolidate all the information you need about your network--your systems and your applications--troubleshooting becomes a difficult, slow process," he says. "That can lead to real problems if you're trying to service your customers electronically."

Andy Kiolbasa, director of enterprise infrastructure for ITT Industries Inc.'s Fluid Technology and Specialty Products business unit, is facing similar challenges. The company is letting its worldwide customers place orders, check shipments, and get technical support online.

Like many IT executives, Kiolbasa is fairly confident about his management team's ability to keep tabs on what goes on across the enterprise network--which in his case connects 10,000 users across 250 facilities in 25 countries. But E-commerce brings a new set of variables into play. "Across my own network, it's easy for me to see that we have 120-millisecond latency from Chicago to New York," he says. "But with E-commerce, you have to learn to start dealing with the unknown of the Internet."

Without a way to monitor public-network traffic, Kiolbasa says, an E-business can quickly become no business. "You can't just throw your hands up in the air and say, 'It's not our problem.' Customers will just go buy what they need somewhere else." That's why Kiolbasa is shopping for tools that will let his staff see whether some problem outside the enterprise, such as poor performance on his customers' Internet service provider networks, are hampering ITT's E-commerce services.

Kiolbasa also will not segregate E-commerce management from other IT management operations. Ultimately, he expects to replace his conventional WAN/LAN management tools with next-generation E-commerce solutions, such as end-to-end application response-time monitors. "That way, we'll wind up with a single technology portfolio that's no larger than what we have now," he says.

However, in moving to the E-commerce toolset, Kiolbasa says, he expects to see a significant, but temporary, spike in management costs--much like the one First American experienced. "Over the next 18 months, I'm going to have to spend a lot to revamp my network management," he says. "After that, I'm anticipating lower costs, because the tools will be more sophisticated."

Kiolbasa says the round-the-clock nature of E-commerce also presents a major cost challenge. "Regardless of what kinds of management tools you use, you still have to decide whether or not to add a second and third shift to address problems when they occur," he says. His solution? Take advantage of his company's global presence to institute a "follow-the-sun" management strategy, where business locations in different time zones can cover for one another throughout the day or night. For example, ITT's management centers in Sydney, Australia, Stockholm, Sweden, and Morton Grove, Ill., all share a common help-desk application from Applied Innovation Technologies Inc. so they can easily pass events and information among the locations as their work shifts change.

Central to Kiolbasa's vision of common management across intranet, extranet, and Internet applications is a highly unified application development strategy that keeps variables to a minimum--even as more diverse services are extended to internal staff, mobile workers, customers, and business partners. "It's important to stick with good, open standards like Java and Corba," he says. "If you don't get involved with anything proprietary, you can avoid support problems that drive up the cost of management."

Distinctions between E-commerce and enterprise network management are inherently artificial, says Caryn Gillooly, an analyst with consulting firm Hurwitz Group. Ultimately, it's just business, whether it happens inside or outside the firewall, she says, but many companies don't quite get it yet. "Their E-business group is very separate, and it's butting heads with the rest of IT," she says. "That's not the way it should be."

In a recent InformationWeek Research survey about infrastructure requirements, 75% of the 150 IT managers queried said they had to add more bandwidth last year to accommodate Internet use. Gillooly says she also believes the growth of E-commerce traffic will lead to greater interest in policy-based network-management solutions, which let network managers define global rules about how different types of traffic should be prioritized and accommodated on the network. "Policy management will become very important as you start protecting the most important applications on your network from the less critical ones," she says.

One early adopter of policy management is $5 billion retailer Toys "R" Us Inc. in Paramus, N.J. The company is implementing policy-based tools from Orchestream Ltd. to ensure proper prioritization of its increasingly diverse types of network traffic. Using Orchestream, Toys "R" Us has created four queues for its network traffic: one for critical legacy DECnet applications such as its corporate financials, and three for IP traffic, which it prioritizes as high, best-effort, and low. "We see the integration of our online systems with the brick-and-mortar side of the business as essential to sustaining our competitive advantage," says Paul Pansini, director of data and voice-network systems. And the integration of online systems with the bricks-and-mortar side of the business will be essential if Toys "R" Us is to sustain its competitive advantages as a global retailer and avoid the problems that plagued its earlier E-business initiatives. "But we can only make that integration happen if we can protect the DECnet traffic," he says. "That's what policy management enables us to do."

Policy management can protect critical E-commerce traffic from noncritical network usage, Pansini says. For example, if a user puts a 1-Gbyte file on a system in a store, it could jam up the whole network. "By the time you figure out what's going on, you've had 10 of your top technicians working on the problem for an hour," he says. With the type of policy-based prioritization that Orchestream provides, on the other hand, such reactive firefighting can be eliminated. In addition, Orchestream automatically configures devices across the retailer's 1,200-store frame relay network to conform to the prioritization rules of the business so Pansini's staff is freed from time-consuming hardware-configuration tasks. "Automation is very important when you're trying to control costs," he says.

The expense and difficulty of retaining qualified networking staff has also driven Pansini to another cost-containment strategy: the use of management service providers. One of his biggest problems with network management is finding and keeping people. "As soon as I bring them on board and get them up to speed, they're out the door to the big equipment vendors or carriers." By turning certain monitoring and reporting responsibilities over to an outside service provider--in his case, Management Reporting Inc. of Franklin Lakes, N.J.--Pansini eliminates many staffing headaches, reduces costs, and achieves higher service levels (see story, p. 80).

Browser-based management tools, which let managers and technicians view management data from any desktop, regardless of its operating system or location, are another way Pansini hopes to cut costs and increase network flexibility. With a common point of presentation, rather than proprietary platforms, "you can eliminate a lot of the costs associated with running different applications on different platforms," he says. Despite the benefits of many of these new tools, Pansini warns against what he calls "tool creep." "There are so many cool applications out there, it's tempting to start collecting them," he says. At some point, however, the networking staffers will wind up spending too much time learning new applications instead of getting the maximum value out of what they already have.

While keeping management toolkits to a manageable size is smart, E-commerce is clearly creating the need for new network-monitoring solutions. Conventional enterprise-network instrumentation simply can't tell IT managers how fast Web-site and business-to-business application response times are across public networks--and good response times are critical to keeping customers happy. That's why E-business executives are turning to vendors, such as Keynote Systems Inc. and NetMechanic Inc., that provide this information by executing "dummy" transactions and queries from various points on the globe.

"It really relieves a big burden when you have someone constantly checking your site to make sure you're serving pages and queries properly," says Eric Wolf, senior software engineer at Kansas City Southern Railway, which permits customers to check the status of railroad cars over the Internet. Wolf uses the NetMechanic service, which alerts his staff about problems via their pagers. "If there's any problem, we get alerted with an alphanumeric pager message that lets us get started on solving the problem right away," he says.

Occasionally, events beyond the control of enterprise IT managers can create E-commerce network-management problems. The railway's T1 line, for example, is provided by Sprint, which uses Cisco routers. The railway itself uses equipment from Nortel Networks Corp.'s Bay Networks division. When Sprint does network upgrades, Wolf says, his equipment doesn't automatically reboot and sync up with the carrier's routers. The result is an occasional lost connection--typically at 1 a.m. on a Monday. "If it weren't for NetMechanic, we'd be dead when we arrive in the morning," he says. "With the monitoring service, one of our technicians can get the page, reboot the router right from home, and go back to sleep." At just $10 per month for each monitored URL, Wolf says, the service is well worth its price tag.

While network managers may adopt various tactics for coping with the high stress that E-commerce is putting on their networks, one thing is clear: Network management is a vital component of any successful E-business strategy. What's the choice? Not spending that time and money could be more costly, if not fatal, to E-business efforts.

Photo of Hull by Edward Carreon
Photo of Pansini by Catrina Genovese

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