Mike Ayres, Managing Director of Channel Partners at Easynet, says, “Management tools like Highlight are vital in helping our partners to grow their businesses. With Highlight, partners can differentiate their offer in the market by delivering a unique level of visibility and transparency for their customers.”
Easynet’s partners can access Highlight’s monitoring and reporting services via Matrix, Easynet’s web-based service management portal for partners. Partners have access to different levels of Highlight depending on the needs of their customers.
“The key benefit of Highlight is that we are using the same tool as our partners and their end customers – it’s a single consistent view across everything,” continues Mike. ”With this common view we can proactively identify and fix any problems. And when critical applications are reliant on any number of parties – including ourselves, partners, carriers and end customers - a single indisputable view of what is happening removes any unnecessary finger pointing.”
Mike adds, “We needed Highlight to equip partners with full visibility of the applications that are driving the workspace including both internal and cloud-based services. The challenge is to deliver not just reliable services but to ensure critical applications are given the correct priority. We receive calls from partners relating to what they believe are network faults but are in fact poorly performing applications. We find that when partners and their customers start to look at Highlight’s application views, they are often surprised at the applications being used such as Skype for non-work purposes.”
The Highlight platform allows evolve, an established Easynet partner, to proactively monitor customer connections and application usage. Using the enhanced statistics they can break down their customers’ usage by application type and port, making it easy to diagnose performance related problems.
The service is also available to their customers directly, enabling IT managers to drill down into their connections, monitor load and manage trends themselves. The ability to view the data by day, week or month, coupled with the general statistical reporting makes Highlight an invaluable tool for reporting and feeding back into the business.
Marcus Alves, Network Services Manager at evolve comments, “In an age where connectivity is in everything we do, having the ability to empower our customers with visibility similar to that of a network provider is key, this is where Highlight comes into its own.”
In addition to using Highlight to quickly and easily pinpoint the cause of an application fault, it has also assisted evolve in identifying upgrade opportunities, where a customer consistently utilises the majority of their bandwidth allocation. The added value here is that the customer can see this for themselves, which makes the upgrade discussion easy to have with the customer.