The client provides affordable housing for people living in London, the South East, East Midlands and East of England. It owns, manages, and administers over 57,000 homes. In addition, it delivers training programmes, events and activities for residents, designed to boost employment opportunities and foster stronger communities.
  • Challenge
  • Solution
  • Outcome

Challenge

The challenges the client faced were two-fold – one was causing day-to-day operational issues, and the other involved a SaaS migration. The first was an ongoing challenge of ad-hoc performance and quality issues with RingCentral that carried MS Teams voice, for which the client could not identify the root cause of the problems experienced.

Secondly, it had a strategic initiative to migrate from a traditional on-premise customer relationship management system to Salesforce SaaS CRM across its entire business, for which user experience was crucially important. To help ensure the success of the Salesforce rollout and ongoing use, the client required a tool that would enable the visibility of SaaS applications and ultimately mitigate the technology migration risk.

Solution

Having been a client of Natilik since 2011, key contacts attended a co-hosted roundtable session at Cisco Live EMEA, where the assurance capabilities of ThousandEyes were demonstrated. During the session, its challenges were recognised as prime use cases for a ThousandEyes solution.

Together, ThousandEyes and Natilik  built a solution that would enable the client to overcome its hybrid worker voice and videoconferencing services challenges and proactively empower the team during the Salesforce rollout. The solution consisted of 500 ThousandEyes endpoint agents, which were deployed to a subset of its knowledge base workers. Supporting this was the adoption of 150 thousand enterprise licenses for network-level visibility across its Catalyst 9000 switching estate.

Outcome

Now, when issues are reported, ThousandEyes is the first place the IT Operations team check to ensure it is not a connectivity or MS Teams issue. This capability has reduced the time taken to pinpoint the root cause of issues, as well as its resolution in instances where the IT team can resolve the problem, all of which have positively impacted wider business productivity.

The client has been so impressed with the capability and value provided by ThousandEyes that the emerging platform support within the Meraki MX portfolio has led it to pursue a Meraki SD-WAN solution across its remote site estate as its legacy solution can’t offer the same level of visibility.

  • Enhanced visibility

    The team can quickly check if poor user experience is a circuit, MS Teams infrastructure or RingCentral services.

  • Speed to resolution

    Quicker user resolution when the cause is solvable by the client's tier 1 team.

  • Improved user experience

    Not only has it helped the IT team with visibility and MTTR, it is also enhanced employee experience and boosted business productivity.