Buchanan Gains Deep Network Visibility with Help from Entuity

Founded in 1988, Buchanan Technologies is a technology services corporation that helps its clients successfully navigate the continuing and tremendous shifts in enterprise technology.

Included in Buchanan’s services are complete, turnkey IT solutions offering management and monitoring of business IT infrastructure and applications to enterprise organizations in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Buchanan’s core principles and beliefs guarantee that its clients always remain at the center of everything it does. In keeping with this commitment, the company’s managed services group deployed Entuity Network Management. With the help of Entuity, Buchanan is now able to deliver the network visibility needed to ensure that its clients’ networks are performing at peak efficiency and availability.

If you are interested in discussing Buchanan Managed Services using Entuity, check out at Buchanan.com.

At A Glance

• Customer Details: Privately held, 250+ Employees, Contractors and Solution Architects, 110+ Global Customers
• Network Management Software: Entuity Network Management for BMC TrueSight Operations Management
• Other Integrations: BMC Remedy

Priority #1: Customer Satisfaction
Buchanan’s mission is to partner with businesses that benefit operationally and financially from the use of its services. Its teams support specific technologies as well as the business processes that keep its clients’ businesses running smoothly.

In keeping with their fundamental values, Buchanan employs and develops a diverse and experienced team of consultants, engineers and architects. This allows Buchanan to guarantee that all of its strategies and activities are focused on one objective: to serve the best interests of its clients.

The Main Challenge: Limited Visibility
To maintain its high standards of customer service and to be a true partner to its clients, Buchanan was searching for a new network monitoring tool that would provide a more superior view into its clients’ networks. It needed to be a bona fide enterprise-class solution that would deliver fast access to detailed information about network devices and enable Buchanan to proactively manage its customers’ networks and fix issues rapidly.

The company’s previous network management tool was limited in technology and would only allow it to ping a device to determine whether that device was up or down. This meant it was limited to only the information the vendor of that device was providing. In addition, the prior tool did not offer the reporting capabilities needed to validate service levels to its customers.

According to Darvey Lavender, Director Client Services for Buchanan: “The service value we offer our customers is being an extension of their IT team. We allow them to focus on the internal goals of their organization—moving their business forward, while we ensure that their systems are up and running and their end-users are online. We needed a network management tool that offered a higher level of visibility, allowing us to support our customers at the highest level.”

Why was Entuity Selected?
The Buchanan team first heard about Entuity from one of its very large managed services customers. Part of Buchanan’s role was to support this customer’s Entuity implementation in its network environment. Having had direct experience with Entuity, the team eventually decided to evaluate and ultimately implement it for monitoring all of its client networks.

Entuity met the challenge: providing quick accessibility and deep visibility into network devices. With Entuity, the Buchanan team now gets streaming information and more detailed operational characteristics that tell them what’s really happening inside the devices it monitors. It uses this information for the benefit of its customers, for example, showing them whether a device has pending issues, or recommending when they may need to upgrade a device or increase capacity levels. Entuity’s root cause capabilities are another big benefit for Buchanan, offering a better understanding of the “root cause” of issues and pinpointing the exact location for fast resolution.

According to Lavender: “Entuity provides quick visibility, an expedited alert that issues are either forthcoming or have already happened. It helped place us in a more proactive stance with customers and gave us more diagnostic capability with the devices. That helps us continue to be a great partner to our clients.”

Entuity Reports Shone a Light on Network Information
In addition to improved network visibility, the Buchanan team is extremely pleased with Entuity’s reporting capabilities. In fact, reporting is, alongside visibility, one of Buchanan’s favorite features. It’s imperative to have professional reports for its customers, but with the previous tool this was, according to Lavender, “a challenging and manual process.”

Since installing Entuity, the Buchanan team can report to its customers in a much more granular way about what it’s monitoring, what they see happening on the network thanks to the network topology mapping tools, network flow analytics, and the location of devices. It can create customized reports that are tailored to its customers’ service level agreements, illustrating SLA metrics for both historical and current data. These features have allowed the added benefit of streamlining the number of standard reports.

The team also appreciates the automation aspect of Entuity reports, which enables a more systematic, repeatable method of reporting to customers. “It’s nice to be able to auto-generate required reports using Entuity instead of having cut and paste,” says Lavender. “It’s allowed us to have a more automated process for sharing valuable information with our customers.”

“Entuity enables us to take a proactive stance with our customers by stating, we see this happening, and this is what we need to do to keep it from causing you problems”
– Darvey Lavender, Director of Client Services, Buchanan Technologies

Operational Efficiency Boosts Customer Satisfaction
Improving the operational efficiency of Buchanan’s managed services strengthens the company’s reputation as an expert in their industry and a reliable partner to their customers. It also means the company spends more time satisfying its customers and less time managing its network management product. For example, it no longer has to spend hours trying to get reports to generate correctly.

The new customer onboarding deployment process is also much more efficient. Before Entuity, there was often a lot of “back and forth” with customers about what they needed and when they could get it. With Entuity, the team can go into the environment and define and configure customer devices very easily. Ongoing monitoring is easily achieved and maintained, with Buchanan requiring just one member of staff dedicated to monitoring upwards of ten customer networks.

“We’re able to onboard customers more quickly now,” says Lavender. “We can complete the deployment in a much more streamlined manner and have visibility to new devices right away, where before we had much more man power devoted to getting devices online and monitored. Entuity makes the process much simpler.”

The Perfect Balance: Delivering Outstanding Services to Customers while Maintaining Business Profitability
Buchanan’s managed services group was looking for a network management system that would provide the fast, in-depth information it needed to guarantee 100% customer satisfaction. The company not only achieved this with Entuity, but has also benefited from Entuity’s customizable reports that allows it to tailor information to each client’s needs and automatically generate reports on a regular schedule. Buchanan can now rapidly and accurately onboard customer devices, which is another way the company provides the best possible service to its clients.

From a business perspective, the operational efficiency and automation gained from using Entuity also allows Buchanan to maintain a stable profit margin. Customer retention, faster customer onboarding, and reducing staff expenses all contribute to a successful organization that is well poised to support its growing customer base in the years to come.

“The network is one of those very difficult areas that not many people understand. When things happen, it’s always, well, ‘what caused that?’ Entuity enables us to take a proactive stance with our customers by stating, we see this happening, and this is what we need to do to keep it from causing you problems. Since we started using Entuity, customer satisfaction has definitely increased across the board.”
– Darvey Lavender, Director of Client Services, Buchanan Technologies

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.