HOUSTON (Business Wire EON/PRWEB ) December 11, 2008 -- AT&T is recognized as the leading worldwide provider of IP-based communications services to businesses and the leading U.S. provider of wireless, high speed Internet access, local and long distance voice, and directory publishing and advertising services.

CHALLENGES

The AT&T southeastern data network is a very sophisticated multi-layered topology, responsible for providing customers with numerous IP-data services. Changes on this network take place on a constant basis and require significant manual processes to ensure that changes from different parts of the organization do not adversely affect other dependent network assets. Despite implementing state-of-the-art monitoring and change management systems, AT&T determined that automating the interaction of change management processes and monitoring tools could increase the success of changes, reduce costs and provide better service to customers.

SOLUTION

BMC Atrium Orchestrator was deployed to provide process automation across a number of management tools, including Tripwire, IBM Netcool and BMC Remedy. Leveraging the change management templates and metrics of BMC Atrium Orchestrator, AT&T was able to quickly implement an automated closed-loop change management process.

BMC Atrium Orchestrator is triggered by events from Tripwire. These events are sent to an email server where the BMC Atrium Orchestrator Platform picks them up in near real-time, cross-correlates the events to a change management request (CMR) system to determine if the changes were “planned” or “un-planned”. Using BMC Atrium Orchestrator’s rules engine, if the event is determined to be “un-planned” then a ticket is opened in BMC Remedy, populated with all change information and escalated to the appropriate group (e.g., network, server, IT). BMC Atrium Orchestrator then monitors BMC Remedy real-time for changes to tickets and automatically closes tickets once the process has successfully completed.

AT&T also utilized the advanced dashboard capabilities of BMC Atrium Orchestrator’s Portal to provide network operators a real-time view of the status of all scheduled and in process changes in the network, regardless of the organization responsible for the change. Using the same integration infrastructure deployed for the closed-loop change management process above, additional BMC Atrium Orchestrator Adapters were configured to gather information from other CMR systems and consolidate their status into a centralized dashboard.

KEY BENEFITS

• Lower downtime with change management process automation
• Automated closed-loop change management ensures incidents are routed to appropriate support teams and managed to closure
• Real-time awareness of changes across organizations improved customer satisfaction and communications between support teams
• Increased visibility of process metrics provides the basis for continuous process improvement and real-time reporting

THE RESULT

• Over 90% reduction in man hours
• Decreased change event processing from hours to minutes
• Centralized real-time dashboard of all changes in queue
• Synchronized data across all change management systems
• Ten month ROI

THE ENVIRONMENT

• BMC Atrium Orchestrator grid architecture installed on two Sun Solaris systems
• BMC Atrium Orchestrator Adapters for Tripwire, IBM Netcool, BMC Remedy, Oracle, POP/SMTP
• BMC Atrium Orchestrator Perspective Portal for real-time dashboards and reports

Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software.

Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster, and stronger. That’s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk, and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2008, BMC revenue was approximately $1.83 billion. Visit www.bmc.com for more information.

© Copyright 2008 BMC Software, Inc.

BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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