CLIENT CASE STUDY – CASH AMERICA 1 3 Things that Matter to Cash America: How Mobility and Integrations have made their business more reliable Matt Ivy Infrastructure Analyst, Cash America xMatters (alarmpoint) client training forum October 5 – 6, 2010, Manhattan
WHAT MATTERS TO CASH AMERICA 2 1. Combining existing products and services with a communication solution that allows them to react faster 2. Accessing critical systems when an issue arises to resolve the situation faster 3. Speeding up the amount of time it takes to react to an incident before it impacts the business
A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON CASH AMERICA 3 • Cash provides specialty financial services to individuals in the United States and Mexico with over 1,000 locations • Largest pawn loan and pay day loan provider in the world • Based in Fort Worth, TX • 17.5% growth year over year • 50 IT staff • Supporting 200 systems to keep the business up and running
EXAMPLES SITUATIONS 4 • Scenario #1: If a machine went down or stalled overnight, it would not get worked on until morning – Keeping the stores from processing loans – Resulting in lost revenue • Scenario #2: Many systems sent many alerts to multiple people whether they supported the app or not – Slowed productivity and resolution – Produced white noise, personnel eventually ignored alerts • Scenario #3: Notifications had to be sent out by a person when a situation would arise and finding the right person took time – Slowing resolution time – Adding human error and additional resources and costs to the process
CHALLENGES - WHY WE NEEDED A RELEVANCE ENGINE 5 • Improve system reliability to keep up with growth – Adding multiple monitoring systems and applications – Each system has a different method of alert delivery – Each system only sends email • Needed to improve mean time to repair – Issue went unresolved at night – Mornings were stressful and full of lost revenue • A down system is money lost – Over 1000 stores rely on corporate systems to approve loans
IT ARCHITECTURE LANDSCAPE – A QUICK LOOK UNDER THE COVER 6
WHY WE CHOSE THE XMATTERS (ALARMPOINT) ENGINE 7 Integrations • xMatters (alarmpoint) engine was the most versatile for integrations – Quest Foglight – enterprise application monitoring – SolarWinds – network management – Microsoft SCOM – operations manager • Only took 17 days to integrate into existing products
WHY WE CHOSE THE XMATTERS (ALARMPOINT) ENGINE 8 Mobility • xMatters mobile access allows IT staff to access critical systems from any mobile device • In the future, we will use mobile access to: – Update tickets – Approve changes – Resolve incidents • IT staff is available at any time, from any place so events are resolved faster and action can be taken while away from the console
WHY WE CHOSE THE XMATTERS (ALARMPOINT) ENGINE 9 Speeding up the resolution process • Service impact no longer than necessary – The right person was informed quickly and efficiently – Reduced MTTR by 77% • Automation is key – No more phone calls or physically sending emails – Personnel is notified quickly before business impact
HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED 10 Now have: – Reportability: metrics on who gets notified and how long it takes to resolve the incident – Accountability: people are available when they say they are, and working quickly to resolve events – Uniformity: all messages look the same regardless of what system they come from – Flexibility: notifications are delivered through emails, SMS, BES, phone calls – however we want
BEFORE XMATTERS 11 • Before xMatters – Monitoring system would notify everyone in an email group causing confusion about who was working an issue – If email was received at night the problem was left until morning – Average MTTR was 90 minutes Before xMatters After xMatters Time to notify staff of event Not Guaranteed Immediately Time from alert to accepting ticket 5 to 480 minutes 5 minutes MTTR (reduced by 7 7% ) 90 minutes 20 minutes Faster response times Faster resolution Protected revenue
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