CASE STUDY BT Enterprise Managed Services and NetBrain: Driving Business Outcomes for 2,000 Managed Services Clients Quick Facts About British Telcom BT Data Services As one of the world’s leading communications services companies, British Telecom (BT) serves organizations around the world, providing consumer and enterprise Employees: 11,300 (BT communications solutions across all verticals. BT’s Enterprise Managed Services arm, Enterprise Services) the company’s second largest, provides security, cloud, networking, and other technology services to companies of all sizes across the UK and Republic of Ireland. Customer Sites: 2,000+ BT Data Services falls within this arm, providing end-to-end managed network infrastructure services. CPEs Managed: 300,000 Technologies Supported: LAN, WAN, WLAN, 5G, and others NetBrain Use Cases: % Automation, MTTR % 43 reduction, automated 75 documentation, knowledge sharings Reduction in MTTR Time Saved in Complex Incident Resolution (With NetBrain), The Challenge “ we can shortcut a According to Sr. Manager Data Services, Lewis Hardy, BT Data Services sought to lot of the knowledge reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and mean-time-to-innocence (MTTI) on the issues or problems, that 2,000+ customer networks it manages. These network accounts range from SMB to needed us to review large enterprise and encompass public and private sector. Having identified network documentation and automation as a means for scaling these improvements across their shared and refresh on networks dedicated service models, they were looking for a means of becoming more productive that we’ve not seen and efficient and to drive better customer outcomes for every customer service request. for some time. Additionally, Hardy recounts his goal of creating a data model “that could bring network documentation to life” knowing that this deep knowledge would help solve problems Lewis Hardy ” more quickly. Sr. Manager, BT Data Services

…Being proactive enough to get ahead “ Having all the accumulated network knowledge of the stuff that (customers) haven’t recorded and accessible to everyone was a huge recognized as an impact – you know, boon to all the operators and engineers who get that’s the next opportunity for others and involved in problem solving. This ultimately supported that’s work we’re excited about the company’s customer satisfaction and retention goals. Hardy describes this as a “cascading of Lewis Hardy ” knowledge in an industrial way” that enables higher Sr. Manager, BT Data Services productivity at scale. Furthermore, BT Data Services uses NetBrain to provide a better customer and employee experience. Given the network’s importance to digital business, ensuring network uptime and fast remediation of issues, particularly P1s and P2s, is paramount to customer experience, from BT’s customers to their customer’s end users. Similarly, the employee The Solution experience and satisfaction for BT Enterprise technicians has been elevated. By being able to According to Lewis Hardy, NetBrain checked all the quickly and with absolute confidence declare the boxes. NetBrain’s network automation solution provided network’s innocence, network technicians can now a truly end-to-end, technology agnostic platform, that help customers get to the actual root problems faster could enhance the resources currently in place, and and use their time much more efficiently. make their outcomes more predictable and measurable. In addition, NetBrain’s extensible data model allowed vast amounts of external context to be stored inside its The Results digital twin, empowering every operator to have the 360-degree view of every issue and take the most BT Data Services keeps a close eye on both individual informed actions possible. customer KPIs and incident change metrics. Today with NetBrain in place, Hardy reports BT is seeing marked The initial goal for the deployment of NetBrain for BT reductions in MTTR. This is particularly noticeable where Data Services’ customers was to establish the network there are interoperability issues between third parties operational and performance baselines and detect and multiple suppliers that lead to network issues where when the network deviates from the baseline, helping the impact of change and complexity of change calls them understand the business impact and get to the create a multiplicative effect. Hardy reports seeing quickest possible resolution. As BT Data Services strong ‘before and after’ differences and is realizing manages all types of network technology, NetBrain’s MTTRs decline by as much as 75% in some cases. standards-based openness was critical. Additionally, he reports seeing a 43% improvement in complex incident resolution time, with the average In BT Data Services’ Proof-of-Concept, Hardy worked duration reduced to two hours from three and one half. with the NetBrain team to establish baseline metrics to be able to compare before and after results with In all these cases, BT can export findings from these NetBrain. They began this process by indexing prior resolved cases into simple reporting documents suitable years’ MTTR/MTTI metrics for customer accounts for any audience. This assists in sharing findings with against after NetBrain has been deployed. Not only does internal and external stakeholders and creates the basis this provide the basis for ROI measurement, but also for a streamlined action plan for future incidents and ensures that learnings are captured at scale. And since tickets. Hardy emphasizes that the knowledgebase NetBrain understands the concept of ‘similiar’, learnings they’re building spans across multi-cloud hybrid from one account can be applied to the others. networks with individual branch CPEs, as well as the behaviors of various core applications on the network This type of knowledge sharing became a crucial aspect across different topologies. of the NetBrain value proposition to BT Data Services, especially in their shared services model where different engineers can be picking up tickets for networks that they may not have seen recently, or for the first time.

Centralized visibility and automation have removed the BT Enterprise looks to a future where they evolve and need for manual hop-by-hop troubleshooting across go deeper with DevOps, AI, and automation. NetBrain even very complicated paths, saving 10 to 15 minutes per is set to play a pivotal role in that story through its each half of the path. Getting to the root cause instantly intent based PDAS solution. NetBrain’s preventative means better efficiency and scalability. Codifying what automation capabilities are of particular interest – was learned in the automated network troubleshooting and how problems can be prevented before they process and saving it into NetBrain’s automation library affect business applications with its leading network means that the same problem will either be prevented intent-based technologies. Hardy foresees customers for the future or solved even more quickly when any seeing tremendous value in this, as well as BT similar problem reoccurs. developing an increasing ability to solve problems proactively before the chance of any impact. Hardy points out that the services of the NetBrain team, from pre-sales to delivery, throughout the implementation cycle was critical to BT’s success. Hardy says, “They (NetBrain) have really gotten to understand our business; they’ve gotten to understand our people.” He adds, “the Center of Excellence type approach in terms of the projects and how we deploy it into our organization has been really refreshing and we certainly feel that their team are invested in making it successful, and I think that approach is being really key to how far we've got in this project. It’s a Win-Win for everyone.” What the Future Holds Hardy and BT are excited about how NetBrain will continue to make a difference for the operations of their managed networks. There is much power to be unlocked in not only sharing operational knowledge across the employee base, but also in their customer base. In a hypothetical example, Hardy states “These are the trends that we're seeing in customer one. Therefore, let's go and look for the same trends in customer two through 2000 and see if there's anything we need to be focused in on proactively. That's really powerful stuff from our perspective.” Hardy believes the results BT is getting from NetBrain bode well for customer satisfaction and retention, and the follow-on effect of winning new customers. Copyright © 2022 NetBrain Technologies, Inc. All trademarks +1 (800) 605-7964 referenced herein belong to NetBrain Technologies, Inc [email protected] www.netbraintech.com