Business Needs
Pernod Ricard Americas is the largest subsidiary of Paris based Pernod Ricard SA. Known for its leading spirits and wines including brands such as Absolut® Vodka, Chivas Regal®, Glenlivet® Scotch, Jameson® Irish Whiskey, Kahlúa® Liqueur, and Mumm Napa® sparkling wines, Pernod Ricard Americas is composed of multiple production facilities and sales/administration offices throughout Canada, the United States, and South America with over 3,000 employees.
As part of a global corporation, Pernod Ricard Americas has a high dependency on IT to enable seamless inter-office, external and production site communications across various countries and locations. The wide range of countries which make up Pernod Ricard Americas is supported through the company’s data center in Ontario, Canada functioning as the keystone for IT Operations enabling management of all Pernod Ricard Americas IT services. The consolidation of these IT services made it imperative to evaluate new network management solutions that would be flexible enough to adapt to future growth, be effective in creating a reliable service delivery capability across all countries to improve business productivity, support new IT technologies and deliver increased operational efficiency for the Pernod Ricard IT team.
Solution
Pernod Ricard Americas tested a number of network management solutions to replace their previous collection of disparate point products. The existing product’s web interface was very slow and was not dependable. For example, service delivery performance issues in particular countries went unnoticed until calls flooded the help desk. The new network management solution had to be an automated and tightly-integrated solution that would support VoIP, better analyze and optimize network traffic, include real-time alerting and scale up easily to meet the enterprise’s growth plans.
After the evaluations were complete, Pernod Ricard selected Entuity Eye of the Storm (EYE) as their new network management solution and also included two of EYE’s specialized modules for managing VoIP and QoS. “From a self-installed deployment with no professional services needed, EYE has proven to be a product that is very intuitive, easy to grasp, so the learning curve has been short and if you are searching for particular information—it is straightforward to browse and find exactly what you need” states Josh Pelosi, Senior IT Operator at Pernod Ricard’s data center. “It did not take us long to become familiar with EYE and its capabilities.”
Benefits
Eye of the Storm has enhanced Pernod Ricard’s ability to meet the ongoing IT challenges of effectively managing an extremely varied multi-country network from their Ontario, Canada data center.
Improved Service Delivery = Improved Employee Productivity
Reducing or eliminating unacceptable service delivery for production software applications was a high priority for the Pernod Ricard team. It was a consistent problem of slow application access, especially in countries where there is limited available bandwidth, which ultimately impacts employee productivity—taking them longer to get things done. Now, with the ability to take proactive preventive action, IT can stay on top of alerts, set better bandwidth parameters and monitor NetFlow using Eye of the Storm. Pernod Ricard has significantly improved the reliability and accessibility of critical production software applications across the organization. “We have attained high levels of application responsiveness that allows our employees to work far more productively. The number of end user issues has been reduced by more than half”, says Pelosi.
Traffic shaping is especially important when there are locations that have severe bandwidth limitations. Pernod has gained key visibility to better shape their traffic using the EYE QoS Module for improved service delivery and capacity planning. With real-time and historical data, it is now easier to identify and remove unessential traffic from critical circuits to prevent overuse and slow performance. “In fact, after we had gone through and adjusted traffic flows we noticed that one of our ‘optimized’ groups was slowing down in its performance. Turns out our service provider was lumping in other traffic into this group—unbeknownst to us. However, the anomaly was simple to spot using EYE and it was a quick adjustment to correct the traffic flow”, relates Josh. “EYE saved us a lot of time, effort and research into why the performance was becoming compromised.”
Operational Efficiency – A Job Done Well and A Job Made Easier
Pernod Ricard has begun to reverse the IT resource drain. With more built-in automation capabilities, the team can reduce the amount of time used for manual tasks. For example, the time saved by not having to manually create network topology maps is a major time saver built into EYE. Being able to create maps specific to a location has been helpful in having more insight into the network’s device connectivity for particular remote locations. And the maps are updated automatically as well, so IT has the most current data to use for troubleshooting any issues that occur.
“Self Service” network management for Pernod’s remote locations now allows field IT support staff to review what is affecting their services before contacting the corporate IT data center staff. This saves time for the corporate IT staff– as no more large expanses of time are spent looking for issues in the field. The problems are resolved more quickly and efficiently. “We are working just as hard but the off-loading of labor intensive tasks has given us more time to move ahead with other critical projects”, states Josh. “Our productivity has improved in tandem with our internal customers’ productivity.”
Summary
Pernod Ricard and Eye of the Storm combine to ensure that outstanding application performance and network reliability are consistently met. “We have a network management solution that will help Pernod maximize new IT technologies, deliver increased operational efficiency for our IT organization and enhance end-user productivity throughout the Americas both today and in the future,” states Josh Pelosi. “We are keeping Pernod Ricard on track to remain a prestigious global brand.”
