Customer Profiles
Magellan Health Services

In March 2003, Magellan Health Services filed for bankruptcy. By January 2004, Magellan restructured its debt, received an infusion of $150 million of capital, and successfully emerged from Chapter 11. Now more than ever, Magellan's primary goal is to maintain market leadership and to cost-effectively provide the best possible behavioral health service to its customers. To meet its goals and obtain a more responsive, consistent and streamlined operational model, Magellan is combining its knowledge and best practices into fewer, larger Care Management Centers and Strategic Business Units.

For Magellan, IT Operations is pivotal. Whether it's completing the challenging task of migrating offices to central platforms or consolidating redundant networks, IT Operations must maintain 24-hour, seven-day-a-week customer access to resources and information.

As Bob Odenheimer, Senior Vice-President of IT Operations explains, "Our goal is to manage the network to support our business. To ensure 100% access to our business systems, we need to know what equipment we have, what is not being used and how to identify potential problem areas to effectively manage traffic and bandwidth."

During the first attempt at consolidation, a migrated office began consuming huge amounts of bandwidth, creating performance issues. Rudimentary network tools provided little to no reporting capabilities, making it impossible for IT Operations to determine the source of the problem. "We realized that to continue migration, we needed more from a network management solution – we needed fault detection, performance monitoring, inventory management and in-depth reporting capabilities in one solution," Odenheimer states.

• Network consolidation; eliminate redundancies, take advantage of equipment trade-ins and lower costs
• Consistent, reliable reporting to support and manage for 100% access
• Inventory management to determine resource capacity and effectively utilize bandwidth
• Stress testing of applications, and tracking and reporting on results
• Maintenance of high level of service for all customers.

As Greg Hammond, network engineer at Magellan explains, "With Entuity EYE, we have fault, performance and inventory management all in one tool. This makes our work more effective – rather than integrating and working with two or three tools, we easily learned and use one. Our team is now more responsive to customer requests."

Key to helping Odenheimer and his team choose Entuity's solution is that EYE consolidates and correlates three operational disciplines using a centralized repository, a powerful analytics engine, presentation and notification and unprecedented reporting.

• Fault management that distinguishes between network, server and application problems using True Cause Analytics, prioritizing problems based on business impact.
• Performance management that predicts problems before costly business interruptions occur, using service degradation sensitivity
• Resource management that takes inventory of network assets, their connectivity, and their logical dependencies in parent-child and peer-to-peer relationships.

According to Hammond, the IT Operations team also selected Entuity EYE for its following features and capabilities:

• Management and network engineer level reports on uptime, device availability, device inventory and utilization
• Ability to work in conjunction with other management solutions
• Out-of-the-box flexibility, rapid implementation and ease of use
• Ability to configure EYE to meet their needs.

"During the pilot program and implementation of EYE, Entuity was
very responsive to our needs," explains Bob Odenheimer. "Entuity's willingness to be a true partner provided us with the ability to impact product planning for EYE, further helping us to meet our goals and objectives for better network operations and availability."

Securing the Enterprise Using Eye of the Storm resource management reports, Magellan Health Services recently identified a rampant computer virus, preventing widespread infection within the company.

"EYE's ability to track MAC and IP addresses on switches and routers proved to be an extremely useful feature," according to Greg Hammond. Magellan network sensors detected the virus scans and identified the infected IP address. "We entered the IP address into Entuity EYE and, with the touch of a button, determined which PCs and ports were infected and where they were located. EYE allowed us to rapidly shut down the infected ports and switches. To move so quickly was invaluable – we experienced little impact to our network and services."

Improved Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) With EYE implemented, the IT Operations team estimates it has decreased MTTR of problems involving PCs, servers and switches by two-thirds, freeing up valuable resources and increasing productivity.

Enhanced Support of Development IT Operations more effectively supports Magellan development teams. Utilizing EYE, the team helps stress test Magellan applications before they are released into production. Magellan network engineers drill down and determine what ports development servers use. Once this is determined, engineers track server and port utilization (volume of activity) during stress tests to determine where bottlenecks or bandwidth problems might occur. With Entuity EYE, IT Operations identifies faults in the network and proactively increases bandwidth, preventing problems in production.

Impact Analysis According to Bob Odenheimer, “Entuity EYE enables us to review the impact consolidation has on our WAN in real time. We proactively evaluate where we are and use this analysis to forecast future needs as our consolidation efforts continue. We plan to display performance reports on our Intranet so business units can review system availability at any time and management can determine how well IT operations is performing. With greater visibility for the entire organization, we effectively prevent service outages and communicate our effectiveness."

Read the Full Magellan Health Services Customer Profile>>