Tait Communications Chooses Entuity to Monitor Managed Services Infrastructure

Tait Communications is a global leader in designing, delivering, and managing innovative communications solutions. Founded in 1969 by Sir Angus Tait in Christchurch, New Zealand, Tait has regional offices in Australia, UK, Brazil, and the United States. Recently, the company began offering managed service solutions to further support customers running mission critical networks for public safety services and utilities. With its highly flexible architecture and enterprise class features such as multi-tenancy, Entuity helps Tait ensure around-the-clock availability and fast on-boarding of new customers without adding staff. In addition, Entuity’s seamless integration with BMC TrueSight Operations Management and BMC Remedy enables end-to-end IT management and timely, high quality service management.

Company Highlights

• Customer Size: Two data centers—Houston, USA; Christchurch, New Zealand
• Network Management Software: Entuity network management for BMC TrueSight Operations Management
• Other Integrations: BMC Remedy
• Specialized Features: IP SLA, QoS, Multi-tenancy

Company Overview
Tait Communications is all about smart, practical, and secure delivery. With customers in critical and high risk environments requiring safe, fast, and smart solutions that work all the time—public safety, utilities, mining oil and gas, and transportation—Tait has the skills, scale, and scope to manage and deliver on a variety of solutions to best suit customers’ needs.

With a global network of trusted partners and dealers, Tait works with customers to manage existing systems and support their move to future products, services, and applications.

Tait Communications corporate headquarters

Business Needs
From their strong position as innovators in radio communication technology, Tait realized that their customers required a way to manage these increasingly complex, vital networks to ensure 24/7 availability.

Public safety agencies and utilities were finding that the intricacy of skills and tools needed to manage critical communications radio networks had become a major distraction and took them away from their core activity of providing public safety services or utilities. Tait created its managed
service solutions to respond to this challenge.

An Open Slate—Creating a State of the Art MSP
Tait’s Managed Services team in New Zealand was delegated with designing and implementing the new managed service solutions. This included selecting software to manage their customers’ networks, providing the necessary processes to maximize system performance and reliability, and adding value to their customers’ investment in Tait’s communications solutions. “Tait is now in a position to make things simpler for our customers by looking after the radio management for them,” states Matt Whitaker, Service Management Centre Senior Engineer.

After a comprehensive evaluation, Tait chose Entuity network management to manage the network infrastructure for the Managed Service solutions.

Why was Entuity Selected? What Set Them Apart?
As you might expect, network outages present extreme hazards for Tait’s customers. What if there was a chemical leak and the danger could not be communicated to the public because the private mobile network was down? It is therefore equally critical that Tait’s managed services are always available to monitor for system problems.

Entuity’s flexible architecture enables Tait to apply and follow the same cross-consolidation model across their two service management centers (data centers) to support a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. This strategy ensures that every service management center can function fully by itself should there be an outage, or be covered by other centers should there be a need to evacuate.

Another feature that Tait required in their MSP platform was support for secure multi-tenancy environments. The ability to compartmentalize and manage customer networks separately was a crucial requirement for Tait. Entuity’s Network Management architecture handles multi-tenancy without creating complexity or requiring additional hardware or IT personnel. Entuity allows Tait to support customers by effectively segregating them for individual management on multiple servers, while also being able to manage these customer networks together on a single central console view that identifies which server/customer the network belongs to. This greatly improves operational efficiency.

As Tait’s managed services business expands, they need the ability to onboard new customers quickly and without adding staff and more overhead costs. Entuity easily scales to accommodate all sizes of enterprise networks and does not need a large IT staff to implement. Tait finds that using the virtualized poller allows them to scale very effectively and aggregate the information into a single pane of glass for ease of management.

Lastly, Tait wanted an integrated solution with the BMC tool suite. Entuity effectively handles the real-time infrastructure monitoring and feeds that data into BMC TrueSight Operations Management to proactively detect and automatically resolve performance issues. Additionally, Tait’s support centers around the world have integrated BMC Remedy with Entuity for accurate and timely service management. “We were looking for a set of best in class tools and we have found it with this platform,” states Steve Kingston, Tait Managed Services Development Manager.

Since using Entuity in concert with BMC TrueSight Operations Management, we’ve been able to provide an end-to-end customized solution to meet our customers’ individual needs.
– Matt Whitaker, Service Management Centre Senior Engineer, Tait Communications

Summary
When it comes to managing a mission critical network, outages simply are not acceptable. Tait has been successful in designing an integrated MSP platform to support their customers’ always-on networks.

With Entuity network management in place, Tait’s MSP solution ensures that their entire unique information and communications technology environment is managed. For example, radio antenna systems and radio base stations that are key elements of Tait customers’ private mobile networks can be fully monitored and managed. This minimizes preventive maintenance costs and allows the company to avoid traveling to mountaintop sites to check on radio tower performance. It also enables proactive maintenance activity to ensure the radio systems continue to perform as designed.

Getting the most from Entuity’s many features has provided Tait with functionality that was not initially evident. For instance, the IP SLA capability allows Tait to monitor the quality of the voice traffic between radio sites. This makes it possible to keep latency and jitter in check to ensure good voice quality for emergency communications.

Managing customer networks is an evolving process for Tait as they add new devices and services. In this respect, Entuity Support has proven to be a valuable partner in creating this new division.
“Since using Entuity in concert with BMC TrueSight Operations Management, we’ve been able to provide an end-to-end customized solution to meet our customers’ individual needs,” said Whitaker. “Entuity monitors the network in real time, and it has allowed us to keep customer satisfaction at high levels by giving them deep insight into what’s happening on the network. We’re impressed with Entuity’s capabilities and believe its well-designed architecture suits our business model very well.”

The future looks bright for Tait Managed Services, which is on track to continue the long-standing tradition of supporting their customers to keep the lights on, cities moving ahead, and communities safe.

Entuity monitors the network in real time, and it has allowed us to keep customer satisfaction at high levels by giving them deep insight into what’s happening on the network. We’re impressed with Entuity’s capabilities and believe its well-designed architecture suits our business model very well.
– Matt Whitaker, Service Management Centre Senior Engineer, Tait Communications

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.