Customer Testimonial

Old Mutual
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Old Mutual is a South African fund manager with Headquarters in London. In the last 3 years Old Mutual has acquired several UK investment and brokering companies, the various IT departments from each company were merged together to form a large service organisation called the Technical Services Group (or TSG as we are commonly known). TSG treat each bank as a customer, although TSG is only an organisational unit not a separate company it has its own budget and competes to win each companies business. Our first use of OverTime was for one of these companies. They required an insight into the performance of the network infrastructure we support. This includes infrastructure, which we cannot for legal and security reasons, give them access to view directly. OverTime was deemed ideal as we already had plenty of SNMP data in the existing HP OpenView implementation.

The OverTime Implementation at OMP (Old Mutual Place, London)
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We started with the default web interface generated with OverTime but this was not entirely useful as it would give other customers access to the data on the non shared infrastructure and vice versa. This would not be an issue for most users of OverTime but it is for us. We deployed Apache Virtual Hosting to give various business parties access to separate performance data. We disabled the default HP NNM Apache server and installed a more feature rich Apache 2. A script was written that generates CGI code based upon what OverTime data is needed and this is presented in a web page. The CGI code calls the OverTime executables to update/generate the PNG graphs, and prints HTML in a format convenient for our business contacts.

The script that generates the CGI script allows us to easily add additional information quickly. We have other web based network performance presenters, however with the combination of the speed of OverTime and script to generate a "pretty" web interface this has become the web interface of choice. So much so that we now only use OverTime and NNM's xnmgraph within TSG to look at network performance. All business parties have been extremely satisfied with the web interfaces.

Many of our intended clients for the OverTime web interface are around the UK and so bandwidth usage is very important, especially when WAN links carry time critical trade and price information.

Comments on our OverTime Implementation
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Each page generated by OverTime downloads quickly because the HTML and graphic images produced use little transmission bandwidth especially compared to other Java clients we have used in the past, another reason that OverTime is a better solution in our environment.

Our current OverTime implementation has been a combination of support and enhancements provided by NETic with feedback from us. We're actively encouraging NETic for more enhancements that'll improve our relationship to our customers. At the same time TSG is in the process of pursuing more business and the OverTime web interface will definitely feature as part of the services we offer.

Regards
Adam Moody
Network Analyst
Technical Services Group
Old Mutual Financial Services