Empowered Networks

Overview

How we can help:

• We can help you understand where you are today and you can better meet your objectives using our IT Operations Assessment
• Recommend, Source, Install and Support the right Tools for improving IT operations
• Improve your centralized monitoring and control activities, often using existing tools
• Improve your processes to make your IT Operations more efficient
• Bring Specialty skills to accelerate your success when you can’t find a particular skill, when you have a short term need, when it’s a non core function you’d rather outsource

Our focus areas are around the following IT Operations processes

• Incident Management
• Event Management
• Request Fulfillment
• Change Management
• Problem Management

Our Tools expertise is centered around:

• Availability
• Compliance
• Capacity
• Service Desk
• Dashboards

Tools

Empowered lives at the intersection of what IT software management vendors say their products can do, and what you need to have done.  We come from your world, not the vendor world, and we’ve worked on teams just like yours.  Our team combined brings hundreds of years of experience with IT software tools. The tools we use with our customers help them:

• Identify device or connectivity failures in real time
• Proactively notifying IT when performance based metrics are moving into levels of risk
• Detecting configuration changes
• Alerting IT staff of abnormal occurrences and providing them with enough information for prompt service restoration

We’ve used, recommended, integrated, implemented and supported software from many vendors who have become our trusted partners in solving customer problems. Some of the software we’ve recommended to our customers to improve their IT Operations includes:

Spectrum Infrastructure Manager from CA Technologies - an Enterprise class MoM (Manager of Managers) providing discovery, fault isolation, root cause analysis, and network configuration management. CA Spectrum allows IT Organizations to consolidate their various management tools into a "single pane of glass" so that network devices, servers and application can be viewed in one place and in context. Spectrum's integration capabilities allow it to accept events from most point tools and communicate with most Service Desks.

Service Desk Manager from CA Technologies – a Service Desk Management solution that helps you build incident and problem management processes, simplify change management and increase your visibility into the infrastructure.  We like the extensive self-service capabilities that allow you to deliver a consistent quality of service without having to add more people.

NetMRI from Netcordia, an Infoblox company – a network change and configuration solution for anyone who needs to manage network device configurations in a multi-vendor environment with an easy to use package. It allows lets you to take control of network configurations and changes–making it easy to identify hard-to-find configuration problems that are lurking in the network. Whether using NetMRI as an appliance or a virtual machine, setup requirements are minimal. By activating built-in issue tracking and compliance rules, valuable information regarding device configurations can be collected as soon as a system is turned up in a network. Topology views provide visual insight into the architecture, physical and logical, of network devices. Configuration changes can be pushed to groups of devices making tedious and time consuming operations quick and easy.

NetworkAuthority from Versata – a network change and configuration solution that provides the ability to find and identify a huge variety of network devices, track the state of configurations on these devices, and push changes to selected devices. A large selection of configuration compliance rules are available to ensure devices meet corporate standards. Jobs are included to perform common tasks on devices such as password changes and software updates. User interactions with devices can be recorded to quickly create new change jobs to fulfill specific needs. NetworkAuthority can be extended to work with new device types that it does not recognize out-of-the-box.

PureShare SingleViewIT – IT dashboard software that aggregates key metrics from a variety of other systems including the Call Center, Network Operations Center and Help Desk organizations. It eliminates the need for managing and generating manual reports by providing direct access to operational performance metrics, the answers that IT Operations all the up to executives need.  We like how customizable this system is, it really can be tuned to show you just about anything YOU want.

Services

• IT Operations Assessment – A detailed review of all aspects of IT Operations including Technology, Support Systems, Locations, Network and Service Visibility and Event Management, Application Manageability, Performance Management, Service Level Management, Configuration Management, Fault Management and Trouble Shooting, Help Desk, Escalation/Notification, Measurements, Change Management, Preventative Management. Each process is evaluated for organizational readiness, technology enablement and metrics, measurements and key performance indicators, and a corresponding gap analysis relative to best practices is delivered. Using the results of the gap analysis, a comprehensive action plan is produced, including:

• Documenting steps to realize immediate and long-term process improvements
• Identifying any necessary changes in organizational structure
• Enablement for leveraging 'best-of-breed' technologies, and integrating existing tools
• Recommending metrics and Key Performance Indicators for measuring success
• A plan for educating and training and training staff

• Service Desk TuneUp - We can bring fresh insights to the business case for evolving your Service Desk to address today's challenges.  We can help you decide whether to migrate to a new platform, or to leverage what you have in place, with incremental improvements. We'll help you develop a plan to make your Service Desk improve customer service with higher quality interactions and quick turnaround of requests, and provide meaningful management information to support decisions around staff resource usage, service deficiencies and performance, training needs, performance targets, and associated costs.

• 24/7 local support - A support system that duplicates your system in our lab so you can make one phone call any time day or night, when things aren’t working perfectly.

• Health Check – For customers of any of the software products we offer, a no-charge one day on-site assessment of your e-health system conducted by an Empowered expert.

• On-site experts - Innovate and reduce your risk at the same time – use our software tools experts to augment your team – when you need them, for only as long as you need them.

E4 Methodology

Our E4 methodology is a straightforward, customer-centric framework that will bring you from ground zero to a completely installed and supported solution, or it can be used to solve any part of the process. We use E4 to customize a solution to meet your individual needs.

The four components of E4 are:

Explore – and assess your current environment
Envision – the solution to your problem
Execute – the recommended solution
Enhance – your environment

Explore: Take your first step to improvement by understanding where you are. Our assessments include a professional and unbiased review of your operations, processes and people, to serve as a solid foundation upon which to build recommendations for change. Get a clear sense of where you are today, learn what changes will have the most impact.

Envision: See your way clear to a solution. We make recommendations for hardware, software, processes and skills -- all with one aim -- to ensure you meet your goals. Our recommendations are pragmatic, because we’ve been in your shoes. We understand they must fit within your budget, meet your timing, leverage your team’s strengths, and deliver a positive return on your investment.

Execute: Make the solution real. We know that a major deployment is one of the largest, most expensive and most complex challenges a company can face. We can reduce your risks and maximize your returns. We don’t stop until you say you’re happy. We’ll sell you the right product, install and configure it for maximum application in your environment, train your team on its use, and then support you 24/7 from our Technical Assistance Centre.

Enhance: People make the difference between good and great. We have talent in so many areas and it is available to you. Whether it’s providing EmpoweredCare support on a system we’ve installed for you, or joining your team to solve a particularly challenging problem, or bringing in a specialized skill, we are here for you 24/7. Employ us to eliminate any worry about hiring, firing or dealing with sick leave. We are accountable to you and we’ll make sure there’s never a gap.