Within the heterogeneous environments among our customers either in our Cloud, Global IT or Mobility (EMM) solutions, we found in eG Innovations a global third generation monitoring platform that provides us and our customers true end-to-end intelligent application performance management. eG Innovations also helps us in better capacity planning and service level management 
Key Benefits to Systemat Digital Hub
- Reduction of inbound support calls by 50% within the first two months
- Saving of €55,000 in hardware costs within the first two months from smart capacity planning
- Reduction in downtime and disconnection incidents
- Improved IT ops efficiency with a "single source of truth" across the organization
- Reduction in OPEX through optimized IT staffing levels
- Increased customer satisfaction through greater reliability and user experience
Why eG Enterprise?
- Complete visibility into the Citrix service infrastructure and throughout all applications on each Windows server
- Automatic discovery and diagnosis of performance issues in virtualized applications with configurable alerts for truly hands-off management
- Full multi-tenant support: Metrics from geographically dispersed customer sites are collected and integrated into a single management solution
- Much more comprehensive and easy to manage alternative to Citrix EdgeSight and Microsoft SCOM
Cloud-Based Citrix Virtualization Services for Today's Dynamic IT Requirements
Systemat Digital Hub offers an aspirational vision of outsourced IT services for its customers: "We Paradise IT." The company's goal is to offer all of the efficiency, privacy and flexibility that cloud-delivered IT services promises, but without the complications and added costs that can accompany this strategy. With six offices throughout Belgium, Luxembourg and France, two data centers, 300 employees and over a thousand customers, Systemat Digital Hub is a growing IT leader in Belgium and Luxembourg's thriving, technology-savvy business landscape.
Over 80% of its customers including small and medium businesses, large companies, and public-sector entities access Systemat's Digital Hub cloud solutions using Citrix technologies. Using two data centers in Luxembourg, Systemat's Digital Hub unit delivers a range of Cloud-based applications and desktops to customers. While close to 60 servers are used to support the Digital Hub service, about 80 servers are managed for external customers. With new customers being added all the time, Systemat's Digital Hub team manages this dynamic IT environment with a focus on client satisfaction and operational efficiency.
The Challenge: Top Performing Cloud-Based Citrix Service Delivery
The widespread use of Citrix technologies for cloud application access means that any disruption or slowdown can quickly escalate into a major business problem, and when problems do strike, every minute counts. Systemat Digital Hub has been delivering virtualized desktops and applications for several years, and as the Citrix infrastructure grew in capability and complexity, the Systemat Digital Hub team found that troubleshooting customer performance issues had become very time consuming and inefficient. Etienne Coppin, Systemat's Digital Hub Manager, commented, "Previously, it took us a long time to solve customer issues. We lacked the capability to find out quickly if the problems were on the customer end or on our site, and this was a major problem."
Etienne's team had been relying on Microsoft SCOM and other siloed monitoring tools but found this strategy was insufficient for the challenges of managing a Citrix-driven, virtualized environment. "We were using multiple tools to monitor performance across the infrastructure, but this was inefficient and ineffective," he said. "Multiple tools required multiple staff members with specialized knowledge, and this was not cost effective at all. It actually created more ongoing costs, because without a consolidated tool, we ended up with many people working to resolve the same issue."
Further, rising infrastructure costs were difficult to manage when the primary available solution to a performance issue was adding new hardware. Etienne noted that without sufficient performance insight, more and more computing power was being used to solve performance problems, and they knew that this was not a cost-effective solution.
The team was also experiencing missed objectives and cost overruns due to a lack of performance visibility. "We were not equipped to make an intelligent report on KPIs and SLAs for our customers," Etienne explained. "This process was done manually and it took many man-hours to gather data and build a report out of it."
Systemat's Digital Hub operational problems were negatively impacting customers. Some experienced frequent disconnections from service, others complained about high keystroke echo latencies and slow response times. After hours of investigation, often these problems were found to be caused on the customer's side, but simply identifying the cause of the problem was too time consuming and slowed remediation.
In 2015, Etienne and Wilfried Landsheer, Systemat's Digital Hub Director, began looking for a monitoring solution that could meet the requirements of their business and customers. Although the team had relied on Microsoft SCOM, they found that its Windows-only coverage and often high performance overhead made it inadequate. Citrix EdgeSight had been installed previously, but not used because of its inherent complexity in setup and use. "The bottom line was," Etienne remarked, "we needed end-to-end monitoring."
The Solution: Unified Citrix Performance Management
In eG Enterprise, the Digital Hub team found a complete solution for their challenges. Etienne said, "Our previous experience with monitoring tools had been quite negative. Because of this experience, I knew exactly what I wanted from performance management, and I was quite blown away with the features eG Enterprise offered. During implementation, we were up and running and back into operating mode right away. With other tools, we needed 4 to 6 months to get started, that too without the depth and visibility that eG Enterprise offers. It's really remarkable."
A single-pane-of-glass solution with correlated insight into all tiers and layers of the infrastructure, eG Enterprise was precisely what Etienne's team needed to quickly identify and fix Citrix user issues. "We have no more frustrations because now we know where the problem is, and the root cause of these issues is detected in minutes." he added. "We have less incidents and less calls than before. Since the implementation, we have seen a major reduction on incidents and calls, from 80 per day down to 40." They have also experienced a dramatic reduction in downtime, with no further "disconnection incidents" and the user experience is vastly improved across the board.
eG Enterprise has also helped Systemat Digital Hub to reduce IT support cost and complexity. Etienne remarked, "Now we only have one tool to train the entire team. All engineering specialists are talking the same eG Enterprise language." This increase in operational efficiency has substantially reduced OPEX on the whole, and also optimized IT staffing levels. Maintenance of the solution has also been easy. "With Microsoft SCOM, maintenance costs were substantial. We had to budget time for upgrades and often an uninstall and reinstall was necessary. With eG Enterprise, we can now auto-update the agents and no restart is necessary," said Etienne. "And whenever specialized application monitoring has been necessary, it has been available as part of the standard package."
Critically for a CSP, eG Enterprise allows detailed, precise capacity planning. This has enabled Systemat Digital Hub to make great strides in improving server density, reducing storage consumption and lowering hardware costs. In the first two months after deployment, Etienne's team achieved significant ROI in the form of €55,000 in storage and CPU cost savings.
Systemat's Digital Hub business runs on its customers' satisfaction and in this way, eG Enterprise has provided less measurable, but equally critical, return on their investment. Etienne concluded, "eG Enterprise is solving issues that the other tools were not able to show us at all. We now know now where to search, quickly and every time. All of our customers are happy today! And that was not the case before."
