CASE STUDY

Network Management Brought Into Play at Hamleys
Organization:
Hamleys
Solution:
WhatsUp Gold
Results:
Resolve intermittent performance problems; deliver quality service to business users

Hamleys, one of the world’s best known toy retailers, has been providing services to global customers for more than 250 years – surviving two world wars and endless business transitions and transformations. Hamleys’ London flagship store is considered one of the city’s major tourist attractions and is the world’s largest toy store, covering 54,000 square feet over seven floors. The chain also has other outlets in the UK and worldwide.
When Sunny Sandhu, IT Infrastructure & Support Manager, joined Hamleys in 2008, he discovered that Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold had been previously purchased but wasn’t being used. As an experienced IT manager, Sunny knew that it was essential to have a robust network management solution in place. “An IT team can’t afford to be reactive,” comments Sunny. “We must have a proactive monitoring tool in order to be responsive, know what is going on all the time and where the point of failure is - whether it’s an outage or whether a server, PBX switch, or a call switch is down.”

An Easy-to-Use, One Console Monitoring Tool
When Sunny started to use WhatsUp Gold, he was surprised at the ease-of-use and the scalability of the product. Comments Sunny, “I was able to easily configure the scalability pollers, design our own maps, and differentiate different types of policies for different machines – all using the one console with no coding. WhatsUp Gold is really a universal platform that allows me to monitor multiple vendors across multiple platforms.”
Sunny had worked with many network management solutions in the past, most of which were developed for larger enterprises with larger corporate networks and budgets. Says