IBM NUMA-Q Servers Support Customer Service at U S WEST
BEAVERTON, Ore (October 12, 1999) – IBM NUMA-Q®, formerly Sequent Computer Systems, together with its customer U S WEST, today announced the successful deployment of a facilities management system aimed at streamlining processes to improve customer service. The application, implemented on IBM NUMA-Q® 2000 servers, provides engineers with a graphic depiction of network resources available in the fourteen-state U S WEST region.
The system enables real-time customer service allowing field engineers to create, access and manipulate digital representations of U S WEST field facilities to design jobs and create work orders that expedite service to customers. Remote access to accurate and up-to-date information is critical for day-to-day engineering functions, generating work plans to fill customer orders, and updating internal records.
“This is a key application with a direct and immediate impact on the quality of service we offer our customers. Increased system performance and availability can dramatically improve our average response times in completing orders,” said Mike Nelson, network systems senior director at U S WEST. “To deliver on our commitment to our customers, we need automated business data and a means to eliminate many manual processes related to maintaining network data. IBM NUMA-Q’s hardware has reliably provided systems platform performance to help us meet these objectives. The company has also been flexible in continuing to work with us to expand the possibilities we see for U S WEST’s automated engineering design tool.”
The system, called the U S WEST Outside Plant Facilities Management Application (OSP-FM), is a fully computerized outside plant engineering tool that uses digitized maps to show elements of the telecommunications network and provides a look at the physical characteristics of the loop. U S WEST and IBM NUMA-Q worked to enhance the system’s capabilities and improve the capacity planning process by providing easy access to outside facilities information, enabling fast design modifications, automating design distribution and improving U S WEST’s ability to manage the network.
To support the upgraded facilities management application, U S WEST needed a computer infrastructure, which would offer maximum availability and scalability to accommodate the rapid accumulation of data. U S WEST also required an environment that was scalable enough to accommodate a larger number of users including those in quality control and training, who previously would only have had access to mock information or incomplete data.
At the core of the solution are IBM NUMA-Q systems including a highly available NUMA-Q 2000 two-node production cluster housing a powerful Oracle backend database. Additional NUMA-Q 2000 systems support quality control, training, development and testing. Two direct connect fiber channel EMC 3430 enterprise storage systems with EMC’s Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software ensure that information in the databases for development, testing, quality and training is identical to the production database information.
“IBM NUMA-Q’s ongoing commitment to U S WEST is to deliver measurable value through a solution which is highly performant and scalable and which improves the customer service representatives’ performance to the end user client,” said Jeff Pancottine, vice president of global marketing, IBM NUMA-Q. “Working with U S WEST, we have implemented a solution which lowers technology and operational costs, increases system manageability and reliability, and improves the application processing environment.”
Source: IBM