Mamas and Papas Case Study

Background

Mamas & Papas is one of the UK's leading retailers in the nursery industry and a market leader in products ranging from nursery interiors, travel systems, kitchen and bathroom equipment to toys, baby and maternity wear.

Based in Huddersfield, the company has retail outlets across the UK, a satellite office in Hong Kong and a workforce of more than 1,000. Among them are 14 specialists responsible for the company's IT infrastructure on a day to day basis with a further 32 researching and developing new IT systems.

Overview

Mamas & Papas' infrastructure consists of over 300 devices including: store based servers, tills, switches together with SQL servers, Exchange and IIS remote agents. These are distributed across its sites in the UK and Hong Kong.

The Mamas & Papas tech team were searching for a network monitoring system that would give them visibility across the global estate, check bandwidth across their WAN links and allow instant assessment of the state all their servers.

The system needed to be cost effective, easy to use and provide the core information the team needed, without them having to sift through masses of unnecessary data.

Following investigation into other options on the market it was the Mutiny Appliance that ticked all the boxes. Mamas & Papas' IT Technical Manager Darren Bootland said: We looked at what some of Mutiny's competitors had to offer but they just didn't seem to give a lot of the nuts and bolts that Mutiny did. Not only that, Mutiny was a doddle to administer and is also very easy to use.

Business Benefits

The first tangible result for Mamas & Papas came when Mutiny identified critical issues in the links to their Hong Kong office. Their link provider was supposed to be supplying two gateways with separate connections. Mutiny quickly discovered that only a single link was fully operational and this was carrying the majority of the traffic while the other was virtually redundant. This insight allowed the business to correct the problem without the extensive cost of man hours and travel to Hong Kong.

The Mutiny appliance helps the Mamas & Papas team to ensure its systems are operating to maximum capacity and enables problems to be resolved before they become critical.

The Mutiny appliance has freed up valuable resources normally allocated to problem solving and allowed them to adopt a more proactive approach to systems development.

Mamas & Papas IT Technical Manager Darren Bootland continued: It's giving us a lot more competence in the infrastructure¦Before Mutiny, by comparison, we were adopting a sort of finger in the air and hope approach to problem solving. Now, if there's something wrong with the server we know exactly what it is and what to do.

It's given us a level of data we've never had before. We're very pleased.

Lawrence Freeman, Mutiny's Operations Director said: Any client that is looking to integrate any form of critical service/network monitoring products into their IT infrastructure wants to see ROI quickly. Mutiny proved itself to Mamas & Papas within weeks and continues to do so with the wealth of systems and devices that it monitors.

Mamas & Papas can feel confident the Mutiny system is monitoring for problems around the clock 24/7.