Venn Recruitment Case Study

Background

Venn Group is one of the UK and Ireland's fastest growing and most successful temporary and contract recruitment consultancies operating in accounting, finance, legal, technology and the public sectors. Venn employs some 120 people based in two offices in central London and regional centres in Bristol, Leicester and Dublin.

Overview

Venn has invested heavily in its IT and networking infrastructure with core technology based around Microsoft's Windows Server combined with Windows clients and .Net. Hardware comprises of Compaq, Cisco and HP with a Fast Ethernet network running TCP/IP across all five sites. This is linked via high bandwidth land extension services, kilostream leased lines and wireless connections. Unlike many businesses of Venn's size, the Group's web sites and DNS (Directory Naming Services) records are hosted in-house to provide a higher degree of control.

VOIP (Voice over IP) systems are employed across all five offices, providing voice communication to the entire business, the life blood of any recruitment firm.

Maintaining the availability of these systems is top priority for chief technology officer Grant Turner and his team:

"We have implemented stringent levels of security, back-up and redundancy to ensure resilience and integrity of our IT systems"

"But we were keen to be more proactive and have a better understanding of what was going on across the network so that we could spot problems before they happened."

Business Benefits

Venn's network infrastructure is complex and like any dynamic business, IT failures can quickly have major knock-on effects for staff and customers, resulting in lost business and client confidence.

The business has now installed the latest Mutiny appliance providing 24x7 network and resource monitoring across all five sites. Mutiny's real time web-based graphical display provides a clear understanding of Venn's hardware and application status. With email and SMS text messaging alerts of potential problems or service failures reported straight to the senior IT team.

Andy Murray - Mutiny's CTO: "As networks and IT systems become more complex and crowded, it's not just network downtime that causes problems. How well a network is performing is critical to a smooth operation and a slow network or one that constantly crashes has a major impact on staff performance and morale"

Far from simply reporting on hardware status, performance is also measured to ensure that critical systems are performing to the levels required by the business. For example the email server is sending emails - but just how well is it doing it?

This fast response provided by Mutiny is critical to keeping systems running at their best and the business operating; "On one occasion the Mutiny software flagged up a problem with disk space on one of our servers and we were able to resolve the situation before it became critical" We also knew about an Internet connection problem between a 12 user remote temporary office running over a VPN before the ISP called to tell us. In short, the Mutiny Network Monitor helps us to stay one step ahead." - Grant Turner - CTO Venn

Future expansion

Mutiny provides a highly scalable solution which grows with your business, its infrastructure and is flexible to its changing needs.

"For Venn's state-of-the- art network, Mutiny performs a vital role and as the company continues to grow, Mutiny is fully scaleable to handle future requirements." Andy Murray - Mutiny's CTO.