Professional performance - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, April, 2001 by Sean Kelly

Express Services provides temporary staffing, direct hire, and professional search and employer services through its 400 franchises in six countries--Belarus, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine and the U.S. The firm, however, had no management tools in place to measure the performance of all of its data intensive networks, from its website and e-mail to a homegrown workflow management system.

"Access to our contact database and back-office administrative applications is a business necessity, as 3,000 end-users in hundreds of offices rely on these applications," says Chris Hood, Express Services network engineer. "If they aren't available, or are slow and cumbersome, productivity is affected."

Implemented at the firm, which handles more than 250,000 placements and $1 billion in revenue annually, was ResponseCenter from Response Networks. The product monitors the performance of critical business transactions across networks, servers, databases, middleware objects and application components. "We now work at maximum efficiency. There is no downtime," notes Hood. Express uses the solution to monitor a third-party, front-office client/server application; the front-office application that supports its franchises; and about a dozen servers and three server databases at headquarters, as well as those deployed in every branch office.

ResponseCenter's test agents act as simulated users, measuring true end-to-end response time, performance and availability from the end-user perspective. As a result, enterprises can obtain early warning of application degradation, identification and isolation of performance problems, and verification that end-user service levels meet performance goals.

www.responsenetworks.com Circle 266 for more information from Response Networks