Case Study

Total Oil Trading SA (TOTSA) of Geneva, Switzerland is a subsidiary of Total, an 80-year old multinational energy firm with over 122 billion Euros in sales. TOTSA buys and sells crude oil and refined oil products on world markets for resale to Total's vast network of customers and distributors. With 12 offices worldwide serving customers on five continents, TOTSA has a team of 500 professionals who monitor oil supply flows, pricing and market conditions from both Total's own sources and other producers and refiners. Powering TOTSA's work is a global network of IBM Lotus Domino servers serving all office locations but concentrated in Geneva, Singapore, Paris and Houston. TOTSA has gargantuan data volumes that its traders process in real-time each day. Although newly rolled out starting in late 2004, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (formerly "Sametime") is becoming a key application to support immediate communication between remote staff.

The lifeblood of the company resides in Domino applications that track contracts, sales, CRM data and manage the millions of past and current emails housing equally important data. TOTSA's IT staff recently polled its users to determine which application was most critical for disaster recovery planning purposes. Overwhelmingly users chose Domino which they ranked as even more critical than their external oil pricing databases.

With this importance, IT management demanded metrics on exactly how Domino was performing and how quickly issues were resolved. A recent Sametime rollout served to heighten the need for fast, accurate reporting on email and IM use. Yet providing even the simplest of application performance management information - such as the amount of mail received by each location per month - consumed inordinate amounts of IT staff time. "It used to take me well over 20 hours a month to create simple reports on mail traffic", said Wilfrid Bohm, project manager in TOTSA's IT group. Bohm would be forced to manually comb through each server's log files, tally email volumes per user or per group and hunt for fine-grained Domino usage metrics. Without the ability to readily access aggregated usage and performance information, Bohm had no way of knowing whether his team was meeting agreed-upon Domino service level agreements (SLAs) - nor achieving management's Sametime adoption targets.

In March 2004, TOTSA purchased the Permessa Control! family of solutions for email, replication, application and collaboration management. Control! solutions "efficiencize" IT operations with comprehensive enterprise analysis, monitoring and reporting on usage, traffic and performance metrics for IBM Lotus Domino networks. Using Control!, organizations large and small, local and global can substantially reduce their Domino infrastructure and administration costs and improve their quality of service. After an easy week getting familiar with Control!, TOTAL had fully deployed Permessa Email Control! and Permessa IM Control! across its global Domino network, Permessa Replication Control! products were rolled out a few months later.

After years of tolerating "one big mess" of a reporting effort every month, project manager Bohm found Control! delivered impressive time- and resource savings in its first use. "Almost immediately, I saved over three days a month that I had spent creating reports manually," Bohm said. "It wasn't just a matter of my working more efficiently. In many cases I simply couldn't get email, IM, database and replication information that I needed before Permessa Control!" Using Permessa Control!, Bohm now had the vision "to see Domino performance as we never could before."
 

Permessa Control! was able to create a report on TOTSA's top 20 email users by message volume and disk utilization per month. "We discovered that one trader was sending 5GB of email a month. We worked with him to develop a customized application that was far more efficient than email. We saved 2GB of storage a month on just this one trader's email - and we have over 100 traders!" Control! also uncovered other wasteful practices such as email agents that were automatically sending emails and causing a spike from one location. "Without Control!, I never would have known the agents were even there." Once he discovered them, Bohm could assess which agents were needed and which were just squandering email infrastructure resources and quickly removed the unnecessary ones.
 

When TOTSA's IT management budgets for its next cycle, it needs accurate baseline performance data in order to estimate needs for the next planning cycle. Control! gives TOTSA the ability to show whether each server has sufficient capacity for the future - for example, by allowing TOTSA to tally the volume of mail by location by month, and identify trends. With Control!, TOTSA now can identify Domino mail or application servers that are underutilized, and conversely, identify servers needing more capacity. IT staff can demonstrate whether emails were delivered within the time requirements defined by SLAs and prove compliance or spot areas needing attention. They can monitor replication performance to assure critical data gets to all locations on time.
 

Best of all, the time TOTSA's IT staff recovered by deploying Control! allows them to now proactively keep Domino operating with peak service levels and further improve business operations with new (or improved) Domino applications. For example, in the time he would have otherwise spent creating reports, Bohm recently developed a Notes application that emails a link to a database tracking non-paid invoices, a task that previously required emailing 50 people daily and storing 10 MB of emails per day. The application lightened email storage and server requirements as well as the volume of mail to individuals' inboxes. It is exactly this kind of better, smarter approach to collaboration that IT staffs can offer their teams when they're not consumed with mundane application management tasks. In addition, using Collaboration Control!, Bohm keeps close watch on Sametime use, looking for ways to accelerate its adoption since Sametime use provides tremendous productivity advantages to traders and lowers email infrastructure use and costs.

"We're a small IT organization so we handle both administration and development. The time I gained with Control! I now can spend developing new applications that help the business," Bohm said.

Bohm continues to be amazed at the wealth of knowledge he now has at his fingertips about his Domino network usage, traffic and performance. "It's incredible how much more efficiently you can operate with all the information Control! provides," he said.

Greater IT Efficiency with Control! Data Sheet