CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Northwestern University Delivers Better Insight to Students, Faculty Using BMC Software

Secure, real-time visibility of IT enables superior web application performance capabilities

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--With more than 25,000 students, faculty and staff, Northwestern University prides itself on its ability to combine innovative teaching and research in a highly collaborative environment. Web applications are critical to that collaboration, representing a “backbone” for the university’s work.

“As a result, we can make better resource decisions and that means better support for our students, faculty and staff.”

The university’s IT department needed a much stronger view into the performance, health and availability of its web applications. Northwestern turned to BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to improve its dynamic learning and teaching capabilities. Prior to choosing BMC, the university had limited visibility into its application performance, which meant diagnosing and resolving any problem was lengthy and inefficient.

“With BMC Software, we have an accurate way to measure usage, performance and availability,” said Dana Nielsen, director of monitoring and management systems at Northwestern University Information Technology. “As a result, we can make better resource decisions and that means better support for our students, faculty and staff.”

Nielsen added, “Instead of relying on anecdotal information, we have a baseline for an intelligent conversation about performance. Having a true measurement of what’s happened has increased our credibility. We can show that our systems are up 99 percent of the time. All of that has been tremendously helpful.”

The Challenge

Northwestern University did not have a single, secure dashboard to monitor its web applications and adequately determine performance issues. As a result, the lack of visibility to critical data caused the processes for troubleshooting and resolving problems to be inefficient.

The Solution

The university created a capacity and availability service monitoring dashboard with the BMC End User Experience Management solution. This provided IT staff with real-time web application performance data. Additionally, students, faculty and staff could check the performance, health and availability of their web applications.

Benefits

The university has experienced several benefits, including:

• Access to real-time data, which accelerated problem resolution and improved the user experience
• Better reporting capabilities to facilitate rapid problem resolution
• Accurate measurement and tracking to demonstrate quality of services, enabling better decision making
• Freed up technology resources and improved collaboration on issues

For more information on the university’s implementation and the BMC End User Experience Management solution, please visit:

• Read the full Northwestern University case study
• BMC End User Experience Management
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• Become a fan of BMC on Facebook

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