Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Mexican ISP Telum is using HP tools to deliver better quality and reliability.

1. Mexican ISP Telum Gains Operational Advantages Via
Project to Identify and Measure its Vast Network Elements
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Mexican ISP Telum is using HP tools to deliver
better quality and reliability.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact
on people’s lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as
better business results.
This time, we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference
in Las Vegas. We're here the week of June 9 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike
how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.
Our next innovation case-study interview highlights how Telum in Northeast Mexico is
improving their reliability through quality assurance and higher availability using software. To
help us learn more about how they do that we are joined by Max Garza O'Ward, Head of IT
Operations at Telum, an ISP in Monterrey, Mexico. Welcome.
What secrets will your data tell you?
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In the HP Toolkit for Operations Analytics
Max Garza O'Ward: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: Good to have you with us. First, tell me why reliability and high performance are so
important to your business?
O'Ward: It’s a very competitive business for the telecommunications industry. We're not the top
dog in Mexico or Northeast Mexico. Everything that we put into our customer effort is to bring
in customers we need to keep. So reliability is a key part of our commitment to our customers.
Gardner: And you're not just using technology. You're delivering technology. So it seems
essential to have a handle on what you have, what it's doing, and maybe even get out in front and
have predictive capabilities when problems might arise.
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Gardner

2. O'Ward: That’s very true. Prediction is where we need to focus. To ensure good services we
need to make sure that all those systems are up and running, and we use software
to precisely do that.
Gardner: For our listeners who might not be familiar with your organization,
tell us about your size, how many subscribers, how many services. Just give us a
description of your organization, both in terms of the breadth of services and the
size of your audience?
O'Ward: We're part of the Northeast Mexico market, basically Monterrey,
which is the biggest city up north. We have three different customer markets. The residential
market is roughly over 500,000 customers. We have small business or SOHO businesses, with
between 3,000 and 6,000 customers. And we also have a large enterprise market, around 1,500
large enterprises.
Unwieldy network
Gardner: Let’s dig a little bit into the problems that you faced. Several years ago, you were
looking at a network that was perhaps a bit unwieldy, maybe not well-defined. You
had some difficulties predicting how certain things that you did on your network
would impact your customers. Perhaps you can walk us through your problem
set, your challenges, and then how you started to solve them.
O'Ward: That’s a very good approach. In terms of network, we basically started
noticing that we were committing a lot of unplanned outages, or unplanned
downtimes. So we started to reinforce our monitoring solutions based on HP software. We came
in and provided better solutions to what we were looking into as a network element point of
view.
Based on that, we refurbished our inventory and made sure that all of our network elements were
replaced promptly, based on events. So prediction was key to our better service-level agreement
(SLA) offering.
Gardner: Max, was this a function of changing just the software or was there a cultural
component to this? Did you have to change the way you were thinking about monitoring and
quality assurance in addition to employing some new technology?
O'Ward: Yes, it was a cultural change. As a matter of fact, just two years ago, we revamped the
way the operations department is composed. So a big gap that was closed because of culture.
Culture needed to be changed.
Previously, we had all these disparate teams working on only their solution. Once we came under
one head of operations, we decided that service was the only thing that matters. So we bridged
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O'Ward

3. that gap and now we have all these cross-functional teams working for the same response, which
is service offerings.
Gardner: So IT service management (ITSM) has led to the ability to maintain your quality and
performance. Are there any indicators of how much -- perhaps the number of failures from one
period to more recent failures?
O'Ward: There are a lot of numbers. I don’t have them with me, but I will give you top figures.
IT is the department that I head, and most of these departments are based on different
engineering groups.
When we started working toward service and focusing only on services, on video services we
had over 10 percent failures globally, not every month, throughout the year. Once we got under
this new management and using our new tools, we have been bringing that number down
consistently.
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Get valuable tools
In the HP Toolkit for Operations Analytics
Now, it's a combination of culture, teamwork, and understanding where the failures are.
Sometimes software tells us where the problem is and sometimes software is needed to
understand where the problem is.
In this particular case we understood what the problem was and we decided to change out
equipment that was failing by either obsolescence or just a defective part.
Transparency and visibility
Gardner: In addition to changing culture, putting in some better processes and better tools, it
seems to me for a lot of companies that I speak to, a lot of the process involves getting to know
yourself better, providing transparency and visibility.
Then, it's dashboarding that information so that people can access it, regardless of whether it’s
firefighting or just ongoing maintenance. Tell me about this journey from having a lot of
elements, perhaps not always visible, to getting this newfound ability to have greater inventory
control?
O'Ward: To start off, transparency is key. Once you have an approach of letting the upper
management know where your failures are, that creates concern. And in order for us to create
business, we need to have a reputation to uphold.
We started with monitoring basic monitoring elements. We created awareness of where our
failures were, and at the same time, we asked for more budget to focus on all these defective
parts.
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4. That, in turn, made management very aware of what the engineering departments were actually
doing, either as an IT department or as engineering by itself, which is basically hardware.
Once we had all these components and they were publicly scrutinized or they were publicly
shown in a quarterly meeting, that helped create a dashboard. Now, dashboards are really fun if
you really know what you're talking about, but if you give upper management the wrong
information, wrong decisions are going to be made. So that’s key.
We're working on creating a huge dashboard. Maybe this year is going to be the year. We have
the elements and we're providing that information for the dashboard to be built, but we are
waiting to do the next step.
Right now, we're focused on getting the elements straightened out, monitoring all of our key
systems, and we have done just that in the last year. So we've upheld our end of the bargain,
which is service, quality, and capacity. The next step is going to be providing automatic
dashboards. Right now, dashboards are manual.
Gardner: So the good news is that you're getting much more reliable information about what's
going on. The bad news is, is you have got a whole lot of information coming in.
O'Ward: That's correct.
Aligning data
Gardner: Big data is a big topic here at HP Discover. What are your thoughts about how to get
that data, be it structured or unstructured, into an alignment so that you can improve on your
situation, know more about it, get better predictions, and better analysis? I suppose the capstone
for this is how important will big data become for you to maintain and improve on your
reliability over time.
O'Ward: Big data is a big name, it’s a big trend, and everybody is talking about it. A lot of
people, especially people who aren't technology-oriented, talk about it as if if they know it. The
way big data is coming into our shop is focused more on customers.
If we're talking about big data, unstructured data, that’s coming in from our traps or alerts and
stuff like that, yes, we need to go into that particular scenario. We're looking at two different
projects.
We're going to look into a big-data project that actually brings capacity and quality for our
services. At the same time, there's going to be another effort of big data that is a customer-facing
effort. So yes, it’s going to be a reality in the next year.
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5. Gardner: So it’s safe to say that big data is going to have an impact on your IT operations, but
perhaps also in your marketing, to understand what’s going on in the field very quickly and then
be able to react to it. Big data sort of ties together business and technology.
O'Ward: That's correct. That’s the way we're looking at it. As I said, there are two different
teams of people working on it. We're going to be working on the operations part first and then at
the marketing part as well.
Gardner: We're here at the beginning of HP Discover. Are there any things in particular that
you're going to be out there looking for in terms of how to accomplish your goals over the next
several years. What would you like to see HP doing?
O’Ward: Very much what they have been doing in the past. The software is awesome, just great
software, and if you have the right people and the right potential, that software can bring you
very good benefits.
Our head of operations for the whole company is here with us this week. I'm going to make sure
he attends all these meeting in which we can talk about big data and how we can mold out all of
the strengths and all of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that he needs. I hope that HP
continues to be an innovative part of a software company. I have really enjoyed working with
them for the last five or six years.
Gardner: Okay, last question. Going from a failure rate of 5-10 percent down to less than 1
percent is enviable. A lot of people want to make those kinds of strides. Now that you have had
experience in doing this, do you have any 20/20 hindsight? What would you suggest to other
organizations that are also trying to get a better handle on their systems and their network, get to
know their inventory, and gain visibility? What have you learned that you might share now that
you have been through it?
O'Ward: It doesn't matter how much we monitor things or how many green lights or red lights
we see on any given dashboard. If we're not focused on business processes and business
outcomes, this isn't going to work.
My take would be to focus on a business process that you actually know it's critical and start
from that. Go top-down from that. That would be the best approach. It's worked for us. It actually
bridges a gap between management and the engineering departments. It also provided us with
sound budgeting information. Once you understand what the problem really is, it gets approved
easier.
What secrets will your data tell you?
Get valuable tools
In the HP Toolkit for Operations Analytics
So look at business processes first, get to know your business outcomes, and work on that
towards your infrastructure.
Page 5

6. Gardner: Excellent. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how
Telum has been improving on their reliability via software quality assurance and delivering much
higher availability and performance to their end users.
Please join me in thanking our guest Max Garza O’Ward, Head of IT Operations at Telum.
Thank you.
O'Ward: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And thanks also to our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT
discussion, coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP
sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Mexican ISP Telum is using HP tools to deliver
better quality and reliability. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights
reserved.
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