Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Fujitsu Turns to OPNET for Network Diagramming Solution

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

Fujitsu (News - Alert) Services, one of the leading IT services companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, may have more than 30 years of experience in designing, building, and operating IT systems for customers in the financial services, telecom, retail, utilities and government markets, but the company still had a problem that it needed fixing.

In an effort to improve service and increase efficiencies, Fujitsu was looking for a way to reduce the manual workload associated with designing the network reconfiguration for problem scenarios and validating their designs for performance and availability in a broad range of scenarios. Without an automation solution, Fujitsu officials frequently had to spend time redesigning and reconfiguring networks, a process that was oftentimes tedious and prone to producing errors. Fujitsu officials wanted to find a better way to rework the networks and provide improved services for customers.

Their quest for help led them to OPNET Technologies (News - Alert), a provider of network diagramming solutions.

After sifting the marketplace for tools that are able to automate and improve network processes, Fujitsu decided to implement the OPNET IT Guru [NetDoctor] and deploy its Virtual Network Environment to design and test various network configurations in the software before the actual deployment. OPNET’s network diagramming solution is capable of predicting potential problems and resolving problems that arise proactively. In so doing, the number of required network redesigns was diminished.

David Carter (News - Alert), senior consultant at the Fujitsu Network Management team, said that OPNET’s software has allowed Fujitsu to provide better service to its existing customers as well as helping the company attract new customers.

“OPNET was selected to add value by allowing Fujitsu to optimize network performance, including right-sizing links, minimizing mistakes in router configurations and even pointing out inefficient configurations,” Carter said in a customer case study. “We have already experienced the benefit of using OPNET software through the reduced number of customer trouble tickets.”

Fujitsu engineers also entrusted OPNET software to help regularly identify and troubleshoot the problems that often occur in network device configurations. Thanks to the network diagramming solution, tasks that used to take days or were impractical to accomplish could now be completed in a matter of hours.

In other company news, OPNET Technologies was recently been positioned by Gartner (News - Alert), Inc., in the “Leaders” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring.”

The report, which was published on Sept. 19 and written by Will Cappelli and Jonah Kowall, evaluated 29 vendors. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at a specific time period and depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner, according to Gartner.

“We believe OPNET introduced significant new APM capabilities that were evaluated in this year’s ‘Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring’,” said Alain Cohen (News - Alert), president and CTO of OPNET, in a statement. “These include groundbreaking solutions for application dependency mapping, end-to-end transaction following combined with deep tracing, cloud-capable virtual appliances and agents, and advanced analytics for automated troubleshooting.”