Getting more
T-Mobile UK utilizes Athene twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. Two years ago, Graeme Chalklin was responsible for about 100 Unix servers from manufacturers such as HP, Sun and Sequent. Today, he has 200 such systems within his remit.

Doubling the number of servers handled by Athene is not the only difference at T-Mobile. Data services, widely regarded as the future for mobile communications, are now becoming available, with many more sophisticated innovations coming on-stream shortly.

Graeme Chalklin: “With the focus on data services, we have more and more servers involved in delivery, and hence more requirements for Athene. It’s an extremely complex juggling act involving many parameters as we seek to ensure that we deliver the requisite levels of service quality.

“In today’s marketplace, the emphasis is on attracting customers from other suppliers and then retaining them, rather than just new customer acquisition. To attract them it is essential that we are able to deliver innovative, high quality services – many of which are introduced almost overnight to ensure that we get a competitive advantage. In this fast-moving and highly demanding environment, Metron’s Athene is, without doubt, a strategic tool for T-Mobile.”

T-Mobile is dedicated to enabling its customers ‘get more’ from their mobile services. The philosophy of ‘getting more’ is one which Graeme Chalklin likes to turn about-face, and direct towards his suppliers. “We are constantly seeing how we can get more from our systems and our suppliers. Whilst the quality of the service delivered by our IT systems is crucial, I believe that there is also an extremely strong financial aspect which has to be considered. We monitor our processes and our suppliers as part of our overall prudent financial management, making sure that we are maximizing our investment in systems, software and tools. I can state, categorically, that we get great value from Metron and their Athene product. In fact one of the key benefits of Athene is that we don’t have to continually change or ‘tweak’ it. Athene does a huge amount of arduous work for us automatically – whilst we can get on with other tasks.”

Focusing on functionality: delivering productivity
Whilst Athene’s data collection and reporting capabilities are fundamental to the work of Graeme Chalklin’s team, he has recently started to use a number of the more specialized modules within Athene 7.3.

Athene Advisor has delivered ‘considerable benefits’ to T-Mobile. Advisor provides expert interpretation of reports and intelligent performance reporting and trend analysis. It delivers an instant means of bringing anomalies to the user’s attention together with an explanation of their likely cause.

T-Mobile worked closely with Metron on the development of APR (Automatic Performance Reporting). APR enables Athene users to define and produce regular performance reports, which are then generated and distributed with no user intervention. The user creates and saves the definition of the report in a template and then schedules its production. Each time the report is required, Athene automatically creates it. Object linking and embedding techniques within Athene ensure that each graph is updated with the correct data for the appropriate report period or event.

Graeme Chalklin: “We attended the workshop at Metron on APR to understand the basics, and were very keen to get it working in our own environment. Connectivity and configuration were sorted out within a very short time, and we soon had the system up and running. Adding to and amending reports is extremely easy as this is a function built into the APR product. We are achieving great productivity advantages from using APR.”

Data management is potentially a major headache for a company such as T-Mobile which is collecting it every second of every day from 200 servers. The company is now fully exploiting the new Data Management function within Athene 7.3 which provides an effective ‘housekeeping’ and archiving system. T-Mobile contributed actively to the original specification for the software and was pleased to see how their comments and suggestions were encapsulated within the final product.

Managing risk
When T-Mobile took the decision to implement Athene 7.3, a major upgrade to the product, they accepted Metron’s offer to provide one of their consultants to help the company through the process. According to Graeme Chalklin: “The transition was seamless. We worked closely with Metron and this undoubtedly helped us gain a fuller understanding of the product.

“In a business such as ours, it is simply unacceptable to have abortive attempts at an upgrade. We have to drive down the possibilities of failure to virtually zero, and in my opinion, using one of Metron’s consultants to work with us on this significant project, was one more way of ensuring that we achieved this goal.”

Metron has ‘packaged’ the experience gained from close customer liaison, such as this with T-Mobile, to create a standard upgrade service offering for all clients.

For day to day queries, T-Mobile uses Metron’s ActionLine for all support calls, a service which they find both knowledgeable and very responsive, “It is far better than many much larger organizations”, said Graeme Chalklin.

Looking to the future
T-Mobile is now looking into the possibility of using the Athene CustomDB module to help manage the capacity of the company’s data networks. Designed to manage and report on data from disparate systems, the use of Custom DB in a data networking environment has yet to be tried.

Despite this, Graeme Chalklin is determined: “The data can be collected from the networks using many different methods, and whilst there are specialist reporting tools available, in my view they simply don’t hold a candle to the reporting, analysis, planning, modeling and data management capability of Athene. We know how Athene works and we can rely on it. As long as we can collect the data – and this is a complex issue – then we’d have complete trust in using Athene to handle the production of reports and other vital management information.”

Capacity Planning for the data networks is rapidly rising to the top for the agenda for T-Mobile as the inexorable move towards new data services brings additional pressure to the infrastructure.

Graeme Chalklin: “Planning the capacity of the networks is crucial to the successful delivery of new products to the marketplace and to their ongoing acceptance.

“In the mobile telecommunications sector, Capacity Planning has always been important. I believe that it can only become more so as the services expand and become ever more complex. Athene and the support services provided by Metron will continue to be essential to the everyday workings of T-Mobile.”