Tailored Solutions
palmOne Service Delivery Management
Customer
palmOne, Inc., Milpitas, California
Goal
In December 1998, palmOne announced the Palm VII device, which was the first PDA with integrated ability to wirelessly access the Internet, email and other data. The Palm VII and the more recent Palm i705 devices make wireless connections through the Palm.Net network and operate over a wireless data network similar to a digital cellular network. The Palm.Net service now provides both wireless data service to thousands of individual consumers and private access to major enterprise class customers.
palmOne targeted May 1999 as the initial rollout for its new device and the related Palm.Net service in the greater New York area. As the launch date approached and recognizing that that initial reviews of the Palm.Net service would influence the adoption rate, palmOne desired assurance that the operations infrastructure for its new service would be adequate. palmOne then sought out Diverse Networks, Inc. (DNI) to evaluate whether the planned network would continuously perform as the subscribers to the service would expect.
Requirements
Because subscribers will not pay for a service that they cannot access, palmOne required a design and management plan for its fledgling service that would render it capable of operating 24 hours per day, 365 days per year with minimal downtime.
Approach
DNI organized this project into three distinct phases:
Phase I: Operational Readiness Assessment
DNI responded by dispatching a strike team to analyze the operational readiness of the Palm.Net service. Because of this analysis, DNI recommended modifications that should be made to the operations infrastructure in order to minimize any service interruptions. Lacking time and in-house expertise regarding the operational issues of a wireless service, palmOne elected to engage DNI to act as its operations team for the initial product launch.
Phase II: Operations Engineering and Initial Operations
With only two weeks remaining before rollout, DNI designed and implemented the service delivery infrastructure and the operations components that would be required to optimize performance for this breakthrough service. As part of the two week effort, DNI also assembled and staffed a temporary operations center at palmOne’s facilities from which DNI provided around-the-clock monitoring and management of the new service.
Phase III: Continuous Operations — Fire Management®
Following the successful New York launch, palmOne finalized plans for the nationwide rollout. The nationwide service would require a larger operations center and an experienced staff. Needing to focus its team on product and platform development, palmOne decided to outsource the operational and network engineering related services of Palm.Net to DNI, who palmOne selected from among numerous vendors. Since November 1999, DNI has staffed and operated a network operations center (NOC) at its Houston, Texas headquarters for Palm.Net and provided staffing as required for a backup NOC at palmOne’s facilities.
Solution
Under the arrangement with palmOne, DNI employs its proprietary Fire Management operations support to provide fault isolation, resolution and escalation to the Palm.Net service. The Fire Management® offering for palmOne includes:
- Proactive monitoring on a 24x7x365 basis of the nationwide operations and performance of the Palm.Net service
- Deploying any new Palm.Net service
- Trouble ticket tracking and fault resolution for all production data service platform components
- Creating and maintaining operational procedures, definitions and documentation
- Providing an operational interface to third-party service providers
- Wireless service and messaging service provider and co-location provider management
- Providing Level 2 and Level 3 administration and engineering services for the numerous Unix and NT based servers
- Systems and application management
- Designing network architecture and providing Level 2 networking support
- Communication circuit trouble reporting and repair coordination (regardless of source of the trouble)
- Owning all problems from detection through resolution
- Advanced troubleshooting (bugs, extended outages)
- Notification of major problems to customer care and appropriate management
- Implementing corrective “hot fix” hardware/software patches, installation and replacement on the production platform
- Escalation of hardware/software issues/bugs to operations engineering or vendors
- Managing scheduled and non-scheduled maintenance
- Network and systems maintenance and capacity planning
- Platform and service performance data collection, report generation and analysis
- Operations SLAs for new service providers
- Co-location vendor selection and contract negotiations
- Enforcing security procedures and policies
In addition to FIRE Management®, DNI also provides other services to palmOne. As a brief sample, please read our abstracts entitled “Palm Activity Monitoring Tool (AMT),” “Palm Systems Engineering — E-mail Systems Outsourcing” and “Palm Systems Engineering – High Availability LDAP Directory Service” for a discussion of these projects.