Mamas & Papas

Mamas and Papas are one of the UK 's leading retailers in the nursery industry and a market leader in products ranging from nursery interiors, travel systems, kitchen and bathroom equipment to toys, baby and maternity wear.

Based in Huddersfield, the company has retail outlets across the UK, a satellite office in Hong Kong and a workforce of more than 1,000. Among them are 14 specialists responsible for the company's IT infrastructure on a day-to-day basis with a further 32 researching and developing new IT systems.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT SYSTEM

Productivity and reliability are the key words when it comes to modern day technology. What Mamas & Papas needed was a network monitoring system that would give them as much monitoring capacity as they could get and would enable them to keep across their entire network of stores, check bandwidth across WAN links and to instantly assess the state of all their servers.

They wanted a system that was easy to use and did not want one that would tie up staff for hours on end processing masses of unnecessary information. It also had to be cost effective with no hidden extras.

They checked out a number of other systems but it was the Mutiny Appliance that ticked all the boxes.

Says Mamas & Papas' IT Technical Manager Darren Bootland: "We looked at what some of Mutiny's competitors had to offer but they just didn't seem to give a lot of the nuts and bolts that Mutiny did."

"Not only that, Mutiny was a doddle to administer and is also very easy to use".  

WHAT DOES MUTINY MONITOR AT MAMAS & PAPAS?

• 300 devices
• Servers in all stores
• Tills in all stores
• Switches
• Store infrastructure
• WAN links to all stores and offices in the UK and Hong Kong

Mamas & Papas also use SQL, Exchange and IIS remote agents

BENEFITS

The first tangible result for Mamas & Papas came when Mutiny identified a glaring error in links to their Hong Kong office. Their network provider was supposed to be providing two gateways with separate connections - except they hadn't.

Mutiny quickly diagnosed that only one of the links was operational and was carrying nearly all the traffic while the other was virtually redundant.   

Without Mutiny's intervention, who knows how many more man hours would have been lost with technicians to-ing and fro-ing to Hong Kong trying to fix the problem? 

And, of course, the Mutiny appliance has freed up more valuable resource time normally allocated to other problem solving and allowed them to adopt a more proactive approach to systems development.

It's also helped the company detect when its systems aren't operating to maximum capacity and so resolve problems before they become critical.

In fact, IT Technical Manager Darren Bootland reckons they're at least 15% more efficient.

"It's giving us a lot more competence in the infrastructure. We know what it's doing and when it's doing it", he says.

"Before Mutiny, by comparison, we were adopting a sort of finger in the air and hope approach to problem solving. Now, if there's something wrong with the server we know exactly what it is and what to do."

"It's given us a level of data we've never had before. We're very pleased".

MUTINY COMMENT

Mutiny is a pre-configured hardware appliance that monitors network traffic and hardware (switches, servers, routers etc) all day and every day.

It is the only SNMP-based Critical Network Monitoring appliance on the market, designed with ease-of-use as the most important feature.

A company like Mamas & Papas can feel confident the Mutiny system is monitoring for problems around the clock 24/7.

Says Dudley Moor-Radford, Mutiny's Commercial Director: "Any client that is looking to integrate any form of critical service/network monitoring products into their IT infrastructure wants to see ROI quickly. Mutiny proved itself to Mamas & Papas within weeks and continues to do so with the wealth of systems and devices that it monitors."