Our expert team supported a top-tier financial organization in their goal to deploy Cisco ACI, helping address skill shortages, ensure seamless migrations and create in-house expertise for a sustainable future.
Day two operational capabilities transferred within just 12 months
Operations team upskilled to level 4 Operational Support in ACI and automation
The Company
Our client is a tier 1 financial institution with over 25,000 employees across the global financial services market.
As one of the world’s leading providers of financial markets infrastructure, this fiscal powerhouse helps organizations fund innovation, manage risk and create jobs by partnering with customers at every point in the trade lifecycle.
Today they deliver financial data, analytics, news and index products to more than 40,000 customers in 190 countries.
The challenges
With the ambition of enhancing business agility, the organization wanted to deploy a new technology in the form of Cisco ACI.
To achieve this goal, they upskilled their architecture and engineering teams to enable them to design and deliver the new tech, with a migration support team waiting in the wings to help if any issues arose.
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Each migration was designed to target a series of switches/ports, which would then translate to a series of configuration scripts to be executed during the change window.
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If there was a problem with the generated scripts, the support team would then attempt to resolve the issue to complete the migration.
Yet due to a lack of ACI experience and an overall skills shortage in the operations team, the client was not able to manage the migrations effectively. The size of the challenge against a compressed timeline also meant there was a need to utilize team members with very little experience, putting them on the hook to create and execute migration scripts. However, these scripts were failing consistently due to lack of knowledge across not only the new technology, but also how to configure it. That’s where HighPoint stepped in.
The solution
Our ACI specialists brought a wealth of expertise in overseeing network migrations, change management, ticket management issues, dealing with day two operation requirements and various training programs.
Using our extensive experience, we provided the client with a level 4 Support function which had two core responsibilities:
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The first was that if there was an issue with a migration, the level 4 Support team would be escalated to fix forward to allow the migration to complete.
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The second was to upskill the support team so that they could understand the technology underpinning the Software Defined Data Centre in order to support it more effectively.
This solution, delivered via our tried and tested Hypercare technology adoption model, was designed to equip our client’s in-house teams with the level of expertise they needed to support the new technology – with the ultimate ambition of transitioning the support function back in house over a period of time.
The results
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With the help of our Hypercare delivery model, we were able to ensure that the client was fully enabled in Cisco ACI before we handed over to them.
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By building collateral and running mentoring sessions for our client’s support teams, we were able to conduct “on-the-job” training to help them achieve their level 4 Support capability in ACI and automation.
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This ultimately enabled them to take over the support function from us, with the operations team assuming responsibility for day two operational capabilities within just 12 months.
