Raet Online - Software as a Service
Raet is an IT service provider active in the field of HR and payroll services. Each month, Raet processes over two million salary and pension calculations, making it the market leader in the Netherlands. In support of its further growth, the company focuses on the business sector and the development of new services that are chiefly related to HR. To this end, at the start of 2007 Raet launched Raet Online, a single, over-arching environment that enables the company to offer all its services and products to customers as an integral whole.
Raet continually strives to improve the quality of its applications. Needless to say, performance monitoring forms a crucial aspect of this process. Jan Treep, Operations Manager at Raet: “It goes without saying that we had various monitoring tools at our disposal. However, we only used these tools to monitor the technical availability of the systems. We were unable to monitor the functional availability of applications from the customer’s perspective”.
Basing SLAs on customer experience to ensure professional service provision
Jan Treep: “Entering into service level agreements with customers forms part of the professional service provision that Raet wishes to offer. We want to be able to demonstrate to our customers that all the availability and performance agreements are being met. This is something that our account managers appreciate as well, as it allows us to distinguish ourselves from our competitors.”
The selection of Moniforce’s webProbe and webAlarm solutions
Treep: “We were actively looking for a specialist vendor of performance and availability monitoring solutions. Moniforce was the only vendor who was able to deliver exactly what we were looking for. We have opted for a combination of active monitoring using webAlarm and passive monitoring using webProbe. Apart from the ability to measure performance from the end user’s point of view, the major strength of webProbe is in the fact that the technology makes sure newly added products are automatically and directly monitored, without impacting the performance. We complement the measurements by webProbe with monitoring based on user activity simulated by webAlarm so we know for sure that business-critical transactions can be performed on a 24 x 7 basis.”
Results and outlook
webProbe and webAlarm are monitoring all products and services of Raet Online. The company currently uses webProbe to perform zero measurements used as baselines for future SLAs and to establish priorities during the quality enhancement process.
Jan Treep: “Thanks to webProbe, we are now able to detect issues before our customers can encounter any problems. And if a customer should nevertheless report an incident, we are able to directly identify the cause of the problem, whether this involves an internal application, a network or Internet issue or a problem at the customer’s end.”
Since performance issues can impact the entire organisation, Raet increasingly makes use of the output from the Moniforce solutions to obtain steering data used for internal deliberation between the business (product managers and product development managers) and R&D.
Treep: “We are highly pleased with our collaboration with Moniforce and expect to use their load and stress-test service webStress in the future as well.”
October 2007