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Addison Lee Improves Service Levels with Mimosa NearPoint™ |
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Addison Lee is London’s leading minicab company operating around the clock, 365 days a year. Founded in 1975, the company has revolutionised the private hire industry and today enjoys an unrivalled reputation for moving people and parcels in London. By offering more than 2,000 spacious people-carriers fitted with air-conditioning and satellite navigation as standard, consistent pick-up times and fixed prices that are on average 33% cheaper than black taxis, Addison Lee has become a serious rival to the black cab trade.
Addison Lee is a technology innovator and, in doing so, has revolutionised the way that a minicab firm operates. For example, it has adopted GPS technology across its entire fleet which allows it to match up the nearest car to the customer’s pick up address. Not only does this ensure almost 99% of its passengers are picked up on time, typically within 20 minutes, but this efficiency has helped reduced carbon emissions by 20% over the last 3 years.
Addison Lee is also a big user of text messaging. When a minicab is allocated, the client automatically receives a text informing them their vehicle is on its way. The make, model and registration details of the car are provided, along with the driver’s mobile number. This means that clients who are travelling alone are secure in the knowledge that they are getting into the right car.
Despite its innovative use of technology, internally Addison Lee was facing a costly performance meltdown with its three Microsoft Exchange Servers. Over the past few years the company had deployed Microsoft Outlook mailboxes at its North London headquarters that were served by three Microsoft Exchange Servers. However, because the IT department had not put strict user policies or mailbox quotas in place it was beginning to hit storage limits imposed by Microsoft Exchange Server.
Paul Caney, IT Manager for Addison Lee, explains: “Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition has a 75-gigabyte (GB) per server mailbox store limit. We were approaching that limit on our Exchange servers and were faced with having to pay £10,000 to get another Exchange Server up and running just to handle the storage requirement.”
To save costs, Caney initially proposed a short-term fix of imposing a limit on everyone’s mailbox size. “This approach just wouldn’t work since no one wanted to delete their email”, said Caney.
There were also other significant costs to consider. Addison Lee was backing-up its Exchange servers remotely, at what Caney calls “an astronomical cost”.
Adding another Exchange server would have pushed Addison Lee over its contracted limit and initiated extra payments of up £40,000 per 100 GB of additional off-site storage.”
Mailbox performance was also being questioned. A number of users had complained about their mailboxes running slowly, especially those who had been with the company for a longer time and who had larger mailboxes, often over 2GB in size. “Once a user’s mailbox goes over a certain limit Outlook keeps disconnecting from the Exchange server leading to performance degradation”, said Caney.
This issue was further exacerbated for those who worked remotely. The only answer was for Addison Lee to find a way to reduce mailboxes to a size more manageable by the Exchange servers. “We discovered that the best way to do this was to deploy an email archiving solution”, concluded Caney.
Litigation, not legislation
In fact it was a lack of archiving that proved to be the final straw, prompting Addison Lee to start looking at solutions to its email problems. The company discovered that one of its largest accounts had not paid its bills for three months and, after an internal investigation, found out that it was sending invoices to the wrong email address. Although the person responsible had received a request to change the email address to which invoices were sent, this email had been inadvertently deleted. Without an archive in place there was no way to retrieve it.
“Lack of a cohesive, comprehensive email archiving solution was clearly hurting us on all fronts and it quickly escalated into a boardroom issue”, said Caney.
This shortcoming flew in the face of the way the rest of the business operated. For example, Addison Lee meticulously records every single phone conversation that comes in, as well as every conversation between the controllers and drivers.
Although this is not a legal requirement, in the event of a client issue Addison Lee has the means to quickly find and bring-up every recorded conversation with a particular client.
“Our managing director wanted to know why we could not retrieve emails in a similar way”, said Caney.
With the green light from the managing director, Caney and his team evaluated a number of email archiving solutions including Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, CA’s Message Manager and Mimosa Systems’ NearPoint™ for Microsoft Exchange. After extensive evaluation and supplier advice, they selected NearPoint™ to provide automated email archiving on all mailboxes across its three Exchange servers.
There were three main considerations Addison Lee made when choosing the archiving solution. It had to be affordable, easy to deploy and manage, and fast.
“On a per mailbox basis Mimosa’s NearPoint™ offered good value”, said Caney, adding, “Mimosa came in at the right price, which made it so much easier to make the business case for it”.
More importantly, Caney felt that NearPoint™ was the easiest to deploy and manage. “Some of the competing products we looked at would have required us to employ a specialist on a higher salary in order to run them which, for a company our size, would have driven the total cost of ownership through the roof.”
In addition, Caney liked the fact that NearPoint™ did not require any software agents to be deployed on either the Exchange servers or the desktops, making deployment and maintenance a much simpler and quicker proposition.
NearPoint™ is unique in that is works using transaction log-shipping which maintains a complete and up-to-date copy of all Addison Lee’s Exchange data — messages, calendar items, tasks, and contacts — without impacting on the performance of the Exchange Server. By contrast, the other solutions considered by Addison Lee were limited in that they either captured email at the SMTP or MAPI level or required use of Exchange Journaling which can impose a huge load on production servers.
In addition, the full-function search and the continuous data protection and recovery features that are integral to NearPoint™ gave Addison Lee the confidence that its employees could quickly and easily find live and archived emails in a secure, resilient environment.
Mimosa NearPoint™ for Microsoft Exchange has given Addison Lee a comprehensive email archiving solution maintaining a complete up-to-date copy of all Exchange data, while preserving the rich context of all users’ mailboxes and public folders.
Commenting on the ease of deployment Caney said: “Because Mimosa’s integration with Exchange is seamless there is no need to retrain our users. Archived items simply appear as another folder in the same familiar Outlook client. Because the archive is accessible by each employee, the administrative burden of recovering past messages is negligible”.
Improved Service Levels
Caney will also be able to improve Service Level Agreements (SLAs). For example, in addition to remote backups Addison Lee also back-up to tape. “As a 24x7 operational environment we have practically no backup window. The closest we come to one is a ‘quiet’ time between 04:30 and 05:30 when our job-handling-rate falls from 900 jobs per hour to around 500”, explained Caney. “That meant having to take live backups, using special agents to allow that. As a result backups could take a long time to complete and there was an impact on system performance.”
Addison Lee will be able to reduce the size of the Exchange server mailbox stores from their original 75 GB down to as little as 5GB each. As a direct result, the backup time is expected to fall from around 12 hours to just one hour. This means that Addison Lee can complete backups faster during the quiet night period and, since there is so much less to restore, recovering from crashes is also that much quicker.
Major Costs Savings
Apart from performance and operational efficiencies, Addison Lee estimates that deploying NearPoint will save it £50,000 in hardware, software and the incremental cost of remote back-up. In fact, with the improvement in tape backups with NearPoint™, Caney is planning to turn off the remote backups altogether.
There are also overhead and maintenance savings in Microsoft Active Directory (AD). Without NearPoint™, Addison Lee had to keep old mailboxes in Exchange when people left as they had no other archiving solution in place. That meant even more objects to manage in AD, as well as extending the AD backup window. Caney concludes: “Our business remains one of the most competitive in London and we need to keep differentiating to keep ahead of the competition. In terms of resilience and performance, with the next generation benefits provided by Mimosa NearPoint™ our Exchange Server environment is now on a par with the rest of our IT infrastructure.”
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