Accurate Inventory Delivers Accurate Billing

Accurate Information Allows Accurate Billing and Avoids Contract Penalties

The Problem

Our customer – one of the largest global network services providers – suspected that some customers were being under billed, because support was being extended to infrastructure and machines beyond what was anticipated.

In addition they were unable to provide the accurate asset register that some contracts demanded, leaving themselves open to contract penalty clauses.

As a result they needed to complete network inventories across a wide range of client networks, involving multiple sites and a variety of protocols and standards.  They then had the ongoing challenge of keeping this information up to date. They had a wide range of existing tools, but they had proven themselves unable to meet this challenge.

The Solution

After an extensive search, the customer selected iQSonar. In addition to having the capabilities needed, the main reason for the choice was iQSonar’s speed of implementation.  This enabled the customer to quickly address the information deficit that they had been struggling with.

The Results

100,000 devices in their top 17 network services clients were scanned in less than 14 weeks. These devices spanned the globe.

The Benefits

While previous tools had taken weeks to audit even a small site with a few hundred devices; iQSonar scanned thousands of devices per hour without any impact on the client’s network.

The IT inventory data was put to immediate use – resulting in:

  • The avoidance of penalties, where inventory data was required by the end customer
  • A dramatic increase in billing, as well as more precise billing methods (billing based on port usage, etc.)
  • Improvement in service by pin pointing network issues  (e.g. devices were not configured consistently; did not have consistent security access).