Cox Communications, Inc.

Cox Communications, Inc. is a multi-service broadband communications company and the nation’s 5th largest cable television provider. A Fortune 500 company headquartered in Atlanta, Cox Communications is one of the Cox Enterprises companies, an organization whose operations span the globe.

		NetMon Challenge: At the heart of Cox’ success is their Network Operations Center (NOC), an Atlanta-based facility that continually monitors the company’s national broadband network. The NOC receives thousands of device alarms every day. It uses several network monitoring tools that provide point-in-time device event configuration data. Although these tools were useful, the NOC staff lacked the ability to perform historical trending across their telephony, cable TV and high-speed internet systems. Before NetMon, NOC staff analyzed data using one-off reports that were both time consuming to build and of questionable accuracy. Bottom line – from executives to engineers, nobody at Cox had ready access to information required to consistently and cost-effectively provide a high level of service to their customers. Intellinet Solution: NOC staff needed a way to capture real-time event data generated from devices throughout its network, correlate that data with other information stored in multifarious databases, and deliver the combined results to end users – without requiring extensive software development for each new report required. “We’ve always had a wealth of real-time information at our disposal, but our inability to report on it over time was limiting our operational efficiency,” said Tim Winebarger, Manager, Cox Communications. In 2002, Intellinet approached Cox with a vision for an enterprise reporting infrastructure that would meet all of the company’s needs. Less than six months later the solution become a reality. The new BI solution uses advanced business intelligence features built into Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 to provide the company with deep insight into the health and performance of its network and the efficiency with which it is managed. NetMon puts information for Cox personnel at their fingertips. It captures real-time alert data across all three Cox lines of service, correlates and augments information with data from other systems, and exposes the combined data — as well as other data sources — through a single enterprise portal. End users can now access reports through an intuitive, web-based interface, regardless of the mix of data sources used to generate a report. The NOC Tools group uses the same web interface to manage reports — for example, to set permissions for who can view each report and determine the frequency with which preprocessed reports are refreshed. NetMon already has approximately 300 regular users, a number that is expected to grow into the thousands as additional reports are added to the system.
		Exchange Migration Challenge: The growing need to connect employees, not only in Atlanta, but also around the country, became an increasing challenge. Cox employees were required to share and gain access to large amounts of information. With their existing infrastructure, collaboration tools were few and cumbersome. Collaborative efforts were inefficient, and information was difficult to locate due to numerous storage locations. Intellinet Solution: Building on the growing Windows 2000 architecture, Intellinet was engaged to assist Cox Communications in designing and deploying an Exchange 2000 architecture to replace the existing Exchange 5.5 environment, and setting standards to be followed by the other Cox Enterprises companies. Intellinet consultants worked with Cox staff to understand the current environment, gathering information to be used in planning for the new architecture. Armed with this information, Intellinet then worked with Cox staff in a test lab to plan, design, and write an Exchange 2000 Architecture Document. With the complexity of the Cox Enterprises Exchange environment (six user sites, two messaging hub sites, approximately 75 servers and over 40,000 Global Address List entries) testing and design validation were of the utmost importance. Accomplished: The Cox “Get Connected” vision was created to bring people together through technology anytime, anywhere in a collaborative environment. By enabling employees to more easily communicate and collaborate, time-to-market cycles are reduced and employee satisfaction is increased. As employees are provided more efficient means of accessing corporate data, more timely decisions can be made.