Cincinnati Bell is the dominant telephone communications company in the Cincinnati area, serving hundreds of thousands of customers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. It has recently invested in its service region’s future with a massive fiber network that reaches 70% of greater Cincinnati’s homes and businesses. ParkView™ is helping the transformation’s tremendous success.

ParkView™ is a remote service that proactively detects equipment hardware faults 24/7 across storage, server, and networking products. The related alerts are then securely transmitted to Park Place Technologies’ technical operations, enabling more timely, and accurate failure diagnosis, part identification, and necessary repair actions.

“We are saving over eight hours per week by not having to travel to data centers and check on hardware,” said Robert Kruthaupt, senior technology team leader, Cincinnati Bell. “This does not include the wear and tear for the vehicle savings.”

Kruthaupt said several Cincinnati Bell data centers are not staffed or close to headquarters, so the company needed to pay employees to drive to far away locations to physically check that servers were operating, then drive back, and do it all over again in the next cycle.

“The time savings in people management is incredible,” Kruthaupt said. “We have been able to reallocate associates’ time to more important duties than driving to data centers and checking for blinking lights.”

Diagnostic time cut

ParkView™ also helps dramatically cut down diagnostic time,” Kruthaupt said, “There is troubleshooting time that is hard to quantify since diagnosing certain hardware failures is problematic. Sometimes we would replace a RAID controller, reboot it, and learn it was not the controller, but the battery. That’s probably an hour of downtime. Another example is, we would replace the RAID controller and then the battery, only to learn it was actually a failed memory stick on the RAID controller. This is another hour of downtime. With ParkView™, we know exactly what component has failed and replace it correctly the first time,” he added.

In its first year since adopting ParkView™, a service that proactively detects faults in storage, server, and networking hardware, Cincinnati Bell has seen demonstrable savings of time and money.

 “In the past when we would find any issues, the technician would save all incidents and call them in at the end of the day. By using ParkView™, we are saving an entire day sometimes since the part is automatically ordered and shipped to us,” Kruthaupt said.

Gartner, Inc. a global research and advisory firm providing insights for leaders in IT, estimates that on average, it costs one administrator with a $123,000 annual salary to support 64:1 Windows OS instances. That translates to $160 in cost per OS instance, per month. Factoring in the ability to have the Park Place technician perform the repair, ParkView™ can “move the needle” on that ratio and allow clients’ administrators to manage more servers per full-time equivalent (FTE). That estimate doesn’t account for soft benefits such as travel time and overhead beyond the FTE according to Kruthaupt.

Cincinnati Bell was one of the first companies to implement Park Place Technologies’ ParkView™ service. Since 1991, Park Place Technologies has provided an alternative to post-warranty storage, server and networking hardware maintenance for IT data centers. As the world’s largest pure play post-warranty data center maintenance organization, Park Place supports more than 13,000 organizations in over 110 countries. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Park Place currently employs more than 1,000 people, and maintains offices across the globe, including San Diego, Denver, Boston, Toronto, London, Weisbaden, and Singapore.

“Park Place has always gone above and beyond for Cincinnati Bell’s needs,” Kruthaupt said. “Even if one of our services is not under contracted support, Park Place fixes it, then we worry about the arrangement.”

“Our ParkView™ offering comes at the apex of digital transformation across numerous verticals,” said Chris Adams, president and chief operating officer, Park Place Technologies. “As CIOs are held more accountable than ever to be a revenue source for their organizations, this innovation allows enterprise IT to be as efficient and error-proof as possible, all while reducing costs.”

Kruthaupt credits ParkView™ as having a great impact on Cincinnati Bell’s tech transformation.

“Across the landscape, Cincinnati Bell is attempting to automate where ever possible,” Kruthaupt said. “ParkView™ has helped with that challenge. We need to minimize downtime, and through predictive analysis, ParkView™ is helping us with application uptime. Business owners are happy, applications owners are happy, endusers do not notice anything because there is no downtime”.

“ParkView™ is enabling us to be more efficient across the board, for data center hardware and maintenance and controlling costs.
The time savings in people management is incredible. We have been able to reallocate associates’ time to more important duties than driving to data centers and checking for blinking lights. By using ParkView, we are saving an entire day sometimes since the part is automatically ordered and shipped to us,” Kruthaupt concluded.