Century Link needed to shift engineering focus into creative, high-value tasks, vs. tedious, repetitive operations.
CenturyLink is in a market with high competitive pressures, and it needs engineers focused on creative, high-value tasks, not burdened with tedious, repetitious operations. Moore’s organization, the Managed Services Tools Engineering team, features content experts in the tools and automation platform for the entire organization. Internal users – such as operations or engineering – or external customers come to him with use cases they want to automate. Moore and his staff identify the best prospects for automation and what tools to use to implement the automation. The team does the automation programming themselves or mentors the users to do it themselves. Their platform includes a diverse set of tools, but the tools are the highlight and the core of managed services. Out of the box, the Micro Focus software tools provide high-level functionality and the tools to make business decisions. Micro Focus Server Automation and Micro Focus Network Automation provide all the data for the CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base), improving the quality of the data.
CenturyLink is a global communications, network, hosting, cloud and IT services company with 43,000 employees. CenturyLink offers network and data systems management, big data analytics and IT consulting, and operates more than 55 data centers in North America, Europe and Asia. The company provides broadband, voice, video, data and managed services over a robust 250,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network and a 300,000-route-mile international transport network.
Riverturn and Georgia IT help CenturyLink staff integrate Micro Focus products with other internal products. As partners, Riverturn and Georgia IT may do the development, or they may mentor, guiding in techniques, approaches and best practices.
Micro Focus solutions allow for phased delivery and the expansion of solutions. Particularly in situations where the stakes are high – such as when PCI or SOX compliance needs to be maintained or when dealing with security – managers may need time to develop trust before allowing mission-critical functions to be automated. Or, it can be an iterative process to learn what can most productively be automated. Because the Micro Focus tools allow applications to be built in layers, staff can take an agile, incremental approach, providing the level of automation that the end-user is comfortable with, and then later, as confidence and knowledge increase, add further capabilities.
Using Micro Focus, CenturyLink realized the following benefits:
