Highlight partners with Cisco’s ITGL

Cisco Gold Partner ITGL has selected the Highlight Service Assurance Platform to enhance the managed service experience it delivers to its 200+ customers including NHS Trusts, university and colleges, as well as private sector companies.

The Portsmouth-based ITGL uses an army of tools that are fully integrated into Cisco’s ecosystem and Highlight is now a key part of this tool set.

With an extensive Cisco Meraki estate, ITGL uses Highlight to bring Meraki Wi-Fi, Switches and SD-WAN into a single dashboard, alongside all supporting network technologies such as broadband, cellular and LAN.

ITGL  Head of Technical Support Luke Maxwell said: “Highlight has become invaluable in the delivery of our day-to-day services to customers. Many of our tools deliver multiple alerts that require a response. With Highlight, we can now quickly identify if an alert needs action, if an issue is applicable to a client’s SLA, or provide additional data to our engineers when troubleshooting. Highlight was the missing piece of our service jigsaw.”

“With such a large Cisco Meraki estate portfolio, bringing everything into a single reporting engine is extremely useful. We now have visibility of each customer site with a breakdown of the services behind that site on a dashboard view that we can interrogate. We particularly value Highlight’s reporting capabilities, its data retention and the ability to deliver availability-based reporting to our customers. It was this combination that has been particularly well received by our customers,” Maxwell said.

One of ITGL’s Meraki-based customers has 130 retail sites across the UK. ITGL has grouped all their cloud services into the Highlight dashboard to make it quick and easy to verify any important alerts.

Maxwell said: “Whilst it is obvious when a site goes offline, Highlight helps us identify if a single VPN tunnel goes down or if there are underlying issues with bandwidth consumption. Each site has its own different and independent broadband speeds, so we can now determine location specific trends and set thresholds within Highlight to trigger different events.

“Most importantly, the initial feedback from customers has been excellent. Having visibility of their own technologies in a single shared view gives them greater confidence and trust in our services. One of our large retail customers has their IT team using the Highlight platform directly, and they plan to give area managers access to a dashboard about their own locations to see if an issue is local or relates to an external network.”

Highlight product and marking director Martin Saunders said: “We’re delighted to have partnered with ITGL. They are a dynamic and forward-thinking organisation who are focused on delivering digital transformation. By using Highlight themselves, and sharing Highlight with their customers, they can present a single version of the truth with their customers, helping to instil confidence in short-term solutions whilst demonstrating that ITGL is committed to helping customers achieve long term success.”