Leading Tourism Company Uses NETSCOUT to Assure Critical Ship-to-Shore UC Services

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
• Networks & Connectivity - Cellular
• Networks & Connectivity - WiFi

• System Integration
• Testing & Certification

The company’s infrastructure includes a complex network of offices, call centers and data centers that span five continents, as well as 40 cruise ships constantly on the move. With this globally distributed network, the company faces IT service delivery challenges that are unique within its industry. In addition to managing shore-side operations, the company has to ensure that 40 cruise ships, with each having its own campus of thousands of users, is able to communicate with headquarters as well as being capable of operating independently. It is absolutely crucial to business operations that the company’s network, whether satellite or terrestrial, be able to deliver business-critical applications and services at any given time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. An important organizational initiative is using technology to drive down internal and external communications costs. In order to reduce its telephony costs for both incoming calls from customers as well as internal communications, the company has moved to IP-based UC.

Headquartered in the southeast United States, this leading tourism services giant has been a travel industry leader since the 1960s. As one of the largest cruise line companies in the world, the company operates five brands. The company offers customers more than 420 destinations worldwide with its 40 ship fleet. To ensure a positive passenger experience, the company employs more than 5,200 shore-based employees worldwide and over 52,000 shipboard workers. With over 40 years of leadership in the travel industry, the company understands that customer experience is paramount and is the foundation of their success. Meeting and exceeding passenger expectations during all phases of the cruise is crucial for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat – and referral – business. As a result, the company puts great emphasis on how every part of the organization can add value to the service delivery value chain. From the front-line staff to the IT organization, everyone must do their part in enhancing the cruise experience. As a result, the company’s Information Technology (IT) group views service delivery and user experience, both internally and customer-facing, as a top priority to delivering great vacations through technology.

NETSCOUT plays a central and strategic role in achieving this tourism company’s service delivery and service-assurance goals. NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE platform and Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology help the company achieve significantly enhanced application and network availability from ship to shore by providing visibility into the network and enabling the IT staff to better manage bandwidth utilization and network optimization. In addition to uptime, NETSCOUT improves the predictability of applications and services by enabling the organization’s IT team to monitor resources in real-time with meaningful information to proactively prevent issues from affecting service levels. Alongside real-time statistics, the NETSCOUT solution provides historical, directly-captured network packet information that can be used for forensics and troubleshooting with more complex or intermittent issues. Additionally, with the NETSCOUT solution, the organization’s IT organization can better validate new services and policies before rolling them out across the network, thus helping to avoid service disruptions or unexpected issues that would adversely affect service delivery to customers.

• Protects the customer experience.
• Optimizes the performance and availability of customer-facing, shore-side applications and basic revenue-generating onboard services.
• Quickly identifies service delivery performance issues, minimizes downtime, and proactively prevents future issues while utilizing fewer IT staff resources.