mStart Powers Network Insight with Entuity

Overview
Founded in 2010, mStart is a leading IT company specializing in MSP services that power businesses across the Adriatic region. It is headquartered in Croatia and has a further presence in countries including Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. As part of the Agrokor Group—which operates more than 100 companies internationally—mStart also provides for all the group’s technology needs. mStart offers the most advanced software solutions and services for businesses in a variety of sectors such as: agriculture, manufacturing, retail, wholesale, and distribution. Over 340 mStart IT professionals provide technical expertise, including the latest in e-commerce and payment transactions, ensuring that their over 60 clients are successful in making today’s digital transformation a reality.

• Customer Details: Privately held, 340+ Staff members, 60+ Customers
• Network Management Software: Entuity
• Entuity Customer Since: November 2018

The Evolving Role of the MSP
To help their clients keep up-to-date on new IT technologies, MSPs today are evolving to be more than just service providers. An innovative and progressive MSP can ensure their clients stay competitive and at the same time achieve business success. mStart’s talented IT professionals are poised to help their clients understand the value of new technologies and how to simultaneously assist their end-users to get the most from them.

To achieve this new consultative status, mStart realized that their network management tool kit was not able to effectively move them ahead. Using multiple unintegrated, older software solutions did not allow for an efficient management platform. Separate network monitoring tools created more work because they were not integrated, and key information could not be shared from one product to another. For example, it was not possible to share fault management details with a configuration management solution, making it more difficult to quickly see where the root cause of an issue was found

Business Needs
Outlining their key challenges led mStart to adjust how they wanted to approach network management so as to expand the services they could offer. The areas they regarded as necessary to address for this business plan included:

• Replace their three key separate network management tools—fault, configuration management and network monitoring with an all-in-one solution. Consolidating their tool set would immediately deliver more visibility, agility and an efficient way to manage
• The rapid expansion of mStart’s customer base requires an MSP network management feature set that accommodates faster onboarding, proactive problem detection, SLA metrics, multi-tenancy for segmenting clients and the ability to easily add new technology and device support
• Incorporating best practices for network and application path management—add a structured management strategy to enhance network management for their customers.
• Real-time views and analytics ensuring outstanding service delivery to their clients.

Choosing the best fit for mStart and its growing customer needs—Entuity
After a comprehensive selection process that included a number of software products, Entuity (ENA) was chosen by the mStart IT team. “Our two top priorities were that the new solution consolidate our monitoring tools and that it be truly user-friendly,” states Kristijan Sić, Head of the network department at mStart. “Entuity Network Analytics has given us operational efficiency with its fully integrated solution. For example, we can compare configurations from the Configuration and Inventory Administration Modules which helps us determine where there have been configuration changes automatically. This has vastly reduced the time spent on manual, repetitive tasks allowing us to become a proactive IT consultant to our customers.”

The Results

Client Onboarding—Creating the Best Initial Customer Experience
Driving new business means streamlining the MSP client onboarding process enabling a fast, smooth transition into mStart’s environment for a solid initial customer experience. Onboarding also must include an approach to handle the varied business requirements for their clients. No two enterprises are alike. Using Entuity, mStart simply adds new clients and customizes what is essential for each client. For example, taking advantage of Entuity’s SLA performance metrics, which are critical when it comes to validating MSP services to clients, mStart creates a set of custom reports for each client. This enables accuracy and transparency for them to understand how their services are performing, where improvements can be made and provides them with relevant data providing a baseline for future IT needs.

Equipping mStart Customers with the tools to be successful—Valuable Analytics, End-to-End Visibility and Management Best Practices

Access to real-time performance metrics and topology maps are also important MSP prerequisites. Entuity supports the managing of multiple businesses through multi-tenancy and automatically updates network topology maps allowing mStart clients to fully understand what is occurring on their network at any given time. Topology maps can show where there have been changes—for instance, there are rogue devices being added to the network affecting performance? Real-time analytics from Entuity gives mStart the visibility to recommend the best business decision for individual customers.

“We find that creating a set of best practices using ENA for our clients helps them understand the IT management process and delivers a solid strategy to keep their networks operating optimally. IT is unpredictable and that’s why it is important to have a plan in place to document each client’s network and associated services,” said Kristijan. “ENA’s SurePath Module has given us another tactic to ensure application performance is not being held back by the network. Clients can now see where a critical application’s data is traveling back and forth on the network and where there are issues. The addition of ENA SurePath ensures that, for example, e-commerce applications are running smoothly and are not impacting sales revenue with poor performance.”

mStart is taking advantage of the many innovative Entuity features that help ensure solid network performance for their clients. For example, customizable reports show data that can provide significant savings in hardware costs. Using the Switch Post Connectivity and Capacity Reports can help spot where there is available capacity before purchasing additional devices. Not only will clients get reliable network performance but also CapEx costs can be better monitored for smart budget spending and planning.

mStart Powers Network Insight with Entuity for Continued Growth
mStart is making their MSP expansion business plan a reality with Entuity. Entuity enables the mStart team to attain this vision through efficient network management and offering IT services that allow their customers to stay competitive as they move into the digital world.  Providing their customers with contemporary solutions that scale quickly, as well as, accurate analytics, outstanding service delivery and an innovative MSP feature set that can reflect their clients’ unique requirements, Entuity is the foundation of mStart’s growing MSP business. mStart with surely continue to be a trusted partner for companies in the Adriatic region looking to outsource their IT functions.  Their innovation, functionality, and expertise is the hallmark of a successful MSP. Learn more about Entuity and see how this highly-acclaimed enterprise network management software can help your organization today!

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.