Wendy’s Gains Greater Visibility

The Wendy’s Company is the world’s third largest quick-service hamburger company. The Wendy’s system includes more than 6,500 franchise and Company restaurants in the U.S. and 27 other countries and U.S. territories worldwide. Founded by Dave Thomas in 1969, Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers restaurant first opened the doors in Columbus, OH. Since the beginning, Dave focused on creating something new - high quality food made with the freshest ingredients, served the way the customer wanted. Quality was so important to Dave that he put the phrase “Quality is our Recipe” on the Wendy’s logo. Today, that passion for quality remains the number one priority in each individual Wendy’s restaurant around the world.

THE CHALLENGE

Wendy’s was faced with the challenge of finding a product that could proactively monitor their Exchange environment and alert key systems engineers of issues. Due to Wendy’s continued substantial growth, Manager of Unified Communications, Don Murawski, realized further assistance was needed to ensure his messaging environment remained stable, robust, and highly available. The Exchange team was spending too much time manually checking the environment’s health. Real time feedback was minimal and system outages were a challenge.

Therefore, Don started evaluating several Exchange monitoring products in an attempt to gain greater visibility into his messaging infrastructure and stabilize his Unified Communications environment.”

THE SOLUTION

Don requested a Mailscape free trial and instantly saw the value of its’ award-winning one-look dashboard. Mailscape provided instant feedback regarding the health of the entire messaging environment. The tool’s proactive monitoring has allowed the Wendy’s Messaging team to identify and troubleshoot small problems before they escalate into major outages. “I’m relieved that Mailscape allows me the time and flexibility to focus my attention on other projects, rather than email 24/7,” explained Don. “Mailscape has become my personal Exchange babysitter!” Don provided several examples describing the immediate impact Mailscape has had in Wendy’s environment.

Wendy’s saw a significant increase in the amount of iOS devices over a very short period of time. Because the initial environment design lacked a CAS array, all the client requests went through a single CAS. With no monitoring solutions in place, managing OWA and ActiveSync efficiently was becoming impossible.

With the ability to monitor OWA and ActiveSync simultaneously, Mailscape immediately alerted the Exchange team of the performance issues. Once these issues were identified, the numerous ActiveSync reports quickly diagnosed the root cause saving time and money.

Don explains that perhaps the best example of Mailscape’s value to Wendy’s occurred when a power glitch occurred at one of their datacenters, causing a massive outage. Having an outage is obviously a problem in itself, however, due to the fact that the outage occurred immediately prior to a corporate quarterly board meeting, the problem intensified exponentially. As time passed, pressure continued to build. The need to quickly troubleshoot and get Exchange up and running was essential. Priceless time was saved because of Mailscape. The power glitch resulted in a loss of quorum for the DAG that lasted four hours. Mailscape immediately sent out alerts for the DAG, and Don was able to get a jumpstart on identifying and solving the problem. Although several Exchange monitoring and reporting tools were considered, Mailscape ultimately proved to be Wendy’s choice. A key differentiator for Wendy’s was the proactive monitoring in real time via the one-look dashboard. “Mailscape provides instant feedback of the health of the entire messaging environment,” said Don. “Real time monitoring on key functionality, like DAG health, is vital for any Exchange engineer. As a manager, I have instant feedback on all my Exchange servers and it allows me to make better use of my team’s time. Overall, I have been very pleased with the product and I would recommend Mailscape to any enterprise messaging environment.

I’m relieved that Mailscape allows me the time and flexibility to focus my attention on other projects, rather than email 24/7...Mailscape has become my personal Exchange babysitter!”
Don Murawski, Manager of Unified