Hello Mr. Trécourt, what is your responsibility at Sodexo?
Hello. At Sodexo, I am the Director in charge of Network and Telecoms. I am in charge of the interconnectivity of all the countries where Sodexo is present and its associated services.
What are the services you are monitoring, and who are the users?
We monitor all the services that Sodexo employees use. There’s a lot, but in short, we have services related to the connectivity and interconnectivity between countries, some related to video conferencing, others related to our network security, etc.
What challenges are you facing?
With 40,000 points of presence, Sodexo’s internal infrastructure is like that of a small operator. Therefore, we need to understand exactly what happens with the network regarding how the user experiences it. We need to show that our services work, and if they don’t work as we expect them to, we need to know where, how, and why.
How important is the quality of experience for you?
Extremely important. While we don’t always monitor the most critical services, we monitor the ones that can generate the most frustration. Suppose there is a problem with a website infrastructure. In that case, the site might take ten extra milliseconds to load, and it won’t have a significant impact on the user’s quality of experience. But as soon as you have a problem with a video conferencing service, the users are going to be able to hear and see it, and there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to understand or be understood. So, we need to stay on top of that and limit this frustration by maintaining a great quality of experience with our services.
How does Witbe help you?
Witbe helps us measure and control the quality of experience of our services. Thanks to Witbe, we can see exactly what happens with our services and when it happens. While we don’t have many incidents, when we do have one that occurs, it’s a great way to solve the issue faster and with less impact on our users. It also allowed us to see precisely how we could improve how we monitor our services.
What is the impact of our technology on your day-to-day activities?
It helps a lot our operations team. The visibility on our infrastructure that Witbe brings is extremely helpful to us. It allows us to find the best way to solve the problem while having a faster resolution time. We can see on the results interface that we have an incident on the latency, performance, or availability of a service. We can explain why, because Witbe is always testing and monitoring. All our team members are delighted to finally have a way of seeing what is happening.
What advice would you give to other companies?
To not rely on the traditional quality of service monitoring tools to control their user experience. Before, we were in control of every part of our infrastructure. But it’s not like that anymore, and companies have less control over their infrastructure. What is the most important now is having visibility over all of your infrastructure, and essential quality of service monitoring tools are not enough to do this. Those tools were a technical answer to a problem of saturation on your network – a particular technical issue. The quality of your users’ experience is a more complex problem, and Witbe is a technical answer to this problem.
Read our usecase to learn more about how we help Sodexo ensure the best quality for their internal services and applications.