How Virgin Entertainment Group Keeps Customer-Facing Transactions Humming at its Virgin Megastores

CIO — Managing the technology that runs Virgin Entertainment Group's 10 Virgin Megastores in the U.S. is like staging a rock concert, says Robert Fort, CIO of the media company. When each store opens its doors, the curtain effectively rises, and the systems—the cash registers, listening station kiosks, digital signage, data warehouse, converged voice and data network—need to perform smoothly and in sync, much like the lighting, pyrotechnics, band and dancers all need to be following the beat of the same drum.

To ensure that store systems don't skip a beat, Fort says he began looking for tools he could use to proactively police them a few years ago. Fort joined Virgin Entertainment Group five years ago and became vice president of IT and CIO in 2004. Last year, he piloted Microsoft's Operations Manager 2007, which monitors the performance of all devices on his network, including servers, cash registers, and kiosks.

Fort says Operations Manager has provided him with a tremendous amount of useful information at the device level, but it doesn't provide him with visibility into individual, customer-facing business transactions. That becomes a problem when he gets an angry phone call from a store manager demanding why credit card transactions are taking so long to process. So Virgin has supplemented its implementation of Operations Manager 2007 with transaction monitoring software from Inetco. This way, he can track the performance of hardware and software (using Operations Manager) as well as credit card transactions (using Inetco's Insight software.)

Sound Check

Operations Manager 2007 tells Fort when hardware doesn't have enough disk space, when communication lines are backed up and when there's a problem with a particular router, switch or piece of software. He says Operations Manager has provided him with a tremendous amount of useful information at the device level. And as a result, he's rolling out Operations Manager across the company.

But it doesn't provide him with any visibility into individual business transactions. For example, he can't tell how long it takes the cash registers to scan prices and ring up sales. Nor can he tell how long it takes to process credit and debit card transactions, which account for between 60 and 70 percent of in-store sales at Virgin Megastores in the U.S.

Yet he needs those metrics to understand what customers are experiencing in the stores. For instance, if point of sale systems are running slowly, lines could be forming. Customers waiting in line and at the register could be growing impatient. They could decide not to bother to wait—and thus not to bother purchasing those CDs and DVDs they had in their hands.

"Our product is available in other locations," says Fort. "It's important to us that customers come into our stores and have a pleasant experience the entire time, even through checkout."

If they don't, he adds, revenue and the reputation of the Virgin Megastore brand is at stake.

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