VPM allows the bank to identify interactions between cloud-based services and the network, uncover performance bottlenecks, and better manage and isolate problems with key financial service applications, diminishing the impact on nearly 1,500 employees spread across more than 100 locations.

Like many financial services companies, Cadence Bank grew through acquisition, which presented unique challenges when combining overlapping and often completely different hardware, applications, and third-party service providers. Further, Cadence is in the midst of opening a new data center, which presents new challenges when identifying users that rely on specific applications, and when streamlining the migration process. The Cadence IT team needed a scalable, comprehensive view into how applications and services behave on the network and how users interact with them. Visual Performance Manager was selected as a turnkey solution to meet a wide variety of visibility issues.

"VPM provides us visibility and access to information that allows our team to save time and money when integrating new networks, optimizing existing ones, and isolating IT problems across the organization," said Jonathan Hay, vice president and director of network engineering at Cadence Bank. "It helps eliminate manual correlations of data and gives us a clear line of sight into network and application performance problems so we can more easily meet IT objectives and get a better understanding of the landscape and impact to end-users."

Visual Performance Manager is a highly scalable distributed system that provides end-to-end visibility into applications being delivered across cloud, carrier and enterprise networks. With a centralized user interface, automated application/server/site discovery, and end-user experience baselining and monitoring, Visual Performance Manager provides complete visibility into network traffic, VoIP monitoring and troubleshooting, and QoS/CoS monitoring and reporting.

Cadence Bank predicts that by taking a close look at application and user behavior with VPM, the reduction in broadband circuits required will payback the purchase price of VPM within 6-8 months based on circuit optimization alone. With a growing base of users and locations, Cadence also expects to use VPM to uncover trends to proactively add circuits to sites that are over-utilized, allowing them to better optimize key financial service applications.

"VPM gives us a level of insight we previously didn't have and will allow our team to work more collaboratively to solve IT challenges," said Mickey Parker, senior vice president and director of network services at Cadence. "It's already proven itself an indispensable system and the go-to resource when evaluating problems, planning changes, or taking the pulse of key systems."