Blackhawk Network processes millions of gift card transactions in the United States leveraging CA UIM. They built a business service reliability team and process to ensure reliability of their payment processing infrastructure and improve the customer experience. CA UIM provides unified monitoring of their critical systems and applications, using log monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and performance trending. This approach and use of CA UIM has directly improved customer experience by reducing transaction times and improving performance across their sites.

1. Case Study
Amping up customer experience with
a business centric approach and CA Unified
Infrastructure Management
Gary Garcia
DevOps: Agile Ops
Blackhawk Network
Sr. Director Technology Service Operations
DO5T16S
@GaryTGarcia

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© 2015 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks referenced herein belong to their respective companies.
The content provided in this CA World 2015 presentation is intended for informational purposes only and does not form any type
of warranty. The information provided by a CA partner and/or CA customer has not been reviewed for accuracy by CA.
For Informational Purposes Only
Terms of this Presentation

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Abstract
In the application economy, viability of your brand largely rests on the
quality of your customers’ experience with your application. You can’t rely
on infrastructure availability anymore; while individual components can be
up 99.99 percent of the time, a customer may still have a bad experience
with a service. Join us in this session to learn how Blackhawk Network
ensures service reliability of their payment processing infrastructure, which
powers millions of gift card transactions in the United States leveraging CA
UIM. Session participants will gain first hand insights into how Blackhawk
built a business service reliability team and process and improved the
customer experience.
Gary Garcia
Blackhawk Network
Sr. Director Technology
Service Operations

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Agenda
ABOUT BLACKHAWK NETWORK
IMPORTANCE OF SERVICE RELIABILITY & CUSTOMER EXPEREINCE
TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTING A SERVICE RELABILTIY APPROACH
ROLE OF CA UIM
Q & A
1
2
3
4
5

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Key Fact: Blackhawk Network Processes
Millions Of gift card transactions in the United
States leveraging CA UIM

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Blackhawk Network Growth
Building on a vision of prepaid possibilities
2001 2015
Brands 7 600+
Retailers 1 198,000+
Countries 1 24

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A Network Of Advantages
The Blackhawk Network of today offers a
hard-to-replicate combination of attributes that
provides significant benefits to both consumers
and our partners
 A broad range of products from the most desirable consumer brands
 An extensive footprint of high-traffic and productive distribution locations
 A comprehensive mix of physical-to-digital products and distribution channels
 Frequent access to a large customer base
 Proprietary technology and systems for complete lifecycle control

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Why We Chose CA UIM?
 Easy of use
 Rapid time to value
 Comprehensive monitoring coverage
 To focus on service reliability

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Why Focus On Business Service Or Site Reliability?
 Customer experience is everything
 High availability doesn’t mean a great customer experience
 Critical for high growth and volume businesses

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An Example
Difference in performance can have a massive impact on business
What if time goes down
to 0.5 sec from 15 sec?
Employee Customer
800
Stores
20
Lanes
100
Gift Cards
Vs222
Hours
6,667
Hours

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Tips for Getting Started?
Executive sponsorship & concept
Define failure points with engineering
Hire a mix of team members
Level three support + developer + sys admin

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Tips for Getting Started?
Educate on the definition of customer
experience and interaction
Execute and show tangible progress
Lead the development of solution/process
(five hats)

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Sample Process
Website Product Selection
Library
Gift card with
artworks
Select Amount Purchase Into
Collection
Product Delivery

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Role of CA UIM
 Provides unified views and alarms of our critical systems
& applications
 Leveraging log monitoring to bring data from critical
applications into the same console
 Using synthetic monitoring and performance trending to
proactively measuring performance in a “real” environment
Central to our business service reliability strategy

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Sample Dashboards
Business Service Availability & Performance

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Sample CA UIM Dashboards
Business Service Availability & Performance

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Sample CA UIM Dashboards
Business Service Availability & Performance

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A Service Reliability Centric Approach And CA UIM
Has made a direct impact on our customer experience
percentage performance
improvements across 75 sites
Double Digit

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For More Information
To learn more, please visit:
http://cainc.to/Nv2VOe
CA World ’15