MultiChoice

MultiChoice’s journey to the cloud with AppDynamics

Key benefits


Reduction in mobile app crashes by over 90%, reduction from 33.3% to below 2%


Performance improvement on key services, by up to 95%, improvement from 25801ms to 35ms


Proactive monitoring through alerts and dashboard views



With millions of Africans accessing media services across phones, laptops and TVs, media powerhouse MultiChoice is giving customers unmatched entertainment experiences. AppDynamics enables MultiChoice to proactively manage application performance to deliver rich streaming content to customers with a seamless digital journey.

“The level of visibility and actionable insights we achieved with AppDynamics helps us drive improvements to our customer experience."

Elmarie Van Aswegen
Senior AppDynamics Analytics Specialist, MultiChoice

Challenge

Drive significant reduction in the time taken to identify and solve critical core system and service performance issues. 

Solution

MultiChoice migrated from an on-prem AppDynamics environment to the cloud-based SaaS AppDynamics instance gaining access to new core features and capabilities available with the SaaS solution.

Results

MultiChoice significantly improved the performance and reliability of critical systems and services, which translates into an improved customer experience. 

"It’s impossible to overstate the collaboration achieved between the AppDynamics and Devcon Solutions teams and our team at MultiChoice. They went out of their way to help us with our cloud migration, and we could not have moved as quickly as we did without guidance and support from them."


Elmarie Van Aswegen
Senior AppDynamics Analytics Specialist, MultiChoice

Challenge

Powering digital entertainment across the continent

MultiChoice is Africa’s leading media and entertainment provider. Its entertainment platforms, which include DStv, Gotv, Showmax, DStv App, and Supersport are watched by millions of people across the African continent. 

MultiChoice’s goal is to become Africa’s most loved storyteller and enrich the lives of their audiences with compelling content enabled by world-class technology. For Elmarie Van Aswegen, Senior Analytics Specialist at MultiChoice, that means improving the performance and experience of the end-to-end customer journey through the use of application performance monitoring tools such as AppDynamics.

“The first step in delivering amazing customer experiences is to be able to track, access, and improve our services across channels,” she says. “By linking our front-end services to the applications that support them behind the scenes, we can improve the underlying systems performance that supports the customer journey.”

Customer experiences with a clear vision

Customer experience is a key driver for MultiChoice, which is laser-focused on eliminating friction points from its customer journeys and making its digital and self-service channels faster and more reliable. 

Van Aswegen joined MultiChoice in 2018 to help fulfill this mission, and her team’s first action was to develop a granular view of MultiChoice’s application performance at a business transaction level. Without in-depth visibility into applications, the ability to validate performance changes to its IT environment and the associated improvements of its customer experience would be exponentially more challenging.

“We set out to transform the way we serve customers. That meant bringing in a solution that would reveal where we stood, allow us to set clear metrics for where we want to go, and make us agile enough to improve our performance quickly,” says Van Aswegen. 

MultiChoice was intent on optimizing its mobile app, a key channel for customers who use their mobile phones for a range of self-service engagements. The ability to track customers from the moment they sign up for MultiChoice, through package selection, monthly payments, and day-to-day content preferences is central to understanding their needs and optimizing self-service journeys.

Solution

A proactive performance platform

Understanding the complexity of MultiChoice’s IT landscape and the need for 24/7 visibility into business-critical applications, the company’s implementation partner Devcon Solutions worked with AppDynamics to deliver a comprehensive solution. Devcon continues to assist with management of the AppDynamics solution as well as with customization and driving adoption throughout the organization.

“From AppDynamics, MultiChoice gets proactive monitoring and end-to-end visibility. From Devcon, they get a partner that specializes in the solution and is there to make sure the value is constantly realized with the backing of AppDynamics,” says Laurent Rodokanakis, Director, Devcon.

 

With AppDynamics, MultiChoice gained a detailed view of application performance across its mobile app, web, and other digital services. Van Aswegen and her team can now monitor the performance of key customer services in granular detail, giving them new insights to improve and enhance the end-to-end digital experience. 

For instance, MultiChoice uses AppDynamics to monitor every transaction in its self-service and payments application. If a process slows to below acceptable thresholds, the issue is immediately brought to the team’s attention and swiftly investigated. Speed and reliability are crucial to MultiChoice’s self-service application, which both web and mobile customers use for a variety of convenient interactions.

“If our self-service applications don’t work, it has significant customer impact. If they’re working too slowly, we risk losing customers’ trust,” says Van Aswegen. “AppDynamics has made us more proactive in managing these applications, cutting our issue response and resolution time substantially.”

“AppDynamics has made us more proactive in managing these applications, cutting our issue response and resolution time substantially..”

Elmarie Van Aswegen
Senior AppDynamics Analytics Specialist, MultiChoice

As for payments, AppDynamics helped MultiChoice support self-service billing in numerous African markets, many with their own unique fiscal regulations and practices. “Serving 50 different markets means understanding how our self-service application is performing at all times, and AppDynamics gives us that visibility,” says Van Aswegen.

The move from reactive to proactive performance and incident management has made a world of difference. For example, by using AppDynamics to see which IT processes or transactions consume the most memory or CPU, the Platform Support team can focus on the exact script or line of code causing the issue and fix it. 

“Finding the underlying cause of performance issues in our applications used to be difficult and time consuming, but now a quick glance at an AppDynamics flow diagram and we can pin-point the problem area almost immediately,” says Van Aswegen. “That inevitably changes people’s mindsets and results in the teams being more effective.”

Benefits

The puzzle pieces take shape

MultiChoice has made significant enhancements and optimizations throughout the system landscape, all driven by deeper and more extensive insight into its application performance. AppDynamics provides the organization with data rich dashboards, giving a real-time view of how services are running, where performance issues might arise and how customers are engaging with its digital channels. 

“Four years ago, we didn’t have the data we needed. With AppDynamics, we now have the relevant data that we can analyze in order to address performance issues across the customer journey,” says Van Aswegen.

By proactive monitoring of its core applications, MultiChoice has improved customer experience across several channels. The performance and reliability of certain core services has increased tenfold in some cases. 

“Managing business applications without AppDynamics is like starting a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle from scratch, with all the pieces laying around on the floor, it’s impossible to find the one you’re looking for, or know which pieces are missing,” says Van Aswegen. “The visibility we’ve gained into each piece of our application puzzle has been of exponential value, and the best part is that we can pay that forward to customers.”

Racing together into the cloud

MultiChoice’s primary objective with itsAppDynamics initiative was to migrate its on-prem application performance management capability into the cloud. With support from the AppDynamics team, MultiChoice managed to complete this six-month project in just two months. 

“It’s impossible to overstate the collaboration achieved between the AppDynamics and Devcon Solutions teams and our team at MultiChoice,” says Van Aswegen. “They went out of their way to help us with our cloud migration, and we could not have moved as quickly as we did without guidance and support from them.”

"Four years ago, we didn’t have the data we needed. With AppDynamics, we now have the relevant data that we can analyze in order to address performance issues across the customer journey..”

Elmarie Van Aswegen
Senior AppDynamics Analytics Specialist, MultiChoice

“ Finding the underlying cause of performance issues in our applications used to be difficult and time consuming, but now a quick glance at an AppDynamics flow diagram and we can pin-point the problem area almost immediately.”

Elmarie Van Aswegen
Senior AppDynamics Analytics Specialist, MultiChoice

A winning team

The partnership between MultiChoice and AppDynamics will grow as the business continues to enhance the monitoring and performance of its core services. MultiChoice’s Enterprise Business Solutions COO, Craig Coetzer, highlighted the importance and purpose of the AppDynamics team, as well as optimizing the underlying investment in the AppDynamics toolset, as the catalyst to driving out proactive application performance management and system performance optimization across all mission critical services. 

Leaders across the technology and engineering teams at MultiChoice see AppDynamics as an invaluable early warning system, and their teams are proactively catching many of these performance issues before Van Aswegen’s dedicated resources even get to them, a shift she is more than happy to see. 

“The level of empowerment and accountability we achieved with AppDynamics is the reason we were able to make more improvements to our customer experience in the past year than we had in the previous three,” she says. “Whenever you think it has revealed everything about your business, you learn something new.” 

“The true beauty of AppDynamics is that when a performance issue arises, we can actually find the ‘needle in the haystack,’” she adds. “We know what’s causing a problem and can proactively fix it. This translates to better, more reliable services for our customers. And that positive experience is why customers choose MultiChoice again and again.”

About MultiChoice Group

MultiChoice Group is a multinational media and entertainment group headquartered in South Africa, Dubai, and the Netherlands with principal operations in pay television, video entertainment, advertising, and content security. Brands within the Group include DStv, GOtv, SuperSport, M-Net, DStv Media Sales, Showmax, and European-based content security leader Irdeto. MultiChoice has an extensive presence/footprint spanning 50 markets in 40 languages across Africa.

About Devcon Solutions

Devcon Solutions, founded in 1992 to meet the increasing reliance on an ever-changing nature of technology, is the leading AppDynamics partner in sub-Saharan Africa. Devcon’s experienced team of application performance management engineers and consultants continuously innovate to empower their clients with the very best solutions in application monitoring and business intelligence.

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