Case Study:
Highlight Platform Assures Horizon River’s 99.9% SLA Secure Uptime Service
Horizon River, a trusted leader in premium technology services, has long been committed to delivering best-in-class network performance to its clients. The addition of the Highlight Service Observability Platform has been pivotal in enhancing Horizon River’s Secure Uptime service, a premium offering guaranteeing 99.9% network availability for clients across industries like retail, healthcare and hospitality.
Key metrics:
Requirement for nationwide Secure Uptime support across the USA
With thousands of distributed locations and a promise of 99.9% network uptime, Horizon River’s ability to deliver such high service levels hinges on proactive monitoring and rapid response. In 2024, Horizon River turned to the Highlight Service Observability Platform to meet these growing demands and reinforce its Secure Uptime offering.
The decision to adopt Highlight was driven by a need for a smarter, more integrated approach to monitoring and reporting, one that aligned with Horizon River’s substantial deployment of Cisco Meraki devices across 49 US states.
After evaluating several platforms, Highlight stood out for its compatibility with Cisco Meraki, ease of integration via API, and its intelligent alerting that distinguishes real issues from noise. Unlike other solutions that required complex setup or came with high costs, Highlight was ready to deploy quickly and delivered immediate value to the operations team.
“Highlight has transformed our network operations. It allows us to proactively address issues, helping us maintain our uptime commitments and giving us complete confidence in our data.
The Highlight platform provides a flexible, accurate and highly configurable alerting function allowing us to detect and respond with greater speed and accuracy to any problems. We particularly valued the way the platform is 100% cloud-based for Meraki and was able to deliver value in a very short time as the speed of deployment was fast.”
Behz Akhund
President of Delivery and Operations at Horizon River
Proven results for Horizon River and Secure Uptime
Highlight’s intuitive dashboard and advanced alerting capabilities have become central to Horizon River’s support workflow. When 150 cellular modems went offline, the platform’s real-time alerts enabled swift identification and resolution of the issue, avoiding what would have previously required days of auditing. Trust in the platform has led the team to shift more responsibility for monitoring into Highlight’s domain, reducing reliance on third-party tools and improving response times.
99.9% uptime guarantee upheld and backed by Highlight
Highlight’s color-coded dashboards (green/yellow/red) and intelligent alerts enabled real-time issue identification and faster resolution, ensuring compliance with Secure Uptime’s 99.9% SLA.
87.5% reduction in detailed SLA report production time
Highlight automated data aggregation from Horizon River’s 10,000+ Meraki devices, reducing quarterly business review preparation from 4 days to 0.5 days.
Extended detailed accessible historical diagnostic periods by 1220%
Highlight retains 366+ days of high-resolution network performance data (vs. Meraki’s 30-day limit), allowing engineers to identify bandwidth trends and pre-empt congestion-related outages.
Established first-class proactive incident resolution process
Alerts integrated directly into Horizon River’s ticketing system reduced support escalations by 60% and reduced meantime-to-resolution by 20%
Doubled support capacity and saved $100,000 operational budget
Highlight enabled the displacement of other tools saving $100,000. It also improved the efficiency of support staff enabling a 100% increase in supported network devices and applications without need for team expansion.
Highlight plays a critical role in Horizon River’s ability to serve enterprise-scale customers. One of their largest clients spans over 1,000 locations across the USA with up to 8,000 active Meraki devices. While the end client doesn’t use Highlight directly, Horizon River relies on the platform to monitor performance, proactively manage issues, and generate accurate reports that feed into monthly metrics and quarterly business reviews. Visual alerts and real-time dashboards help the support team triage problems instantly, with engineers focusing on critical events shown in red or yellow, while green indicates smooth operations.
“I taught myself Highlight in half a day. It’s that intuitive. I’ve worked with major carriers and their tools often took weeks to learn. With Highlight, I can reconcile availability data directly, and the platform has become our new source of truth. I’ve even told our support vendors that from now on, I want everything in Highlight.”
Behz Akhund
President of Delivery and Operations at Horizon River
The observability reporting revelation
The platform also streamlines reporting. Behz adds, “Where quarterly business reviews once took up to four days to prepare, the process can now be completed in half a day. This efficiency is especially valuable given our layered support structure, where our senior engineers collaborate with a NOC team ranging from 30 to 50 staff. Highlight’s API capabilities are also being used to integrate with IT service management (ITSM) and project portfolio management (PPM) tools, creating a unified pane of glass for event and incident visibility.
“Highlight’s value is not only in visibility but also in enhancing our proactive service. Too often, our incumbent providers promise monitoring but fail to deliver timely alerts or actionable data. With Highlight, we can bridge that gap, providing our NOC with a clear, color-coded, and trustworthy representation of network health. Whilst there’s always room for improvement, Highlight has quickly become an essential tool in our mission to deliver secure, reliable, and customer-centric technology services.”
As Horizon River continues to innovate and scale, Highlight remains at the core of its observability strategy, ensuring that every customer, from a single retail location to a national chain, receives the service excellence they expect and deserve.
The observability productisation opportunity
Despite the spectacular metrics demonstrated by its adoption, Highlight is not just an operational tool. The Highlight Service Observability Platform is natively multi-tenant and, as such, is ideal for deployment as a self-service observability solution that customers can access directly.
Read our retail IT observability report for a demonstration of how you can build a case for selling Highlight to your customers, including our ROI calculator. Alternatively, get in touch with us and find out how you can partner with us, working together to close more deals with a differentiated offering.
About Horizon River:
Since 2005, Horizon River Technologies has evolved into a dynamic and diverse team of professionals focused on customer success. The talented team offers clients the best custom solutions for their business needs by constantly innovating and expanding its offerings to better serve its clients.
Horizon River leverages technology to solve business problems, improve operations and improve financial performance through cost structuring and savings. The company’s Application Development, Infrastructure and Security Experts provide big IT services with a boutique, personalised service throughout the United States.
About Highlight:
The Highlight Service Observability Platform collects and analyses complex network data, translating and transforming it into an intuitive web portal. It goes beyond the technical monitoring of individual components by focusing on the network service as-a-whole, empowering both Service Providers and Enterprise organisations.
Clear and understandable service assurance data encourages better conversations and enables informed decision-making for both service providers and enterprise organisations.
The Highlight platform has been continuously developed for more than two decades by a dedicated team of in-house software developers, resulting in a feature-packed experience with an intuitive user experience that is used by over 10,000 organisations globally.