Telvent, a European provider of integrated IT services, has dramatically reduced its IT management costs and achieved ITIL/ISO 20000 best practice compliance by implementing IT Service Management (ITSM) v7 from BMC Software.
The company estimates the new platform will deliver a 370% return on investment (ROI), totalling $5.5m (£3.77m) over the 30 month project lifecycle. Telvent breaks the ROI down to 193% from improved IT management and 177% coming from new customer revenues and expanded orders from existing customers.
The platform has consolidated change management processes across Telvent’s seven data centres in Europe and North America. This has resulted in a reduction in the time needed to plan, schedule and deploy changes from three weeks to one week. Telvent has also reduced system outages by 25%, which in return has cut assessed service level penalties by approximately $9,000 (£6,200) per month.
Speaking exclusively to CBR, Oscar Ceballos, global services IT governance manager at Telvent, said that the company chose BMC ahead of offerings from CA and HP for a variety of reasons.
He said: “One factor was the level of segregation that BMC provides by default. For an outsourcing company like us, one of the biggest challenges is to provide data segregation across all customers. We couldn’t see that in any other products. CA looks more integrated but it requires lots of development to provide the level of segregation that we required.”
Ceballos added that the embedding of ITIL into applications and the integration between all products were also deciding factors.
One of the biggest transformations at the company, and according to Ceballos one of the major challenges Telvent faced with implementation, was changing the way people worked. “Workers were used to working with only one application, we had to modify the culture and mentality to work based on SLAs and change management and so on. It was a tremendous change for them and one of the biggest challenges,” he said.
Additional training was required for users, says Ceballos, especially regarding new processes and terminology. “All people are now beginning to talk the same language, and we are linking together the theoretical and the practical side of things.”
Ceballos says the before the BMC offering was implemented, the company had a different approach to compliance. He said: “Maturity level was low; we had many processes in place. There was not very much control and we couldn’t manage the process.”
Ceballos added that the commitment of the company’s board was key to getting the new system implemented. “It was one of the biggest challenges, but a successful one. I was lucky in that my managers and senior representatives were very helpful, and that makes everything a lot easier,” he said.
