…At a cost of less than 40% of the projected wage bill to deliver the service in-house
Bracknell, UK, 9 July, 2007 – Partners in IT, leaders in IT Service Management, today announced that Nexagent, market leader in ICT process automation for service providers, has subscribed to Partners in IT’s hosted HP Service Desk and HP OpenView event monitoring solutions – part of its new subscription-based managed service offering. Under the enhanced Event Monitoring Service, Partners in IT are acting as the first line support team, answering customer telephone calls, monitoring customer emails and Network Alarms and raising incidents on the service desk, all 24×7. The Trouble ticketing service is based on HP OpenView Service Desk and provides Nexagent with the ability to extend the capability to support complete ITIL process compliance in line with the company’s requirements.
Nexagent had dedicated a number of years to developing process automation software for service providers delivering multi-sourced enterprise information and communications technology (ICT) services. Having fine-tuned its market offering, the next challenge was to deliver operational support to its customers. It needed to provide excellent 24×7 first line support, trouble ticketing and event monitoring to support its customer implementations. With no in-house HP OpenView Service Desk expertise – and with no plans in the corporate strategy to create such a team – the decision was taken to focus on its core business and look to external experts for first level incident management services. Nexagent opted to subscribe to Partners in IT’s hosted HP Service Desk and HP OpenView event monitoring solutions.
Sally Brinkley, VP Operations, Nexagent, explained; “The business case for subscribing to both the service desk and event monitoring service was straightforward. Partners in IT’s solution is very cost effective and enables Nexagent to predict costs going forward.” Indeed, Brinkley confirms the total cost of both services from Partners in IT has proved to be less than 40 percent of the projected staff wage bill alone for delivering this service in-house, and that doesn’t include any overheads such as systems or facilities costs.”
Brinkley continued; “The Nexagent solution helps our customers deliver an unmatched level of ICT service quality for their enterprise customers, so delivering service excellence is absolutely essential and the quality of the support – including first line support – has to be outstanding. When selecting the right managed service to help us with this, the stakes were high. Partners in IT offer a resilient managed service that enables us to use incident management today but evolve to full ITIL process compliance in the future as our business develops.”
Having gone out to tender, it was clear to Brinkley that the traditional outsource providers, whose models centered around call centres, would generate huge additional costs as a result of Nexagent’s change management requirements. “However,” Brinkley explained, “Partners in IT’s subscription based approach to managed services is far more flexible and, critically, includes a group of highly skilled individuals able to take the initiative in response to business alerts.”
She concludes, “Nexagent does not have skills in HP OpenView technologies. Frankly, the company does not need those skills. Partners in IT has excellent experience and expertise. It was a perfect match.”
Paul Cash, MD of Partners in IT, said, “As a business grows organically or through acquisition, its IT requirements develop and out-grow the existing in-house systems and support. This leads to solutions having to being replaced or heavily reconfigured – both of which demand significant resourcing. If however a company adopts a SaaS (Software as a Service) approach rather than owning solutions outright, growing pains are considerably less challenging as any development, enhancement or change is implemented and delivered via the hosting organisation.”
He continued, “We are delighted to be working with such a market-leader as Nexagent in order to help them deliver a business-critical service to its customers. Having already proved the value of our subscription approach to managed services in terms of lower risk, lower cost and improved quality of service, we are very much looking forward to supporting Nexagent as it continues to grow and develop its offerings to its customers.”
