The activities of SRH IT Solutions are very extensive: for example, the employees have to operate central core applications for the SRH business areas, expand a high-performance IT infrastructure and support 15,000 end devices - as well as 3,000 to 6,000 tickets per month. In addition, the COVID-19 crisis, which began in 2020, has changed the pace, nature and intensity of the workload. Overall, customer requirements vary greatly depending on the sector served: for example, in the healthcare sector, the focus is on IT stability, reliability and availability, while in the education segment, innovation is more in demand. "This area of tension requires flexibility from partners, which we have found at Ivanti," says Sascha Tebben, Head of IT Service.
SRH IT Solutions has already been successfully using the Ivanti Endpoint Manager since the end of 2016. However, SRH IT Solutions aimed for a strong integration of the endpoint management with the general IT service management. In 2017, discussions began with Ivanti about such an interlocking, and in June 2018, the complete suite went live: Ivanti EPM, Ivanti Service Manager, and Ivanti Patch Management have been in use on premise since then. Invent AG helped build the system and is a partner of SRH IT Solutions for further development and maintenance of the system. The integrated solution is generally used for ITSM according to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standard such as incident and service request management as well as change management, the configuration management database (CMDB) and general task management.
The project was particularly concerned with ensuring an efficient and smooth processes - for example, avoiding duplicate data storage in the CMDB area. This required an ITSM platform that could also trigger deployment processes for the operating system and software. In addition, the platform had to be ITIL-compliant. The fact that the Service Manager belongs to one of the few ITIL 4 toolsets certified by Pink Elephant spoke in favor of Ivanti. Another goal was to avoid context changes: Previously, analysts sometimes had to use three different solutions to answer a single customer query.