Website: http://www.datacom.com.au/
Datacom reaps the benefits of automation and flexible ITSM licencing
- Huge cost management benefits with concurrent licencing model
- Higher standard of customer service
- Secure, codeless development
- Automate ticket creation and assignment
Organisation Background
With more than 50 years’ experience in technology, Datacom is one of Asia Pacific’s leading IT-based managed service providers with more than 7,500 staff, working in 30 different offices in New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, plus the US and UK. Private and public sector clients choose to partner with Datacom to support both existing IT systems and processes and custom-design brand new ones. The Challenge Datacom went to market to replace their existing CA Technologies IT Service Management (ITSM) solution which was highly customised, ageing and no longer fit for market demand. Four vendors were invited to respond to a set of 100 selection criteria, including use cases and user stories. An internal panel reviewed responses and shortlisted Ivanti, ServiceNow and CA Technologies. Nathan Pethybridge, Enterprise Tools Manager Australia at Datacom, was a member of the selection committee.
Another critical factor for Datacom was Ivanti’s flexible licencing model which stood apart from ServiceNow. With Ivanti, Datacom has a concurrent licencing model that provides a cost-effective alternative to named licencing and users can access multiple portal instances at zero cost. This is a huge benefit in managing costs and means Datacom can be very cost-competitive in delivering services to their own customers. The secure, codeless development provided by Ivanti was another big differentiator.
Immediate benefits realised in just 9 months Datacom went live and had migrated 300 customers to the Ivanti platform. An immediate benefit was the stability of the Ivanti product and automated ticket migration meant Datacom could easily migrate open tickets to Ivanti from the old CA tool.
“Ivanti provided a much more modern and feature rich solution particularly with the integrated Dashboards which delivered extensive functionality so users can search, query, group, sort and philtre records and then interact directly with them in the tool,” said Pethybridge.
Ivanti has been in place at Datacom in Australia since 2016 with 300 Datacom customers on the multi-tenanted platform and Datacom has now extended its investment in Ivanti and is working to onboard 200 customers in New Zealand. Expanding the platform Expansion of the Ivanti platform to Datacom New Zealand will consolidate the tools and monitoring platforms across the organisation. This means a single dedicated team can support all Datacom customers rather than separate geographies servicing individual Datacom customers. The outcome is a standard product offering rather than bespoke solutions for different customers and an even higher standard of customer service and reduction in the cost of service.
Pethybridge noted the Ivanti platform has also been an asset during recent global challenges, “Ivanti has been a great enabler during the global pandemic with flexibility to deliver new solutions for management of staff and customers and to accommodate the different support models without physical contact. Ivanti has enabled that flexibility as the way businesses operated had to change almost overnight.”
On-going benefit and ROI delivered
The benefits of no-code continue to be realised operationally in development and maintenance with a continuous two-week release cycle for developing, testing and release. Datacom and their implementation partner Service Quality are now building a standard offering to dynamically deliver a personalised portal to each Datacom customer. As the service function moves away from telephone and email-based support the portals will provide a self-service interface for customer interactions.
The ITIL processes built into the Ivanti platform have complemented Datacom’s own ITIL practices so processes are aligned across the business ensuring consistency every time. “Datacom noticed significant time savings and productivity increases from automation, most obvious was the reduction in the number of clicks to action and resolve tickets. Our staff didn’t need to know how the ITIL process worked, the tool itself helped staff to quickly progress and resolve tickets,” said Pethybridge. “For example, to manage traditional inbound emails like infrastructure reports Datacom configured the mail monitors so tickets are automatically created and assigned to the right resolver group and bypass the service desk. Then, based on a unique ID the system will continue to update or resolve the ticket based on the status,” said Pethybridge.
There are typically 500 concurrent users of the ITSM solution across Datacom and Datacom customers and Pethybridge is responsible for overseeing enhancement requests and engaging with different business units to implement these into production. Ivanti CMDB is used as the system of record for quality assurance on tools being used in the environment.
In addition to expanding the Ivanti platform to New Zealand, Datacom is currently working on developing additional automation capabilities to further reduce cost of delivery and continues the partnership with Service Quality as they work closely with the Datacom team and consult on significant platform changes.