Validating Your Value

Nightmare Situation: One of your Fortune 100 clients (you know: the one with the multi-billion dollar 7-year contract for IT infrastructure management and associated services that you signed a year ago) believes they are being over-billed and has initiated an internal audit. Yet given current your asset services expenses, your gut feeling is that you're likely not billing enough.

In either case, there are at least a dozen dispersed management systems and data points to reconcile in order to conclude a mutually agreeable truth – a task that will take months of manual effort while also concurrently meeting service agreements for existing IT operations and services. Need more pressure? In the wings, lurks your rivals (the in-house team that says they can do it better or another IT service provider) waiting to pounce on the next failure of confidence. Validating IT outsourcing value is an ongoing discipline that requires a consistent, defensible approach.

Building the Business Case

The root of this problem is a lack of visibility across systems and services to ensure an accurate baseline inventory. Not that the data doesn't exist; it in fact does and in large quantities. Instead, outsourcers are confronted with collecting and translating all of that heterogeneous technical and operationally-focused data into articulate business terms and triangulating it to reach a confident statement of value.

• Are IT assets being billed for?
• Where are they in their lifecycle?
• What about the servers ordered last week?
• Are services around the asset being properly billed?
• Are we supporting assets we don't know about?
• How much is this costing us?
• Can we shift our service teams or hardware to another client?

Answering these questions requires an approach that goes beyond independent IT operations tools.

Blazent: ITO-Ready

Blazent provides IT outsourcers and client delivery teams with the ability to validate their value for managed assets and associated services. Its flexible platform specializes in supporting global delivery architectures, utility-based infrastructures, and desktop, laptop, and data center outsourced management.

IT service providers can quickly optimize their assets and related services, as well as perform service level audits on asset lifecycles (from procurement to retirement), asset billing reconciliation, and service and support billing.

Blazent has helped clients:

• Ensure an accurate baseline inventory
• Identify missed billings
• Reduce monthly SLA reporting expense
• Improve position for contract re-competes
• Certify order-to-cash processes

Blazent can be implemented as a standalone instance for large individual IT enterprise accounts, or as part of a leveraged platform through a multi-tenant (MT) instance. Blazent MT also provides global aggregation across all leveraged clients for a holistic view into the IT outsourcing business.