ITO Team Delivers Profitability
Enhanced asset intelligence with Blazent helps the IT Outsource team turn the corner on profitability while enhancing the client relationship

Customer description
The customer is a Fortune 100 telecommunications manufacturer with revenues exceeding $36 billion per annum and more than 66,000 staff around the world. The company is a manufacturer of wireless telephone handsets. It also designs and sells wireless network infrastructure equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers.

Contract Background
Seeking to lower costs and improve its IT operations, the manufacturer signed a global technology infrastructure outsourcing agreement with a major IT Outsourcer in 2003. The 10-year contract, valued at approximately $1.6 billion, called for the IT Outsourcer to manage the company’s midrange, desktop and distributed computing infrastructure worldwide, as well as its global help-desk and network infrastructure functions. As part of the agreement, the IT Outsourcer acquired certain IT infrastructure and network assets owned by the customer.

From the start, the IT Outsourcer knew that the account would be a challenge, not just due to its size, but also due to its stringent contractual obligations. The customer looked to the IT Outsourcer to streamline and standardize IT processes, integrate its IT infrastructure architecture worldwide, and lower IT costs, thus making IT operations more flexible and agile.

Challenge
With any large enterprise, it isn’t surprising to find silos of unconnected IT asset-related data. At this customer, that data was scattered across more than 25 source systems, including asset management systems, antivirus systems, agents, procurement systems and so on. What was surprising to the IT Outsource team though was the level of inaccuracy the team found in that data. And to make things worse, the customer expected the IT Outsource team to have at its fingertips complete and accurate information, right out of the gate.

The IT Outsource team struggled to manually reconcile data from the disparate sources, a task that was made extremely complex by the number of sources and the inconsistency of the data. They found themselves the target of frequent billing disputes. Due to the lack of accurate and consistent information, they were having difficulty justifying their services and billing. The customer was beginning to lose faith in the IT Outsourcer and the potential to attract additional business was slipping away.

Solution
The IT Outsource team took a hard look at what was called for. First, they determined a need for a single, consolidated, and accurate view of the IT assets they were under contract to manage. Second, they needed analytics and reporting that leveraged that data. That would give them and their customer the visibility into their assets they so desperately needed. And last, the IT Outsource team needed to reduce costs.

After an extensive evaluation of the offerings on the market and after considering the costs associated with building a solution in-house, the IT Outsourcer turned to Blazent’s IT asset intelligence solution.

Results
In 2007 the team deployed the Blazent solution. The results were impressive and continue to be felt.

• Almost immediately, the team found that there was less than 50% consistency in asset source data, and less than 75% accuracy at the IT asset field level. Armed with this data, the team was able to begin a targeted remediation program that rapidly improved operational readiness and integrity.
• In just 5 months, some 2,300 billable PC’s were uncovered that were being managed by the IT Outsourcer yet not being billed. This alone had an annual benefit of $966,000 and added some 10% of total asset count to the monthly bill.
• From an operational perspective, Blazent enabled the IT Outsourcer to work more efficiently. The team was able to reduce headcount through the automation of what was once a manual reconciliation and data cleansing effort. Not only did this save money, it improved accuracy and accelerated the delivery of the crucial information. In addition, using Blazent’s technology they are now able to update key operational support systems and optimize its service delivery support model in the areas of risk management and operational readiness

In the meantime, the partnership between the IT Outsourcer and the customer has begun to flourish again. Armed with the accurate asset intelligence information that Blazent delivers, the IT Outsourcer is now able to focus on building value with the customer rather than dealing with endless contract and billing disputes. The team is now well positioned to win business for additional services at the customer, truly a win-win for both.