What is BMC’s Applications Managed Service (AMS) :
When a you sign up for an AMS engagement, you receive a wide range of services from application administration, support for all customizations and integrations, to managing day-to-day operations of BMC solutions. The value-added services such as application testing, bulk data loading, service catalog building & deployment, managing upgrades, and providing expert consultation are some of the key components that make this offering unique.
The Context
One of the world’s largest retailers and a BMC customer for over 35 years, signed up for AMS about five years ago to manage their IT service management and IT operations management portfolio. Their technology infrastructure serves nearly 500 stores and offices in over 50 countries.
Multiple monitoring tools, several layers of infrastructure managed by isolated teams, lack of unified event management systems, high downtime, and redundancy were some of many challenges the BMC AMS team had to work around and address.
The BMC AMS Approach
Guided by a solid support framework and best in class standards, the BMC AMS team set out to tailor its approach to align with the customer’s vision while addressing their immediate and long-term needs.
Let’s take a quick look at the BMC AMS team’s three-pronged approach:
- Analyze, Remediate, Stabilize: The BMC AMS team carefully analyzed the overall infrastructure ecosystem, its performance, backlogged tasks, and pending upgrades. Adopting a DevOps model helped the team to iron out numerous gaps and inefficiencies in the systems, delivering a 30 percent reduction in the number of alerts. This also helped the team to establish stability across systems within six to eight months. Subsequently, they designed a sustainable hygiene framework around monitoring, reporting, and governance that enabled the retailer to have strong control of their operations.
- Adopt, Automate, Advise: Working closely with the customer on various campaigns helped improve user adoption by 35 percent year-over-year. By identifying automation opportunities across systems, both BMC and other third-party applications achieved reduced ticket volumes by over 35 percent. This was the result of automating and simplifying tasks and workflows, enabling self-help options for end users, extending the monitoring radius by 20 percent, and many other adjustments. The BMC AMS team became a trusted advisor helping the customer to draft their digital transformation roadmap and assisting with execution of their plan.
- Agile Always, Continuous Improvement: Application of Agile techniques coupled with a continual process improvement mindset helped the retailer attain zero downtime on all updates and upgrades for over two years. This was of paramount importance to the retailer as downtimes in the past incurred substantial business losses. The BMC AMS team was also successful in eliminating multiple applications and streamlining critical processes which again delivered significant cost savings.
BMC’s AMS leadership team was proactive in providing forward-looking insights and valuable technology counselling that helped the customer shape some of their critical technology decisions.
The Outcome
With this strong partnership and shared enthusiasm, the BMC AMS team conducted many “Co-Innovation” workshops with the retailer to establish a seamless product-process ecosystem that helped to sustain smooth operations while rapidly growing the business. Here are some accomplishments that the retailer found particularly valuable:
- Automating processes and services reduced ticket volumes by more than 14 percent.
- User adoption improved over 35 percent year-over-year.
- Improved turn-around-time that led to happier internal customers.
- Reduced downtime to zero which directly impacted revenue.
- Exhaustive monitoring ensured proactive problem management.
- Elimination of redundant applications and services reduced financial and management burdens.
BMC’s Applications Managed Service helped simplify IT operations, increase user satisfaction, and improve service quality while saving significant OPEX costs.
If you would like to speak with someone about how BMC’s Application Managed Service can help your organization, please fill out our form.
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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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