Infrabel is a government-owned railway management company responsible for building, maintaining, expanding, and improving the Belgian railway network and its infrastructure, as well as directing and coordinating all operating trains and ensuring effective distribution of capacity. With over 3,602 kilometers of railway lines, the Belgian rail network is one of the densest railway systems in the world.
Infrabel aims to meet society’s current and future mobility needs through a sustainable, safe, modern, and reliable rail network—and the company’s reputation, customer relationships, and success rely heavily on the performance of its IT infrastructure and applications.
As part of its Autonomous Digital Enterprise evolution, Infrabel needed a way to improve its service reliability, moving away from a solution that did not give infrastructure and operations teams adequate insight to the impact of changes in their environment. Asset discovery processes were mostly manual, inaccurate, and unrepeatable. As a result, 30 to 40 percent of the company’s assets weren’t encoded in its CMDB.
Infrabel turned to BMC and BMC partner Devoteam for a solution to better support its business operations and its customers, and were happy to learn about BMC Helix Discovery, a SaaS-based, cloud-native discovery and dependency modeling system that provides instant visibility into hardware, software, and service dependencies across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.
Completing its implementation in under a month, Infrabel’s 180 infrastructure and operations team members were quickly able to being using BMC Helix to solve migration challenges, facilitate release management, and monitor security as part of the life cycle management of the company’s applications and operating systems. In addition:
- A comprehensive and automated solution for change, release, and lifecycle management, BMC Helix allows Infrabel to update the platform and its myriad applications, ensuring systems are up to date, migrated, and patched appropriately.
- The company can easily and quickly respond to twice-annual government requests for investment and operating cost reports.
- “Showback” models help Infrabel demonstrate service and application costs, helping forecast and audit processes.
- CMDB accuracy has improved by nearly 48 percent thanks to the solution’s comprehensive mapping capabilities.
- With efficiency gains from automated asset discovery, Infrabel has been able to move valuable skilled personnel to other transformation initiatives.
Says Frederik Dumarey, Infrabel’s IT infrastructure manager, “We are looking forward to our continuing partnership with BMC as we continue our journey to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise. I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in embarking on the path to digital transformation to talk with BMC.”
To learn more about Infrabel’s digital transformation with BMC Helix Discovery, watch the video now.
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