Getronics on Compuware

“What really differentiated Compuware was its strong end-user experience solution that included agentless capability. Vantage proved to be the right solution when we realized ROI in less than nine months.”

-- Don O’Connor, Vice President of IT Operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Getronics

Customer Profile - Getronics N.V. is a largely Dutch-based Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Company whose stated focus is on creating value for business through Workspace Management Services and Application Services. Since October 2007, Getronics has been a subsidiary of telecommunications firm KPN. Getronics is a second-tier, international provider of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services with a strong reliance on Microsoft and Cisco solutions. Getronics designs, integrates and manages ICT systems for many global and local companies and organisations and has approximately 24,000 employees worldwide. Its headquarters are in Amsterdam, with regional offices in Boston and Singapore.

Vendor Profile - Compuware Corporation maximizes the value IT brings to the business by helping CIOs more effectively manage the business of IT. Compuware solutions accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of critical business systems while enabling CIOs to align and govern the entire IT portfolio, increasing efficiency, cost control and employee productivity throughout the IT organization. Founded in 1973, Compuware serves the world's leading IT organizations, including more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. Compuware's 2006 sales was $1.2 billion.

Customer: Getronics

Industry: IT services

Solution: Compuware Vantage

Results:

• ROI realized within nine months
• Proactive approach to solving problems
• Improved quality of the end-user’s experience

Improving application services delivered to worldwide customers was a top priority for Getronics. This leading IT service provider, based in the Netherlands, turned to Compuware for better measurement and reporting of its global application systems. Enhancing quality makes it possible for customers to focus on their core business values while trusting Getronics’ services.

Getronics offers workspace management and application services for customers ranging from small to Global 1000 companies. “We’re focused on helping companies deliver their core competencies while we manage their infrastructure,” says Don O’Connor, Vice President of IT Operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Getronics.

“The performance and availability of our IT system is critical for our credibility with our customers. Many of our transactions extend into the customers’ space, and the customers get interactions straight into our system via web pages or a portal or some other system. How we manage our own IT system is critical, since we have global systems that must be available 24x7 to customers worldwide.”

Getronics employs 24,000 IT professionals spread out through Europe, North America and around the world. With such a far-flung network, maintaining application availability and reliability is a challenge.

The scale of the operation—12 million service calls a year, 4.6 million customer assets managed, and direct or indirect presence in 105 countries—makes centralized management and monitoring of IT service performance essential. Since most remote call management is routed through a single PeopleSoft application, and nearly all financials are handled through an SAP system, the impact of any problem is enormous.

When O’Connor first took leadership of the data center several years ago, siloed operations were standard. “If there was a performance issue, and it wasn’t in the data center, we passed it to the network guy, or someone else,” he recalls. Now, however, things are different. “The interest is purely in service to the end user, all the way through.”

To move to a more proactive approach, Getronics put together a team of business and IT personnel to assess vendors by seeking presentations on software tools and reviewing third-party reports. The company set strict standards: Each tool vendor had to satisfy 23 mandatory criteria, and those that made the initial cut faced a scorecard of dozens more strategic, functional, technical and financial criteria.

A total of 12 vendors presented, and ultimately three of them, Compuware, HP Mercury and Quest, were invited to submit proofs of concept. Tools from all three companies were already in use at Getronics.

“At the end, the team recommended Compuware to be implemented, both to be used internally and with customers,” O’Connor says. “For us, what really differentiated Compuware was the agentless solution. It immediately stood out.”

O’Connor is enthusiastic about the positive results from implementing Vantage: “We started to get wins from Vantage almost out of the box. We had an application called Timesheet that was used almost exclusively in the Netherlands. We always used to get complaints about performance at month-end. We configured it within the agentless monitoring, got the reports out and by the end of one month we showed it was the best-performing application we had.”

Other “quick wins” included identifying an untraced problem in the company’s Citrix farm, by using an active monitoring robot, and detecting a performance problem in China before any user called. This would have impacted performance in Getronics’s headquarters.

Vantage’s end-user experience monitoring via agentless technology is used most heavily, O’Connor explains. “Vantage is very easy to set up and use,” he says. “One of the really great things about Vantage is the reports are very easy to configure and customize. Vantage gives 80 percent of what you need without formal training.”

The key feature of Vantage, according to O’Connor, was its ability to show the real end-user experience for all users, all the time. “I have a Heat Chart on business transactions that sits on my desktop every day, in the background,” he concludes. “Vantage shows how we’re doing over the last 24 hours from a performance and availability standpoint, for every country, giving a real executive overview of our critical business applications.”

“We can’t imagine how we can go back to working the way we did before, now we know exactly how our application service is performing. Any IT service provider should consider Vantage in their PoC.” Mr. O’Connor added.

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