SMS M&T turns to BMC for IT service management
- 05 February, 2015 12:08
SMS Management and Technology (SMS) has inked a deal to license BMC's Remedy IT service management suite.
SMS, a managed services provider and systems integrator, has offices in all mainland state capitals and Canberra, as well as Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong, and has more than 1700 staff across nine offices.
It's the first Australian win for BMC's 'Remedy with Smart IT'. BMC last year unveiled Smart IT, which delivers a modern user experience on top of the company's ITSM suite.
SMS's employees and customers will benefit from the deal, said Merlin Allan, managing director, hosted services, at SMS.
"There was a need to bring all our managed services and application support capability under a single, South-East Asia-wide federated system," Allan said.
"We currently have a number of disparate platforms that we inherited from certain regions and acquisitions which we brought on board. We needed to consolidate those disparate ITSM platforms."
"[SMS's CIO Nick Smith] is working on a program now to have an integrated [enterprise] suite — so we needed an ITSM solution that would fully integrate with our ERP and our other business systems," Allan said.
"Really the underlying value proposition there was to have a fully integrated and federated system that operated across the region. It would improve our resolution times to clients, we'd be able to get the best resource allocated to jobs irrespective of the plant location or the specialist location, and again improve customer service, customer experience through Smart IT."
"Obviously made sense to leverage the power of Remedy for our own internal use and particularly utilise the capabilities of the MyIT function to ensure that we improved the customer experience - much like we are for our external clients," Smith said.
"At the moment our internal environment is effectively managed through a SharePoint platform and utilising some service manager attributes out of the System Center catalogue," the CIO said.
"Obviously there's 1700-odd staff, so there's quite a large customer base."
MyIT is designed to make it easier for employees to fill out IT service requests.
"We've completed the project initiation phase and we're starting to do the detailed functional design at the moment," the CIO said.
SMS signed with BMC just before Christmas. The process began with a market scan by Smith in Q1, Allan said.
"We wanted an enterprise solution — there's obviously a lot of point solutions around the market; we needed an integrated solution," Allan said.
Allan said that Remedy offered a "whole view" across IT service management including cloud and that BMC and SMS enjoyed a strategic alignment.
"They really have a long term strategic view of this market and we wanted someone we could comfortably partner with who would take us on the journey," Allan said.
"We really want to underpin customer innovation and initiatives through smart service design and we were completely aligned with BMC on that and that's important to us," he added.