T-Systems Inc. is preparing to launch next month a new managed services toolset for its managed network and IT services operation that will allow customers to monitor the performance of their network and IT infrastructures against service-level agreements (SLAs).
The DecisionPilot toolset is built on a series of third-party management tools integrated by T-Systems and used to model customer environments and then monitor performance against SLAs that are meaningful to different sets of users, including CIOs, operations managers and technicians.
“The point of the process is to give people very good information to make quick decisions about the infrastructure on a real-time basis, and it can be used for planning,” said Kurt Thaus, senior vice president of service delivery at T-Systems Inc. in Lisle, Ill. It can be used to monitor and manage on a daily basis and give an overview of what you have in the back office,” he added.
T-Systems is using DecisionPilot as part of its overall managed services offering and will work with partners that provide break/fix services and data center services.
As part of the package, T-Systems is using Micromuse Inc.s new SLA Manager to provide views of how an IT infrastructure is performing in real time. “Theres never been a tool put in place that can model the entire infrastructure. If one component goes out and its not critical, it lets you know that. If another that can affect your whole operation goes out, it tells you that too. It can point out weaknesses to you, point out what you need for disaster recovery—things you dont see by looking at individual elements,” said Thaus.
Thaus described a typical engagement scenario for the new offering: We will take a customers SAP environment in our data center, along with security components, our back office infrastructure with backup and storage and connectivity to all the customers sites as well as the distributes pieces on their site and model it all with DecisionPilot. Then we monitor and manage that entire infrastructure from here and service it. If one remote facility has a connectivity problem, we can dispatch someone to take care of it, or handle it remotely from here if we can.”
As part of its service, T-Systems will also provide customers with a Web-based portal, dubbed DecisionPilot Dashboard, so that they can track in “near real-time” the performance of their infrastructure as well as the service. “If they see something turn yellow, they can drill down to see if were working on it or they can pull up a problem management ticket from the Dashboad to see what the status of the ticket is,” he said.
Latest Stories by Paula Musich: