T-Systems Inc. is preparing to launch next month a managed services tool set for its network and IT services operation that will allow customers to monitor the performance of their network and IT infrastructures against service-level agreements.
The DecisionPilot tool set is built on a series of third-party management tools integrated by T-Systems and used to model customer environments and monitor performance against SLAs with reports 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,” said Kurt Thaus, senior vice president of service delivery at T-Systems, 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.”
T-Systems uses DecisionPilot as part of its overall managed services offering and will work with partners that provide break/fix and data center services. As part of the package, T-Systems uses Micromuse Inc.s new SLA Manager to provide views of how an IT infrastructure is performing in real time.
“Theres never been a tool 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.
In a typical engagement, T-Systems “will take a customers SAP [AG] environment in our data center —along with security components, back-office infrastructure with backup and storage, and connectivity to all the customers sites, as well as the distributed pieces on their site—and model it all with DecisionPilot,” Thaus said. “Then we monitor and manage that entire infrastructure from here. If one remote facility has a connectivity problem, we can dispatch someone to take care of it or handle it remotely.”
As part of T-Systems service, it will provide customers with a Web-based portal, dubbed DecisionPilot Dashboard, so they can track infrastructure performance as well as the service.
