Unique Technology

ServiceFlow’s SLA and service cost management application functionality offers a full match to the service provider and enterprise requirements. Not only does it automate the management of the contractual obligations for IT and BPO engagements, it manages the commercial risk associated with demanding penalty regimes, assists in service cost control, and supports regulatory compliance requirements. Allowing service providers and enterprises to benefit from the most complete and robust set of functionalities in managing their business services.

ServiceFlow Engine

ServiceFlow Engine is a unique temporal base computational and data management engine that extracts operational data from any source and performs the necessary operations such as correlation, filter, aggregation and more to compare actual “service floor” results to business and contractual obligations. It is based on a high-performance, fault-tolerant architecture that scales to meet the demands of any organization.

ServiceFlow’s Visual Modelling

With Visual ServiceFlow, users can very quickly model any service or contractual process, along with its business logic, performance requirements, cost formulas, data-source extraction logic, and cost definitions – all in a visual manner. This unique aspect of Digital Fuel’s solution allows our customers to respond to business change without coding the new business logic in some homegrown scripting language or arcane XML and/or SQL. Instead, with Digital Fuel everything is naturally modelled through a visual modelling concept providing the lowest possible TCO compared with other vendors.

Because of the Visual Modelling environment, the initial deployment of ServiceFlow has been confirmed during multiple situations as requiring 50 – 65% less consulting. If our Service Line best practices are utilized, the savings will increase to 75%. In addition due to the easy ability to modify in Visual Modelling, ongoing enhancements (new data sources, SLA and Cost formula modifications, additional KPI’s, new reports etc) require at least 80% less consulting.

Visual Modelling of Data-Source Adapters

During the course of working with an SLM and service cost management solution, new data sources (such as help-desk systems, network monitoring applications, billing systems etc.) are introduced and existing data-sources are changed or upgraded. In ServiceFlow, adding and modifying data-source adaptors is a straightforward process done through the same visual modelling interface. This both deskills and accelerates the effort of responding to business change. This capability is a major differentiator from other vendor approaches who rely on XML modelling and complex SQL queries development.

Supports Reusable Best Practices and Templates

ServiceFlow allows service providers and enterprises to build their own “way of doing things” within the application. These best practices can include predefined SLA’s, KPI’s, reports, dashboards, and processes for a specific service. All of these are then available to be reused across customers and deployments adding value while maintaining an extremely low TCO.

Export/Import

ServiceFlow includes powerful export/import capability, which allows for re-using all the metrics, reports, data sources and other artifacts visually defined in one environment. ServiceFlow brings this knowledge in as XML definitions into other environment through this unique export/import capability.

Enterprise-Ready Solution

World-class enterprise software needs to support industry standard components and service-oriented architectures. ServiceFlow is implemented entirely in J2EE/Java and is deployed on industry standard, secure, web application servers and databases. This means that Service Providers and Enterprises can deploy ServiceFlow to its most conservative clients fully confident that it complies with their security expectations. ServiceFlow is demonstrably scaleable whether measured by users, data volumes, or complexity. Service Providers and Enterprise requirement for distributed deployment is readily managed through robust administration tools and reuse capabilities.

Highly Secured-- Wide Range of Technology Environments

Digital Fuel customers have a significant advantage of running ServiceFlow on HW and OS of their choice. This leads to significant savings and can utilize existing enterprise licenses. ServiceFlow can be implemented in NO COST running in already established sharing environment or entry-level configuration.
These environments include:

Intel/MS Windows
Sun/Unix
HP/Unix
Intel/Linux
Many others

ServiceFlow is based on a J2EE Application Server – ranging from none through Spring J2EE framework, through free through JBoss to commercial ones. Digital Fuel proposes numerous choices of EJB application servers including WebLogic, WebSphere, Jrun, SAP WAS and Jboss. This gives a customer plenty of choice of what application server to use. Running ServiceFlow on Linux and low to no cost application servers such as Jrun and Jboss bring SW licensees close to zero.
Using standard EJB application servers allows as additional integration savings such as Single Sign On.

Zero Footprint

ServiceFlow has a zero user footprint so there are no installation and maintenance requirements for all users that access the system. Other applications require Active X for full functionality (which in some infrastructures may be prohibited). Options also exist (i.e. Linux) to run on zero cost operating systems

Lowest TCO

Initial license pricing is only the beginning when it comes to understanding the cost of deploying a solution. With ServiceFlow, a Service Provider can be confident it is receiving the very lowest Total Cost of Ownership by virtue of rapid deployment, ease of use, Visual Modeling and automated upgrade path.