Digital Fuel Eliminates Industry Barriers to SLA Management Adoption

Digital Fuel's ServiceFlow 5.0 release sets new standards for speed, flexibility, lowest cost of ownership, and scalability in SLA management

SAN MATEO, Calif. – February 28, 2005 Digital Fuel today announced the general availability of ServiceFlow 5.0, the fifth generation of the company's solution for managing Service Level Agreements (SLA) and other contractual and business obligations critical to the delivery of IT and business services.  The ServiceFlow 5.0 release represents over five years of product development and extensive industry expertise gained through deployments with valued, blue-chip customers such as Proctor & Gamble, General Electric, O2, Cummins, IBM, CSC, Atos Origin, and Siemens Business Services.

The new release offers customers the power and flexibility of SLA management automation without the traditional complexity and prohibitively high total cost of ownership of competing offerings.  Unique features of the new release include a patented visual modeling user interface for the definition of SLA Business-Logic and Data-Source mapping, built-in SLA management processes, pre-configured Business report templates, enhanced reporting with multi-dimensional analytics, as well as a framework for applying and reusing best practices. ServiceFlow 5.0 is immediately available, including new out-of-the-box service-line best practice content, commonly applied in managing services for human resources, finance and accounting, OSS, ITIL, IT service-lines and more.

Automating The SLA Management Process

Digital Fuel's ServiceFlow 5.0 is a robust out–of-the-box solution with built-in SLA management process functionality, which dramatically speeds these processes and lowers cost of ownership.  ServiceFlow 5.0 automates processes such as SLA development, approval and verification, SLA reporting, obligation performance forecasting, dispute/issue resolution management, credit and earn-back management, role-based performance analysis, executive dashboards, end of month summary reports and other processes important to fast and efficient SLA management.  The release was built on a proven software foundation that enables customers to easily scale in order to meet the largest, most demanding enterprise requirements.

"Service level agreements are one of the most critical factors for success in managing services since they clarify the business and contractual obligations between the provider and enterprise, thus laying the foundation for mutual trust between these partners," said Linda Cohen, Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst. "Unfortunately, many organizations are facing huge barriers to adoption because of traditional implementation approaches."  

Pre-configured Reports Support SLA Management Processes

Advanced reporting features include a wide variety of new, pre-configured standard business reports that support contract obligation management, issue avoidance and resolution, report packaging and automated distribution, and many other important processes. These new reporting capabilities provide proactive, critical business insight to executives, relationship managers, service consumers, and service delivery teams. Additionally, expanded reporting capabilities offer robust multi-dimensional drill-down analysis, trending and root cause assessment. These include:

• Executive Reports
• Trending and Forecasting Reports
• SLA Compliance Reports
• Credits Reports
• Earn-back Reports
• Customer Management Reports

Visual Modeling of SLAs, Business Logic and Data-Sources

ServiceFlow 5.0 provides patented visual modeling that empowers users to easily and quickly create and modify SLAs, KPIs, business-logic, data-source adaptors, and more.  With ServiceFlow 5.0, users visually model SLAs, Metrics, Business-Logic, and data connections, which drives the lowest total cost of ownership from Digital Fuel compared to the scripting/development approach required with other vendors.  Consequently, ServiceFlow 5.0 users perform these visual tasks independently without the need for specialized software development/scripting resources.   

ServiceFlow 5.0 ensures that changes can be made quickly and easily as business environments change, and that information can be easily reused for numerous purposes, such as across various SLAs, customers, organizations, services and more.

Solution Provides Service-line Content and Best Practice Framework

To facilitate quick deployment of best practices, ServiceFlow 5.0 offers pre-packaged best practice content for commonly outsourced and in-sourced functions including IT, finance and accounting, human resources, and customer relationship management.

The new release also offers a best practice framework for service providers and enterprises that can be applied across varied customers, business units, multiple SLAs, and services.  This capability allows for effective organization of service management methodologies that have been proven for standardization and re-use.  Using ServiceFlow 5.0, service providers and enterprises can quickly incorporate their requirements into templates, re-use the objectives and metrics, and tailor them for each relationship in their service supply chain.   

"ServiceFlow 5 brings many new capabilities to our customers for increased business value, whether they are a service provider or an enterprise," said Yisrael Dancziger, CEO of Digital Fuel Technologies. "This release underscores our commitment to our customers by guaranteeing rapid deployment, lowest total cost of ownership, and highly scalable performance.  Every company considering improvements in SLA, SLM and ITIL can benefit from ServiceFlow 5.0."

Additional information on ServiceFlow 5.0 can be found at http://www.digitalfuel.com/products/ServiceFlow-V5.aspx.

About Digital Fuel

Digital Fuel is the leading provider of business service management (BSM) software solutions, helping service providers and enterprise service organizations manage the performance, financial, and regulatory aspects of IT, telecommunications, and business process services.  Digital Fuel has the largest deployments for SLA management and service cost management in the world, with thousands of concurrent users, SLAs, KPIs, metrics, cost formulas, and pricing rules.  With Digital Fuel's patented visual approach, our customers are deployed rapidly to quickly drive business value from automating the management of service offerings, agreements, service cost, and performance with their service customers and vendors.  ServiceFlow manages billions in business and IT services at companies and governments around the world such as Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Cummins, Capgemini, BT, IBM, SITA, Siemens Business Services, O2, Atos Origin, Telefonica, Transport of London, CSC and many others.  Digital Fuel is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices across North America and Europe.  Learn more at http://www.digitalfuel.com.