Digital Fuel's Breakthrough ServiceFlow IT Cost Management Gives Visibility To IT Costs For Better Decision-Making

New On-Demand Application Provides Visibility Into All Levels of IT Cost Detail;
IT And Business Users can Drill Down into Costs and Cost Drivers

SAN MATEO, CA - (July 7, 2009) - Digital Fuel, the leader in IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today announced the major release of its ServiceFlow 6 IT Cost Management software product, giving enterprise users unparalleled visibility into their IT spend. Able to track and report on all levels of cost detail, ServiceFlow IT Cost Management provides the visibility needed to drive fact based IT cost trade-offs, better business alignment, collaboration and cost reduction throughout the organization—enabling enterprises to do more with less.Employing built-in processes and role-based views, ServiceFlow IT Cost Management delivers actionable information that enables IT departments to align with their business users and reduce costs while optimizing service delivery. The easy-to-use application is available in a subscription-based, on-demand solution that eliminates the need to invest in hardware, software and IT resources to maintain an in-house system—making it affordable for enterprises to benefit now from IT cost visibility even with the tightest budgets.

"Leading analyst firms estimate that 20% of the millions of dollars spent by individual businesses each year on IT could be saved, if these companies had the proper visibility," said Yisrael Dancziger, President and CEO of Digital Fuel. "ServiceFlow IT Cost Management allows enterprises to answer important questions like 'How much are specific IT services costing?' and 'How can we eliminate the inefficiencies that are present?'. By focusing on the direct business impact of IT spending decisions, ServiceFlow IT Cost Management can help users eliminate waste and make fully-informed cost trade-offs."

Using ServiceFlow, customers have typically reduced service costs by at least 5%, representing millions in annual savings on IT operating budgets of $50 million and more. Such savings have been realized by aligning IT with strategic business priorities, eliminating cost inefficiencies, and focusing demand for IT-based services on what matters most to the business.

Among the many capabilities of ServiceFlow IT Cost Management are the following:

• Full Visibility into IT Service Costs—Allows for informed decisions to optimize IT spend by giving full transparency into cost drivers that affect overall IT Services cost, as well as early warning notifications when costs are trending outside of plan.
• Affordable On-Demand Solution—Subscription to web-based solution access requires no hardware/software installation. On-demand allows companies on every size budget to implement ServiceFlow immediately, with full functionality to reduce IT costs.
• Centralized IT Cost Information—Enables both IT and business users to access IT cost information in more intuitive ways from their perspectives for better decision-making.
• Automate Ineffective and Error-Prone Manual Processes—Built-in automation of IT cost management processes, role-based views and integration with existing data sources all serve to reduce costs and increase accuracy.
• IT Cost Modeling and Allocation—Businesses can allocate costs effectively to IT services between IT cost pools including general ledger, IT assets, projects, tech services, business services and IT cost centers; as well as allocate IT service costs to each business unit based on IT service consumption.
• IT Cost Reduction Analysis—Proactively track and drill down into overall costs and cost drivers of specific IT services including infrastructure, application licenses, labor costs, shared services and more; assess IT service efficiency by tracking service unit costs.
• Usage Analysis -- helps IT controllers, business relationship managers and business unit manager to ensure that services utilization is clearly linked to business value, so that the most efficient and valuable services are widely promoted across the organization and non-efficient unused services are quickly retired.
• Billing and Chargeback—Supports preparation of IT service charges by consumption; users can also create detailed breakdown of charges, resolve IT chargeback issues, and identify top spenders by geography and/or business unit. This capability leads to better-decision making even if formal chargeback is not yet applied to the P&L of each business unit.
• Out of the Box IT Service Definitions—Fast to value with low total cost of ownership through many unique capabilities including out-of-the-box IT service definitions built into a service portfolio catalog that accelerates and simplifies the application of IT cost models.

"Visibility drives good decision-making," noted Dancziger. "For example, one of our customers recently discovered, through the use of ServiceFlow, that it was paying $15 million per year to run one its applications. These costs were due not only to maintenance and support paid to the software vendors, but also for hardware, network fees, and consulting costs paid to external vendors for configuration and customization worldwide. By training its own employees on the application, and moving most of the configuration and application management work in-house, the customer was able to save more than $6 million per year—over 40% of the original annual cost."

ServiceFlow IT Cost Management's role-based application includes personalized web dashboards that can be customized for IT services users as well as business unit personnel such as business managers or controllers. Furthermore, ServiceFlow IT Cost Management includes a comprehensive IT Service Portfolio Catalog, and integrates fully with ServiceFlow SLM, for a complete view of cost, delivery and service.

The new ServiceFlow 6 IT Cost Management is now available in on-demand and on-premise editions. To learn more about how ServiceFlow can help dramatically improve services and reduce service costs, view the ServiceFlow online demos at www.digitalfuel.com or sign up for a ServiceFlow free trial.

About Digital Fuel:

Digital Fuel Technologies, Inc., is the leading provider of IT cost visibility solutions including IT Cost Management and Service Level Management (SLM) applications used by enterprises and commercial service providers. The company's business software applications manage billions in IT, telco and other business services at companies and governments around the world including BBC, BT, Capital One, Cisco, Computacenter, CSC, Cummins, Dell, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, Global Crossing, IBM, Nationwide, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, SITA, Sprint, Steria, Telefonica, Telus, VW and Wipro. Digital Fuel is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA, with offices across North America and Europe. Learn more at www.DigitalFuel.com.

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