"With Digital Fuel's unique solution, companies can attain the necessary cost visibility to make critical IT decisions and know what the business impact will be—many, in all likelihood, for the first time ever."
– George Spalding, VP
Pink Elephant

IT Services Company Cuts Unit Costs, Creates Reusable Service Components With Digital Fuel IT Service Level Management

Digital Fuel's ServiceFlow Drives Computacenter's "Shared Services Factory" Featuring Standard Suite of Proven IT Elements; Benefits Accrue for Both Company and Customers

SAN MATEO, CA - (June 24, 2009) - From the start, Computacenter, Europe's leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services, learned how Digital Fuel's ServiceFlow IT Service Management (ITSM) software could improve service levels and automate business processes for its core service offerings. What it's found since then, is how ServiceFlow can actually reduce the cost and effort required to build consistently better services.

Computacenter, headquartered outside London, is a 10,000-employee, £2.5-billion company serving the needs of hundreds of organisations in the U.K., Germany, France, Benelux and beyond. In late 2006, Computacenter began using ServiceFlow as a component of its "Shared Services Factory", a framework to assure IT best practices for customers by offering services built on standards derived from the company's most successful projects.

"A key element of ServiceFlow is that once you build something, you can reuse that service for other purposes and customers with relatively minor adjustments," said Michael Neethling, Service Assurance Manager for Computacenter. "This allows us to take on new customers in a very efficient and cost effective manner, which then translates directly into more attractive pricing for our customers."

Computacenter has applied its "Shared Services Factory", powered by ServiceFlow, to customer-facing services ranging from datacentres and first/second-line service desks to application, network and project management and much more. Most services can be assembled using components proven through ServiceFlow, lowering their overall development and implementation cost.
"As an example, one customer's help desk may require an average speed-to-answer metric of 25 seconds because that is acceptable to their business," Neethling explains. "But a second customer may need an average answer in 10 seconds. Using our Shared Service Factory with ServiceFlow, we are able to serve both of these customers with the same setup, metrics and methods, automatically adjusted to the different applications of the help desk and different levels of service."

ServiceFlow is one of the best-known IT Service Management software platforms, ensuring optimal Service Level Management (SLM), reductions in TCO and improved time to value. Neethling points out the application has allowed Computacenter to capitalise on and continually improve its intellectual property and best practices. The benefits have stretched across every aspect of the company's service offering, from bidding for new contracts, to the teams involved in service delivery and customer support.

"It's definitely a differentiator," he noted. "When customers see how we have industrialised our services and lowered costs with our "Shared Services Factory" underpinned by ServiceFlow, they have the confidence to accept our best practices as a better way than their present approach—and at a lower cost."

Yet ServiceFlow also offers something more—the unparalleled ability to analyse cost for better IT accountability. With ServiceFlow, IT service organisations can finally control services spend and usage, gaining the cost visibility necessary to manage an IT service operation like a well-managed business.

"ServiceFlow gives us the ability to quickly align our services performance with our business goals and those of our customers,"Neethling stated. "We were also able to cut the time needed to automate our reporting processes anywhere from 20% to 50%. Where we used to manually generate reports on service analysis, problem escalation and the like, ServiceFlow is able to trigger processes and generate customer-friendly reports for us automatically."

By integrating ServiceFlow into its "Shared Services Factory", Computacenter has given customers an additional level of confidence in the company's ability to manage its services efficiently. ServiceFlow also has helped assure IT and executive management that it has made the best possible investments in people, tools and processes.

"What we put into place now using ServiceFlow with every single customer, is a framework that allows us to regularly review how we can make IT work for them even better and help them drive their business forward," said Neethling

To learn more about how Digital Fuel can help dramatically improve services and reduce service costs, visit the Digital Fuel Web site at www.digitalfuel.com and sign up for a free trial of the ServiceFlow solution.

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.

About Computacenter:

Computacenter is Europe's leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services. We can advise customers on their IT strategy, implement the most appropriate technology from a wide range of leading vendors and manage their technology infrastructures on their behalf. At every stage we make our customers' businesses sharper by removing cost, complexity and barriers to change across their IT infrastructures.

Our corporate and government clients are served by offices across the UK, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Spain and South Africa. We also serve our customers' global requirements through our extensive partner network.