Print this Page

Email this Page

Download Briefing

Computacenter Homepage

No two businesses are the same, so when it comes to outsourcing some or all of your datacentre operations, you need an IT servicespartner that’s capable of adapting to your need

Every business has a different set of drivers and requirements that depends on its size, strategy, culture, the sectors in which it operates and the state of its existing systems and processes. As organisations increasingly look at outsourcing their datacentre facilities and/or operational management, so partners such as Computacenter Services strive to meet their changing business needs by offering ever more flexible solutions and services.

To be able to deliver the appropriate levels of service and flexibility for these diverse customers, a service provider needs to give its customers access not only to the best technologies, but also to best-practice principles and processes. Neil Meddick, director of Remote Services for Computacenter Services, says: “Through our Solutions Centre in Hatfield and our strong vendor relationships, we have access to the very latest technology. We also constantly review our best-practice architecture. That means when a client comes to us with a specific problem, we will typically have a proven solution for their scale of business or their specific business issues.”

While some customers opt for hosted or co-location services, others are looking purely for remote datacentre management services where they can retain their infrastructure on-site. “Bank of Ireland is one good example of the latter,” says Meddick. “We manage its online mortgage application system which resides on a Sun Enterprise server in Bristol. We are responsible for capacity management, availability, incident and event monitoring, security and change management — all of which we do remotely from our Service Operations Centre in Hatfield.”

Another of the company’s remote management clients is a financial services firm of significant size. Meddick says: “We’re managing their distributed server estate. That includes all the servers sitting in their branches, plus a significant number of their campus locations.”

Other clients need a mix of both managed services and hosted or co-location facilities, which again Computacenter Services is able to provide due to its strong service-based and process-driven approach. Meddick says: “For example, we deliver a broad managed service for a leading television broadcaster, including some services, in support of their advertising, delivered out of our co-location datacentre.”

The top end of the company’s datacentre outsourcing offerings is well illustrated by the services it provides for one of the UK’s leading training companies. “At the end of 2005 we signed a contract to migrate the client’s entire datacentre into our shared facility, as well as taking on the managed service. And although many customers are decoupling the network from the datacentre when they outsource, in this instance we also migrated the company from a BT WAN to a Cable & Wireless WAN, which is now managed as part of our outsourced service,” says Meddick.

Utility benefits

He adds that where companies outsource their datacentre facilities as well as the management, the potential benefits are enormous. “When they do this, they can begin to see the true benefits of utility computing,” he says. “At the most basic level, we can deliver what is effectively ‘infrastructure on demand’. In other words, we’ll turn on the processing power or storage as and when customers require it. And because we have significant buying power with the product vendors, we can offer them the ability to effectively flex up and down according to their demand for infrastructure at any particular time.”

One client already set to benefit from this kind of ondemand infrastructure is a company that provides invoice-processing services to corporate clients. Its business has grown significantly over the past five years and the company has a broad base of mainly blue-chip UK clients, including Computacenter. “Over that period, we’ve run their infrastructure, but now they want to refresh it in its entirety, to support the new release of their software,” says Meddick. “In order to come up with the best solution, we are scaling that architecture in our Solutions Centre so they don’t end up paying over the top for processing power they’re not going to need.”

Computacenter Services has also looked at their business and expansion plans for the next five years and is currently working with the customer to design its future infrastructure. Part of the service Computacenter offers is to review that architecture periodically to see if it needs to increase or reduce the processing power.

The full range of datacentre outsourcing services Computacenter provides today spans Datacentre Managed Service offerings, hosted Managed Availability solutions, all the way up to the top-end Utility Datacentre services (for details, see panels). Meddick notes that Computacenter Services will shortly be able to offer customers even more flexible utility-style options, moving ever closer to a true pay-asyou- use model. The company also offers consultancy and services around datacentre consolidation, optimisation and virtualisation.

Although Computacenter does not currently manage the applications that sit on top of the infrastructure, Meddick says the company can nonetheless help ensure that clients realise the benefits of more robust change and release management processes, based on a best-practice, serviceoriented approach. He explains: “One of the things we will do as a provider of datacentre services is request — with some insistence — that we become part of the client’s change advisory board. We tend to find some small and medium—sized clients do not have sufficiently robust change or release processes. And even though our focus today is on managing the infrastructure and not the applications, we will ensure that, prior to any software being released, it is tested and there is a rollback process in place. That’s one example of how we can bring those ITIL best-practice skills and principles to bear for customers who may not currently have access to them in-house.”

Indeed, Computacenter Services has been a long-term advocate of, and is fully accredited in, the ITIL service management standard. It is a discipline that sits well with the pragmatic, service-focused culture of the organisation, which has done a lot of work in adapting ITIL standards and developing processes and solutions to deploy them in practical ways for customers. By outsourcing the datacentre using Computacenter’s managed services, customers have fast and effective access to best practice. This increases in importance as areas like change management and configuration management become more complex in a virtualised world.

Key issues

Camilla Sunner, who heads up development for the organisation’s Managed Services division, says: “When we engage with customers, we always start by trying to ascertain their key business issues. In terms of why customers should choose us over other providers, we believe we have three key differentiators. The first is our ability to map our solutions onto their business needs. The second is our ability to help them strike the right balance between cost and risk. And underpinning both of these is Computacenter’s pragmatic culture. Our focus is firmly on helping customers predict what their future business needs will be, helping them choose the right level of service and taking cost out before it is incurred.”

This focus on better aligning IT services with business needs is also beginning to be reflected in the contracts and service-level agreements that customers are looking for, a move Meddick says Computacenter Services wholly welcomes. “One example is a government agency that processes in the region of two million paper forms each week. They were having to re-key every single one of these forms and were looking for a way to automate and expedite the process. But the SLA they asked us to sign up for was quite different. Historically, SLAs have been based on availability or response time, but in this case it is based on the number of transactions they process per day, because that’s what drives their business,” he says.

Sunner adds: “We believe this ability to align our services with our customers’ key business issues will become increasingly crucial, and that means measuring performance in business terms and communicating in business language.”

But some customers aren’t yet at this stage and Meddick says Computacenter Services can help such organisations to develop the right approach. “An increasing number of customers are keen to talk to us about true businessfocused SLAs, but quite a lot of them don’t have a sufficiently clear picture of their critical business processes to make such agreements feasible. Traditionally, clients will ask for, say, 99.999 per cent availability across their infrastructure. Our aim is to move to the point where we’re delivering the appropriate level of availability for the appropriate people doing the appropriate thing at the appropriate time,” he says.

One way the company is doing this is by working with IT service management consultancy G2G3 to run simulations for customers that help them identify their critical processes and measure how important these are in driving their businesses.

Crucially, Meddick believes they can offer individual customers not only the ability to adopt the datacentre outsourcing and management solutions that best meet client needs, but also the flexibility to implement those solutions at a scale and pace appropriate to their particular organisation. “In the 1,000-2,000 seat range, customers may ask us to take over everything for them right at the outset, but a lot of organisations want, at least initially, to retain their core and any mainframe-based infrastructure in-house, perhaps proceeding cautiously by outsourcing it one application at a time. Customers such as a major government agency, on the other hand, have retained all of their core systems in-house and are outsourcing individual components of their web presence stage by stage. This kind of approach is fairly typical for an organisation of that size.”

Whichever model your organisation decides to adopt, and whatever pace you choose to progress, you need to be sure you select partners with a thorough understanding of the issues, needs and drivers of your business. In addition, they must be able to prove they have the bestpractice credentials in service, process and security management that are key to both business compliance, customer confidence and future agility.