Case Study : IBM Global Services

Synopsis

IBM Global Services in Spain chose to embark on a complex outsourcing project with the assistance of the Micro Focus APM solution. IBM Global Services needed a solution that incorporated tools to handle application maintenance and development in order to ensure customer satisfaction and to meet its service level agreements in a profitable manner. Following the successful implementation of the Micro Focus APM solution, IBM Global Services conservatively estimates that it will break even within 12 months.

Business benefits

IBM was able to utilise the business benefits of the solution throughout the project as well as communicating the proposed business benefits to their clients:

• Circulation of knowledge – The Micro Focus APM solution has the ability to automatically cross reference links between code and data assets allowing standardised access to each application’s technical and practical structure.  This enabled IBM’s clients to circulate the relevant application knowledge to all staff, thereby reducing reliance on subject matter experts or outdated and absent documentation. This directly reduces the risk or ‘bottleneck’ aspect of varied and unmonitored sources of information.
• Awareness of future strategies – after utilising a variety of historically unstructured approaches to application development, IBM were able to highlight how their customers could experience the strategic benefit of application portfolio management using the data collected by the tools of the Micro Focus APM solution.
• Impact analysis – IBM were able to use the solution to carry out ‘impact analysis’ during application maintenance and new development. This meant that the solution was able to ensure that nothing at the code level was overlooked or not tested. Providing this high level of quality assurance can improve user satisfaction but also enabled IBM to meet its service level agreements with certainty.
• Level of analysis – The application portfolio consisted of a large number of highly critical core business applications, as well as new e-business applications and the entire data centre. The solution was able to comprehensively analyse all of these components to provide IBM and their customer with an accurate, robust view of the entire application portfolio.