Leveraging cloud shift and interconnection with BMC Software
"Cloud shift," or the practice of IT spending moving from traditional IT offerings to cloud services, will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020, according to Gartner.
Two application segments that will feel cloud shift the most are business process-as-a-service (BPaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS), with a 43% and 37% respective cloud shift rate.
One of the leading providers of BPaaS- and SaaS-based IT service management solutions for enterprises, BMC Software, has leveraged cloud shift and greater interconnection to transform the delivery of its Digital Enterprise Management software solutions to BMC employees and customers with dramatically improved customer satisfaction, reduced downtime and lower costs.
BMC's innovative Digital Enterprise Management software solutions enable businesses to better manage digital operations, including IT service delivery, data center automation, performance, virtualization lifecycle and cloud computing.
The company previously offered primarily on-premises services to its 10,000 worldwide customers, but as of 2016, its business model has increasingly incorporated SaaS solutions. Its SaaS platform development organization for the Digital Service Management Business is chartered to deliver a world-class digital IT service delivery and support experience from the cloud.
The BMC SaaS team wanted to improve its overall IT service management effectiveness and user satisfaction for its employees, and ultimately, its enterprise customers.
For the BMC SaaS organization that meant implementing "smart IT" and greater interconnection to increase the performance, reliability and security of the IT services and support it delivers to its employees and customers, out at the edge of the enterprise.
The SaaS Operations team currently drives the standardization of cloud IT service management for BMC's technical operations and end-to-end customer support for 14 global data centers and more than 700,000 core SaaS subscribers and 1,200+ SaaS customers worldwide.
According to Nandu Mahadevan, Vice President, SaaS Operations, digital transformation was critical to BMC's strategic initiative around enterprise productivity:
"We needed to digitally transform our IT service management infrastructure first, and then provide our customers with solutions to do the same.
The BMC SaaS team leveraged an Interconnection Oriented Architecture (IOA) strategy deployed on Platform Equinix to develop a more structured, real-time approach to digital IT service management that was more data-driven, automated, intuitive and proactive.
Unlocking User Productivity with Interconnection to the Cloud
To accomplish their current business goals and continuously innovate based on a more revolutionary digital IT platform required a higher-level of interconnection to the cloud than their existing IT infrastructure could provide.
BMC moved its SaaS operations for its IT service management into Equinix data centers in Chicago and Amsterdam ̶ two of the biggest internet hubs with the lowest latency around the world.
This move also enabled BMC to better interconnect its service delivery out at the edge of its enterprise network, where high concentrations of users, data and applications reside. The SaaS team migrated more than 120 customers in just seven months, delivering dramatically higher service levels with zero migration-related issues.
The team could now offer its customers active-active, high availability/disaster recovery with 99.99999% average uptime and extreme resiliency for BMC's high-performance compute, network and storage systems. This enabled them to reduce service-impacting incidents by 10 times and IT-related user downtime by 25%.
Moving to Platform Equinix also allowed the SaaS team to directly and securely interconnect to leading network and cloud providers via Equinix Cross Connects and the Cloud Exchange for greater performance at a lower cost.
Said Mahadevan, "Partnering with Equinix, a world-class colocation and interconnection service provider, was a "faster, better and cheaper" strategy for growing the company, expanding its global footprint and better serving our customers with greater performance and reliability.
Greater Customer Value and Satisfaction
By adopting an IOA strategy, deployed on Platform Equinix, BMC has modernized its IT service management help desk infrastructure by delivering flexible and agile management of IT services and support anywhere, anytime, on any device.
Service desk employees are more informed about their users' issues prior to them requesting help, empowering them to be more efficient when servicing customers, as seen in the dramatic decrease in level-one ticket costs by 33%, and a gain of 17-points in Net Promoter customer loyalty scores and 18-points in customer service satisfaction rates.
As a result of its digital IT and interconnection transformation, BMC's SaaS Operations organization was recently recognized with the 2016 Computer World Premier 100 award.
Article by Tony Biship, Equinix Blog Network
