ROI Success Story in Infrastructure Support

The Customer: A leading global technology services provider, delivering business solutions. The company was a leader in founding the information technology outsourcing industry. The company delivers a broad portfolio of information technology, applications and business process outsourcing services to customers in the manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation and consumer and retail industries around the world.

The Issue: The customer realized it had a significant amount of technology being supported by a number of different vendors. Those vendors were delivering a wide range of service levels, and in some cases, providing duplicate support.

The company faced the following problems within its technology support portfolio:

• Uncontrolled spending on asset support
• Lack of understanding on how to improve asset life cycle
• Rigid deliverables with limited flexibility
• Lack of standardization on implemented technologies
• Duplicated or different service levels for the same piece of technology
• No actionable program to control operational costs and improved overall efficiency of the support delivered

To meet its goals of reducing costs and simplifying the support process while ensuring better support levels, the customer needed a comprehensive infrastructure support plan that could help standardize enterprise-wide infrastructure support.

Statement of Work: Develop a framework that would help simplify the current support process for both current and future business. The major goals behind the support framework were:

• Reduce the number of support providers across the enterprise
• Improve the quality, agility and competitiveness of support for the business units
• Lower the overall capital and operational expenses associated with the infrastructure support
• Determine the return on investment (ROI) as a percentage saved by using this new framework
• Deliver information on realized savings to executive management

The Overall Goal: To provide a simplified approach to infrastructure support and begin realizing substantial savings by implementing standards and eliminating complexity.

The Solution: The customer selected STG to provide infrastructure support in North America. Since 2000, STG has been providing support to a number of different organizations within the customer's enterprise, as well as servicing the firm's equipment in its regional data centers. This leading technology services provider relies on STG for its proven ability to provide flexible service deliverables. Our participation allows the client to achieve rapid implementation in geographically remote facilities, including sites in the U.S., Canada, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

The Results with STG: A key metric of the company's goal was ROI. With STG's help, the customer recognized a full ROI within six months. In some cases, the return was realized at inception. The customer was extremely pleased with the cost savings.

On several large implementations, the company achieved a cost savings in the range of 40% to 60%, which significantly impacted profit margins within the firm's solution area. The customer promoted and mandated the use of STG's infrastructure support services in North America and is using the following key features, benefits, and metrics to support their direction:

• ROI of six months or sooner
• Immediate cost savings of 40% to 60%, significantly reducing operating expenses
• Extending asset life cycle from three-five years to six-eight years while reducing overall capital expenditures
• Stringent service level agreement including 7X24X365, featuring 30-minute phone response, on-hour on-site, and four-hour call repair
• Flexibility featuring a unique hourly approach that allows for wider coverage model and rapid implementation capabilities
• Zero outage requirement, translating to 95% to 99% SLA compliance and service excellence reporting
• High first call closure rate resulting from knowledgeable, U.S.-based call center
• Multi-platform support including mainframes, UNIX and Windows servers, tape and disk, printers and desktop/laptop computers
• Multi-vendor support including IBM, HP, SUN, Dell, EMC, STK, and UNISYS

The customer was, and continues to be, very satisfied with the service and support they receive from STG. Choosing the right source for data center and infrastructure support has made a significant difference.