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Under the umbrella of HP Mission Critical Support, proactive services and specialized reactive services work jointly to support the IT demands of a global transportation giant. In an environment where executive’s bonuses depend on obtaining the highest levels of availability, HP has consistently attained and surpassed all expected service levels, measuring typical response time in mere minutes.
An IT infrastructure built to meet the most stringent business demands
Keeping thousands of vehicles and employees on time and in motion requires an IT infrastructure capable of processing millions of electronic transmissions daily. In support of this activity, mission critical goals for IT include:
- Enhancing the company’s competitive advantage through continual improvement of IT productivity
- Maximizing availability while minimizing risk and protecting business revenue
- Enhancing the productivity and skill sets of the IT staff In view of current market conditions, this customer is focused on reducing costs wherever possible, with fuel costs skyrocketing—78% in this year alone. To address competitive pressures, improving time-toproduction for new products is also a critical goal HP seeks to help address.
Over 4000 servers need protection Across three data centers, and over 4000 servers, HP provides mission critical protection for key systems, including those housing important Oracle applications—payroll, HR, and Financial Systems. As part of the custom mission critical support agreement, HP also supports 3000 Red Hat licenses. Red Hat serves as the primary development vehicle for the 6000 IT personnel, many of whom are focused on driving time-to-market and time-to-production for new products.
HP provides a one-hour hardware response time for all critical calls. For the past 3 years, under the span of this mission critical partnership, there have been no issues with this commitment.
Also as part of the service agreement negotiated for this customer, HP offers a single number to call for HP, Microsoft, and Red Hat support. The number is directly connected to an HP engineer for the fastest support possible. Availability of IT systems is so crucial to this customer, executives receive bonuses based on keeping their systems 100% available, and their customers completely satisfied. HP continues to perform satisfactorily under these stringent guidelines, with the Mission Critical contract recently renewed for yet another 5 years.
Mission Critical Support and ITIL reduces cost, helps improve time-toproduction Rising fuel costs have increased the pressure on all parts of the business, including IT, to better manage their cost structure, stretching their support dollars and maximizing the investments they continue to make. As people leave the company, and normal attrition occurs, these open positions are often not back-filled. Partners, like the HP Mission Critical team, are relied upon increasingly to ease the pain of the reduced workforce.
HP is contributing toward the People Initiative with a multi-pronged approach. The HP Account Support team has provided:
-Mentoring through knowledge transfer on a broad range of System Administration topics including networking, performance analysis, capacity planning, patching, SAN, back-up and recovery, HA clustering, security, system configuration, 3rd party issues and sharing of best practices. This helps reduce the amount of time taken on technical issues, allowing IT staff to refocus their energy on core business issues.
- Skill sets of IT staff have been additionally enhanced with web-based training offered by HP—in the last year, 15 technical seminars have been offered, as well as on-site and off-site sessions through Lunch-N-Learn Tech Talks, and ITIL Foundations Certification programs.
-A Service Escalation Manager was assigned to the account, helping to facilitate support issues in a timely and effective fashion, and getting higher level resources involved as needed.
- In collaboration with the customer, HP has provided an ongoing focus on ITIL improvements, including over 30 active initiatives now, ranging from Service Continuity to Service Desk and Incident Management to Change Management and Configuration Management to Capacity and Performance Management. All ITIL work is focused on improving IT processes, saving money, time and resources.
Responding to the customer’s competitive squeeze, HP Mission Critical members have worked to improve processes, such as patch management, to get hardware in faster. The net result is additional time shaved off this critical success factor. As a further cost savings, in the latest contract supporting Red Hat subscriptions, HP was able to increase the discount offered by 20%, by virtue of the volume growth of the environment.
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