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Despite tight budgets and growing complexity, IT executives are challenged to ensure a secure and reliable IT infrastructure that fully supports and adjusts to an organization's dynamic business needs. For help, they can now turn to integrated IT service management solutions that allow them to optimize IT service performance and availability, while reducing operational costs.
These management solutions integrate incident, problem, change, and service-level management, and save costs by automating previously manual tasks, including the discovery and tracking of assets within the IT environment to minimize waste, loss, and risk. The tools also standardize on the processes and best practices of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Additionally they add business value by prioritizing projects and changes based on their importance to the business and by aggregating IT data to provide business intelligence.
One firm addressing the need for integrated IT service management is Hewlett-Packard (HP) with its HP OpenView ServiceCenter solutions. HP gained the software as part of its acquisition (completed in December 2005) of Peregrine Systems.
The HP OpenView ServiceCenter is a comprehensive and fully integrated IT service management software application suite based upon best practices defined by the ITIL standard for managing requests, incidents, problems, changes, and service level agreements (SLAs). HP OpenView ServiceCenter implements these processes through a suite of integrated applications, enabling companies to quickly deploy consistent, integrated work processes across every part of their IT organization.
ROI Analyst for HP OpenView
Customized business case tools are now available that estimate the ROI and organizational benefits customers can expect from implementing HP OpenView management solutions. The tools are based on data gathered by IDC from HP OpenView customers and industry-standard data provided by Alinean. Please contact your OpenView account representative to learn more about this service.
To assess and quantify the business benefits of today's integrated IT service management solutions, IDC conducted in-depth interviews with a number of organizations using HP OpenView ServiceCenter solutions. IDC asked detailed questions about the implementation costs in deploying the solutions, and the cost savings and other benefits realized.
IDC found that, for the companies surveyed, IT productivity jumped by an average of 31%, resulting in an average cost savings over three years of $2.8 million annually. When normalized for company size, the savings amounted to $5,031 per 100 users. (Throughout the paper, the term "users" refers to the number of end users supported by the company's IT organization.) The IT managers interviewed reported that they had realized substantial savings in staff hours expended on a number of management tasks (see Table 1).
Increased user productivity from reduced downtime and time lost waiting for help desk and other IT administrative support contributed an average annual savings over three years of more than $4.6 million, or $8,229 per 100 users. Downtime dropped by 52%, following the deployment of the management software. This reduction in downtime resulted in an average recaptured revenue of slightly more than $1 million annually.
The companies surveyed also saved an average of close to $6 million a year, or $10,539 per 100 users, from improved IT management efficiency and other economies. The average number of network devices managed by each FTE rose from 175 before deploying the management software to 275 afterwards, an increase of 57%. This improved management efficiency yielded an average reduction in IT headcount growth of 12.2% a year, accounting for average payroll savings of close to $5.7 million a year over the three years, or $9,955 per 100 users. Additional savings came from the elimination of other management tools and from reductions in the number of visits to remote sites for repairs. These savings averaged $326,361 a year.
For the HP customers surveyed, the total benefits averaged close to $14.5 million annually, or $24,216 per 100 users. The companies invested an average of more than $2.1 million over three years in deploying the HP OpenView ServiceCenter management solution, resulting in a net present value for the three-year savings of almost $26.7 million, or $43,265 per 100 users.
Based on these numbers, the payback period from deploying the HP OpenView ServiceCenter management solution averaged 11.8 months for the companies surveyed, yielding an average return on investment of 422% (see Table 2).
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