ScienceLogic Enables T-Systems Ltd to Expand Customer-Centric Offerings & Adapt to an Evolving Marketplace

At T-Systems Ltd, to achieve our goal of being the market leader in the European cloud industry, it’s imperative we continue to innovate and expand our offerings to complement our existing portfolio of products. We must constantly evolve to satisfy our customers’ requirements and achieve our business goals.

T-Systems has a strong competitive portfolio with our own public cloud offering—Open Telekom Cloud (OTC)—run out of T-Systems’ German Datacentres and a proven capability of delivering services through Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). We also have an extensive portfolio of highly secure private cloud offerings to satisfy the requirements of our customers. With our Market Leading Dynamic SAP solution and a proven record of delivering successful migrations/transformations onto our cloud platform, the key focus area for us now is to bring the benefits of this knowledge and experience to our existing and potential clients.

To achieve this goal, we have adopted a mindset of customer centricity. By spending more time with our customers—listening to them, understanding their business and strategy—we’re able to expand our portfolio to add the maximum amount of value to our clients. Customer centricity requires us to be agile and flexible, to adapt to the market’s ever-changing needs with innovative solutions that engender confidence that we can deliver on our promises.

Our customers have options, and over the past few years those options have increased. There are a number of cloud and SAP providers that have emerged in the market, and therefore it’s not only a minefield of choice for any prospective client but also for existing clients when contracts are being reviewed. 

To ensure we meet the constant evolving requirements of our current & future client base, we wanted to be able to offer those clients the benefits and wealth of our experience combined with our Technical Service Managers who provide a single point of contact as a service wrapper to the potentially multiple Hybrid Cloud solutions within a contract. That desire led us to ScienceLogic. ScienceLogic's product adds to that capability and fits nicely into the strategic “kit bag” of innovative solutions and offerings that aid in being a key differentiator in the marketplace.

T-Systems naturally has always had robust and established monitoring tools, with a key focus on “Zero Outage.” Within the UK, T-Systems Ltd is taking that one step further with “Service Assurance” which is not replacing our established tools but augmenting them with the ScienceLogic product to demonstrate innovation, flexibility, agility and more importantly customer-centricity. 

In 2015, I attended the Cloud Expo conference in the UK, and after discussions with the VP of EMEA for ScienceLogic, and reviewing their live demo, it was evident that their offering had the potential to satisfy the requirement for a customer on-premise and multi-cloud “Service Assurance” solution. Additional benefits would also aid in baselining capacity and performance monitoring of a customer’s environment prior to it being migrated/transformed onto their T-Systems Cloud solution of choice.

T-Systems Ltd are now well positioned to offer and demonstrate their strategic vision which is a seamless and innovative hybrid cloud service assurance capability for UK customers while using a single product (ScienceLogic).  

Simplicity 

The ability to have a single pane of glass view of before and after transition—with the same look and feel—is invaluable to us. It provides us with demonstrable and easy-to-understand metrics and dashboards. When accessed via a portal, the view enables customers and T-Systems Ltd to have our own badged secure login with the ability to provide visibility of the services that we deploy and manage on their behalf, or even the possibility of extending that capability to make available views for systems that we do not manage. The dashboards have enabled the creation of Service Chain views that list all of the individual components that make up the end-to-end application services for a specific customer and pulls together all of the performance and health data into a single view. This will eventually enable the overhead of maintaining a large amount of data alongside the CMDB to be reduced and add even more value to the Technical Service Managers with on-demand information in a graphical display.

Set-Up

The most surprising element of ScienceLogic was its ease and speed of implementation and the tangible benefits immediately derived. As someone who has seen many products in the marketplace during my time in IT, I’m rather skeptical when it comes to vendor implementation claims. However, it was pleasing to initiate a pilot in our own environment and within a very short time frame. In approximately three months, the system was implemented, configured and generating previously defined metrics and dashboards. With the confidence gained from the pilot, we were able to show our senior executive team that we had something that we knew worked in our environment and we could roll it out to customers. 

Real-World Benefits

Problem Solving Reduction in TTR

With the implementation of ScienceLogic, it has helped alleviate and identify previously hard to diagnose complex intermittent issues, reducing the time to find root cause to a matter of hours, given the comprehensive end to end visibility available within a single window.

We are able to expediently demonstrate the health and performance of the underlying cloud platform and, using the seamless performance metrics, are better positioned to isolate problems to areas outside of our immediate control (within the customer supported application). This demonstrates the immediate value of the product and its capabilities.   

Due Diligence & Baselining

The use of the ScienceLogic product has reaped further benefits in terms of time and cost, which only helps us better serve our customers.

In a recent customer due diligence exercise as part of a transition project, we deployed a ScienceLogic collector on-site within the customer environment prior to their migration to our Cloud Platform. The Auto Discovery capability enabled the capture of all of the systems that would be considered for the transition. This highlighted certain differences in the CMDB data provided by that customer and avoided potential issues with systems remaining on-premise that actually needed to be within the cloud. This type of due diligence exercise previously would have involved a number of scripts being supplied along with a multitude of spreadsheets to capture the real configuration data. This whole process was reduced by 60% with the use of ScienceLogic platform. 

This has, as previously mentioned, positioned us to deliver a seamless view of Performance and Capacity metrics of systems pre and post transition which ultimately adds to the confidence factor in demonstrating the safety and security of T-Systems within the UK.

Finally, the largest qualitative benefit we’ve received from ScienceLogic is their people. It has been an absolute joy to work with the entire team, both during the pilot and after implementation. Their professionalism, attention to detail and the readiness to respond to any query has made the relationship a strong one and a pleasure to reflect on and communicate.