Sweet maker updates ITIL data centre management

Danish sweet manufacturer, Leaf has replaced HP Service Desk with new IT management tools as part of a data centre consolidation project.

The maker of the well-known brand, Chewits embarked on a consolidation project for its six regionally distributed data centres in Western Europe to reduce management complexity, rationalise its hardware investment and so, save money.

Jannis Vergotis, Leaf IT manager told IT PRO the project was also designed to reduce the duplication of effort in managing its data centres and extend the use of best practices as outlined by the industry standard, IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework from its headquarters out to the rest of its regional offices.

Leaf decided to replace its existing HP Service Desk implementation with assist from vendor Axios Systems, using IT Service Management (ITSM) best-practice processes.

Vergotis said Leaf was looking for one tool to replace the six separate instances of its existing HP helpdesks: "We wanted one system to effectively rule them all. By looking for an out-of-the-box solution that adhered to ITIL best practices, we recognised we could easily move from our current HP system to assyst and achieve our goal quickly."

He added that the project team spent six months prior to choosing the new tool defining the Incident, Change and Asset Management processes to match the ITIL framework with the company structure. And the roll out is now 80 per cent complete in extending out the ITIL framework to its regional office infrastructure.

Now if hardware or software faults occur, the IT team can quickly identify the causes and resolve the issue. The Axios tool also enables the team to identify where to make investments in the infrastructure and to support its decisions with clear management reports generated with the help of the single underlying assyst Configuration Management Database (CMDB). And within Leaf Holland, only two people are now needed to support 650 configurations.

Vergotis said new functionality and, in particular the web-based interface of the assyst tool, has helped the IT function better manage problems when they occur, while also enabling the company to proactively manage its IT infrastructure and head off issues before they become problems that could affect the business.

"We've also been able to make better use of existing resources, like in the roll out of an ERP [enterprise resource planning] upgrade. We were able to apply ITIL practices and so ensure the satisfaction of our end users when it went live," he said.