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Managed service provider implements OpenText™ SMAX service delivery and acquisition management to reduce IT complexity and improve productivity by 25%

Redcentric logo

About Redcentric

As a trusted cloud and communications transformation partner with strong networking and security services, Redcentric empowers organizations with innovative and reliable managed IT services that help them succeed.
A system administrator working in server room using laptop
  • Employees:
    500
  • Number of customers:
    2,000+
  • Locations:
    11

Summary

Challenges

  • Consolidate and unify multiple disparate ITSM tools, resulting from company acquisitions and outdated existing toolset.
  • Automate the acquisition processes to ensure service continuity.

Solution

  • Implemented streamlined service delivery.
  • Supported clients’ ESG reporting requirements.
  • Integrated non-IT functions to ensure full transparency.
  • Embraced AI to elevate user experience.

Results

  • happy-laptop Simplified service management client interaction
  • process-data-visualization Streamlined acquisitions and reduced IT complexity
  • performance-graph-stats Improved productivity by 25%

Challenges

  • Simplify the user experience and create one go-to portal for all IT and non-IT service management requirements
  • Automate the processes involved with new company acquisitions to ensure service continuity for all clients

As a fast-growing organization, Redcentric wanted to ensure its clients and employees receive a streamlined service, not just in response to their IT-related queries, but across the board. Current research shows that many organizations experience system technology failings, which drain the user experience at a time when demand is at an all-time high.

Redcentric’s CTO, Paul Mardling, certainly recognized this in his own organization, “We’ve seen a massive transformation in the IT industry with artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionizing pretty much everything we do. As expectations increased, we were acutely aware that our service management solution would not be able to support us going forward. We’ve been a long-term user of the OpenText™ stack through its evolution over the years. OpenText Service Manager had been superseded by OpenText SMAX and was reaching the end of its supported life. We realized now was the time for us to make the move to SMAX too. We assessed other options in the marketplace and felt that SMAX was the solution to give us the modern ITSM environment that would enable us to drastically simplify our client and user experience."

The timing coincided with five major acquisitions made by Redcentric within just two and a half years. This resulted in disparate IT service management (ITSM) tools, creating integration and operational efficiency challenges. Mardling commented, “This motivated us to consolidate and unify our IT service management in SMAX. We worked to aggressive timescales to ensure that clients of the acquired companies were integrated within SMAX as soon as possible, providing seamless service continuity.”

The cloud-based data center

SMAX fulfilled all the functions we needed and gave us a firm AI roadmap which will further increase our operational efficiency, reduce our costs, and ultimately optimize our service delivery to further improve our customer satisfaction.

Paul Mardling
CTO, Redcentric

Solution

The SMAX implementation streamlined company acquisitions and new client onboarding. Integrating SMAX with other OpenText solutions and automating many key non-IT processes through SMAX workflows provided valuable insight and improved collaboration.

Products deployed

Implementing SMAX to streamline service delivery

Introducing OpenText™ Service Management Automation X (SMAX) was a multi-team effort. Regular meetings between all involved staff and leaders ensured the right workflows were put in place from the start to simplify the experience for over 2,000 UK and Northern Ireland-based clients. Specific workflows to support new company acquisitions were designed using SMAX Studio. This user-friendly design tool enables users to create and implement new workflows in hours instead of days or sometimes even weeks. This streamlined process analysis, data loading, and configuration management, ensuring newly acquired clients were quickly onboarded within Redcentric.

The hundreds of service offerings within the SMAX catalog made it easy and simple for users to correctly classify any tickets raised. This allowed an automated workflow to route tickets to the appropriate engineer as fast as possible.

Some Redcentric client contacts, such as transient staff within healthcare clients, don’t have direct access to the SMAX service portal. For those, email integration provided an easy way to submit their tickets, which are then automatically routed within the system for fast resolution. SMAX was also integrated with PagerDuty to further support process automation and incident management.

Supporting clients’ ESG reporting requirements

SMAX is closely integrated with OpenText™ Universal CMDB to easily share configuration and asset data. With over 100,000 configuration items (CIs) managed on behalf of Redcentric clients, providing user-friendly client visibility into the operation of their CIs is a real service value-add. Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager for Redcentric explained, “We created a ‘rack viewer’ module within SMAX. This gives clients simple access to a visualization of a rack containing their IT equipment. It provides the usage information they need to optimize their capacity planning. Using the same tool, clients can also request physical access to their devices managed in any of the seven Redcentric UK datacenters. These requests are automatically routed so that the relevant datacenter staff is aware of the impending client visit and can prepare accordingly.”

The CI visibility is also key for client environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting purposes, as Jackson continued, “We leverage SMAX, Universal CMDB, and other OpenText technology, such as Operations Bridge and Operations Orchestration to closely monitor our environments. Using the SMAX-designed rack viewer we can see exactly what the power consumption and wattage requirements are for each asset. We produce monthly client reports itemizing the carbon offset and footprint to support our clients’ ESG reporting requirements. Our organization is all about sustainability and optimizing the capacity of our datacenters. These previously manual processes would take an inordinate amount of time to complete, so we’re delighted with the SMAX process automation. With the automation in place, we have reduced the ESG reporting time by 60%.”

Integrating non-IT functions in SMAX ensures full transparency

SMAX’s main purpose is to simplify and automate client requests. This extends beyond IT requests to reach many of Redcentric’s non-IT departments. The Finance team leverages SMAX to manage client billing queries and requests. Security staff at the datacenters have a specific SMAX page view that helps manage client visits, ensuring client contacts are automatically sent a confirmation email detailing the identity documents they need to bring to gain access. Redcentric’s HR department uses SMAX to manage its new joiners, movers, and leavers processes. An HR-specific SMAX request is auto-routed to the right departments so that new joiners can be productive from their first day, with appropriate access rights, a configured laptop, mobile, and any other devices they may need.

The Audit department used the information captured in SMAX for ISO recertification. Legal colleagues requested some customization to the standard SMAX contract module which enabled them to easily manage supplier contracts. Sales colleagues managing groups of smaller clients were included in a SMAX workflow that ensured they are in the loop when any client interaction takes place. Service and Support colleagues were given full visibility of service level agreements (SLA) between Redcentric, its clients, and its vendors. When clients report issues, these often involve line outages by telecommunications vendors. With the increased SMAX visibility, Redcentric staff could easily see the status of a line fix and keep clients informed throughout.

Embracing AI to elevate the user experience

Redcentric is excited about the prospect of implementing OpenText™ IT Operations Aviator. This secure, private generative AI (GenAI) virtual agent leverages domain-specific enterprise knowledge to elevate the user experience. It can empower users to resolve routine support and service requests in minutes. It can boost service agent productivity by expediting ticket handling. When agents are given a full ticket context, they can work faster and reduce user wait times.

Jackson commented, “While we are still at the start of our AI journey, we look forward to the benefits that Aviator can bring us. We can layer rich machine learning and AI on top of our data lake leveraging data from SMAX, Operations Bridge, and UCMDB. We also use OpenText™ Network Operations Management (NOM) so that we can holistically track network performance, quality, and traffic to be able to diagnose issues even more effectively. A great use case would be when we have a major line outage. We envision that our AI-driven systems can identify the postcode area and therefore highlight any clients that will be affected by it. SMAX will then auto-generate tickets and link these to a major incident ticket which will be auto-assigned to the correct group for resolution. This alone will be a massive timesaver as the resolution will be totally focused and as efficient as possible.”

The organization also looks to embrace AI to search much more efficiently across disparate internal information sources, such as SharePoint repositories, Google Docs, JIRA, Confluence, and Wikis. This will enable new staff members to get up to speed quickly and provide contextual information to agents, enabling them to reduce the mean time to resolution.

Two people are working on laptops in the data center

Following our SMAX implementation, we estimate a productivity improvement across the board of at least 25 percent, thanks to leveraging process automation, preventing human error, and having the visibility we need to improve our speed and agility.

Edward Jackson
Operational System Support Manager, Redcentric

Results

Effective use of AI and machine learning within SMAX simplified the user experience while service delivery times have improved. Customer satisfaction is increased, and SMAX process automation has enhanced the organization’s speed and agility.

Simplified service management client interaction

Delighting its customers is vitally important to Redcentric. Jackson is clear on the role SMAX and its fellow OpenText solutions play, “I feel most satisfied when our clients congratulate us on a job well done. You can easily see the difference our new SMAX-enabled processes make to their day-to-day lives and the running of their businesses. We receive feedback every day that shows us our clients appreciate the simplicity of how to engage with us and the offerings we have within service management. They can either help themselves using a GenAI virtual agent that understands user intent, or their ticket is routed automatically to the right people through an easy process with scripted questions. They can upload additional information, such as screenshots, documentation, or log files which will follow the ticket to the assigned expert group. We feel any customer experience needs to be efficient and easy to follow through, while ultimately providing the answer required. Our customer satisfaction scores have increased by 30% following the implementation of SMAX.”

Streamlined acquisitions and reduced IT complexity

The SMAX processes and workflows that were designed to support company acquisitions will continue to streamline future acquisitions. By successfully consolidating ITSM processes and onboarding clients from five acquisitions, the Redcentric team has built a valuable knowledge base to adapt in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

The consolidation of various ITSM tools into SMAX streamlined workflows to significantly reduce IT complexity. This integration improved service restoration times and enhanced overall service delivery. Deploying AI and machine learning with SMAX simplified the user experience and made it much easier for clients to interact with Redcentric, raise any issues, and gain full visibility on the resolution status.

Improved productivity by 25%

Redcentric employees enjoy the benefits of SMAX process automation in many aspects of their day-to-day jobs. Jackson commented, “Following our SMAX implementation, we estimate a productivity improvement across the board of at least 25 percent, thanks to leveraging process automation, preventing human error, and having the visibility we need to improve our speed and agility.”

Mardling concluded, “We were really pleased to discover the OpenText IT Operations Management stack of solutions. This modern set is just what we needed at Redcentric. SMAX fulfilled all the functions we needed and gave us a firm AI roadmap which will further increase our operational efficiency, reduce our costs, and ultimately optimize our service delivery to further improve our customer satisfaction.”

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