Concord Communications, Inc, a global provider of business service management (BSM) software solutions, today announced that Bayer Business Services, a service provider and 100% subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG, has selected Concord`s BSM solution for service level and application management. Bayer Business Services has entrusted implementation to Concord`s German partner Amasol, which expects that the solution will go live at the end of November 2004.
Bayer Business Services is Bayer`s centre of excellence for IT-based business and scientific services. The company, which has approximately 3 500 staff and annual revenues of 1.1 billion euros, manages core applications covering business and administrative functions as well as human resources, scientific and legal services. It also includes travel and media services in its portfolio. For each of its internal customers, Bayer Business Services signs service level agreements for each application utilised, and the new Concord solution will be implemented in order to automate the monitoring and management of these applications.
"We chose the Concord solution - including the eHealth Suite and the Business Service Console (BSC) - because its service-based approach and its end-to-end management capabilities were best suited to our needs," said Dr Armin Leukens, Bayer Business Services` Director of Application Availability Management.
"Not only do we obtain real-time information about the status of application performance and availability from the end-user`s point of view, we can also guarantee our agreed service levels over the long-term by using Concord`s trend analysis tools, and adapt our IT infrastructure accordingly - exactly mirroring the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) concept."
Concord`s German partner Amasol is implementing the solution. In the first phase of the project, the eHealth Suite, including the BSC, will monitor and manage 10 applications. The implementation will only take eight weeks and is expected to go into production at the end of November.
Continued Bayer Business Services` Dr Leukens: "Another strength of the Concord solution is the target-group specific views of our services. For example, the Business Service Console is useful for management, while our service professionals have a complete overview of the operational data. We are also impressed with Concord`s sophisticated reporting capabilities. All these characteristics of the Concord solution will enable us to further increase our service levels and customer satisfaction."
The eHealth Suite is an integrated solution for managing networks, systems, and applications from the end-user`s perspective. Comprehensive information with different levels of detail, superlative reporting capabilities, and intelligent algorithms issue a warning when service levels start to slip, and help to avoid downtime before it impacts business. Trend analysis safeguards the long-term availability of business services and enable the whole IT infrastructure to be optimised. Concord`s eHealth Suite is an ideal basis for several ITIL processes, including incident management, capacity management and business impact analysis.
For business and IT management, the eHealth Suite can be complemented with the BSC. The Business Service Console offers an executive view of the real-time status of services from the end-user`s perspective with traffic-light indications in red, yellow and green. In addition, a Web-based "ticker" runs along the bottom of the screen, giving an overview of the status of selected processes at any time. If the status of a service is yellow or red, a simple mouse-click on the ticker displays more information about the issue, including how long the problem has existed and who is working on it.
"Global enterprises depend more and more on business-critical packaged and custom applications as well as on the networks and systems that underpin them," said Dayton Semerjian, Executive Vice-President of Marketing and Strategic Alliances for Concord Communications. "True end-to-end service management means using the real end-user experience to measure application performance, allowing service companies like Bayer Business Services to raise the bar in customer satisfaction."
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Concord Communications, Inc (NASDAQ: CCRD) provides an integrated software solution that enables companies to map their IT services to business needs, measure their actual end-user experience, and manage their applications, systems and networks. More than 3 000 companies worldwide, including 23 of the world`s 24 largest service providers, rely on Concord`s eHealth Suite, and its components, to optimise IT services to drive business success. Based in Marlboro, Massachusetts, USA, Concord maintains offices around the globe, and can be found on the Web at www.concord.com.
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