Quintica SA, a service management solutions specialist, has been appointed to distribute and support Marval Service Management (MSM) - a service management application based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Ingo Tuschardt, MD of Quintica SA, says MSM complements the company's existing portfolio which includes accredited ITIL training, Applix TM1 and iET CRM software. "Marval is considered the only service management application currently available that fully complies with best-practice ITIL standards."
Speaking at the IT Manager's Forum held recently at the Indaba Hotel in Fourways, Don Page, CEO of Marval Group UK and co-developer of MSM, announced the appointment and described it as broadening Marval's reach globally. "We now have representation in mainland Europe, Scandinavia, North America, Australasia, Asia Pacific and SA," he noted.
MSM has already made an impact locally. John Campbell, CIO of Ster-Kinekor, also spoke at the conference, delivering a paper on the implementation of MSM and the benefits reaped so far. "We have deployed [MSM] in our IT department as a first phase proof-of-concept and the impact has been huge. It gives us a solid handle on the actual costs involved in supporting our IT infrastructure," he said.
Campbell provided an illustration: "We were looking seriously at centralised printing; we had analysed the numbers using a financial tool and it appeared to make good business sense. However, when we put the same data into MSM, it highlighted issues we hadn't considered."
According to the analysis, Ster-Kinekor's support personnel would have spent 14% of their time supporting centralised printing services while this dropped to 2-3% with the existing decentralised model. As a result, the company reconsidered the issue.
Tuschardt says MSM is a valuable resource for managing change effectively. "Once you've done the analysis, it guides you through the change management process and ensures that everything required, from equipment and software to training and user education, is in place at the right time so as to minimise disruption to critical business systems and processes."
Page agrees: "Incidents usually occur when something changes. We've all experienced the scenario of arriving at work to find we cannot access an important service, print a document or send an urgent fax. We contact our service team and eventually discover the incident was caused by a badly managed change.
"The situation would not have occurred if we had been using MSM to plan, manage and implement the change," he adds.
For more information, go to www.quintica.co.za or www.marval.co.uk.
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