Siemens Nixdorf yesterday announced the official launch of its first Systems Management Centre (SMC) in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The SMC is a central operational service engine which uses state-of-the-art remote management tools to monitor customers' IT infrastructures 24 hours-a-day. This powerful new technology is able to recognise faults at source and rectify them, often before the customer knows there has been a problem.
At the heart of Siemens Nixdorf's operational services, the SMC is designed to enable organisations to concentrate on their core business without having to worry about the availability, reliability, security and cost-effectiveness of their IT solutions. It effectively and efficiently handles planning, prevention, maintenance and ongoing performance optimisation thereby reducing the total cost of IT ownership.
The SMC will drive a wide range of operational services including: end-user support; data services; administrative services; configuration services; optimisation services; and software management.
"Whilst the rapid development of new technologies offers a wealth of options for custom-tailored client/server architectures, the new freedom associated with these distributed solutions also brings with it a host of new problems and challenges for IT management," says Andy Maertz, operational services manager at Siemens Nixdorf South Africa.
"Our research amongst the Top 200 companies in South Africa reveals that the more complex the network, the more know-how is needed, since more and more of the components are sourced from a wide variety of vendors. At the same time, increasingly heterogeneous system structures make problems difficult to localise and troubleshooting them becomes a problem in its own right. Downtime and crashes are the inevitable result.
"Security needs are rising, since the more ways there are to access the networks, the easier it is to tamper with them. Maintenance is becoming a bigger issue, since the software has to be distributed to various target systems and supported there.
"Overall, there is a greater need for support, since questions and problems are increasingly coming from users who are having to deal with ever more complex desktop structures. And finally, companies have to invest in ongoing training so that their staff can keep up with the rapid rate of innovation.
"All this means that time, effort and investments are inevitable, because otherwise it's virtually impossible to utilise modern IT infrastructures," continues Maertz. " Our research findings clearly indicate that whilst many companies are aware of these inherent hidden costs, very few have quantified them. And as such, they are effectively throwing money down the drain.
"But at the end of the day, that's not their core business. So it's perhaps not so surprising then that over seventy per cent of the Top 200 companies say they expect to outsource more of their IT activities." "As the delivery mechanism for our total Operational Services offering, the new Systems Management Centre is designed to provide the support needed to take these problems away from companies enabling them to use their IT infrastructure as efficiently as possible. In other words, not outsourcing, but a 'managed services' concept.
The new South African SMC is the latest addition to Siemens Nixdorf's network of 15 SMCs throughout the world, backing each other up, and enabling service delivery 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. "Through our global network of SMCs, we have access to an international pool of knowledge and database of problems and solutions, thereby making problem analysis so much easier and faster" says Maertz. "Customers don't buy only one SMC but 15 world-wide."
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