The acquisition of Foster Melliar on 11 April 2005 by Xantium Technology Holdings has seen the formation of a company that provides a full spectrum of IT services management, including training, implementation, consultancy and support. As a result, South African organisations now have access to a company that can deliver a single service solution.
"We believe Xantium is certainly leading the way in IT service management," says Simon Turner, executive director at Xantium Professional Services. "Together with Foster Melliar, we have ensured we do not just provide basic IT services, but that we translate this information into business delivery to ensure we create sustainable expectations on the value IT can bring to organisations."
Xantium Professional Services is focused on true customer skills and knowledge transfer and therefore approaches each customer via a mentorship programme to ensure that once the business case has been identified, the organisation itself can manage the process.
"We are truly focused on the concept of people, processes and technology - bringing them together to ensure IT solutions business and technology requirements for a company. Today with the increased understanding of technology, companies are certainly becoming more mature in their decision-making process around the ability of IT to drive business. Therefore, they are starting to dictate that technology solutions adapt to their business requirements - and not the other way around, as in the past," adds Turner.
Xantium Professional Services outlines how IT services and processes can align with business goals to fill the gap between IT and business needs. In essence, a company's IT requirements are set up as a set of services, giving the ability to understand what needs they are trying to address from a business and customer perspective, ie is it driving quality assurances or increasing customer expectations - as these have very different approaches both internally and externally.
Additionally, Xantium examines current and desired maturity levels of a business from a customer, organisational and IT perspective to ensure an accurate roadmap of a companies business goals are developed. This makes certain that any IT implementation undertaken is driven by three key values; namely people, processes and technology - which allows the organisation to assess and adapt its processes according to their actual requirements, ensuring the use of resources from a cost perspective is driven by business demand.
The key is understanding expectations first and then driving the best implementations in a phased approach, giving the business the opportunity to provide input to ensure its IT delivery is set against its business processes.
As Xantium Professional Services is also a recognised leader in ITIL, through its local expertise and experience, the company is able to demonstrate to organisations how to examine their business processes and understand and measure the technology process to gain true value for the company.
According to Turner, this has meant companies like Harmony have, through their work with Xantium Professional Services, already started to gain cost savings on their IT infrastructure and move towards IT from a business-centric approach.
Too many companies view service management as an internal issue that IT can fix. Service management is about assessing business issues, adapting to requirements and managing business expectations to ensure IT alignment with business strategy.
"Therefore, organisations need to work with companies who understand this alignment into IT, while being flexible enough to adapt to the organisations they support," concludes Turner.
Xantium Technology Holdings - Creation of equity and equitable opportunity is a moral necessity but it also makes great business sense. Today's markets are looking for true black employment equity 'information technology' partners. Partners that help meet our social challenge collectively and bring real value to their clients' businesses. Information technology (IT) is an enabler of outstanding business strategy; partners who deliver robust IT enablement for their clients' strategic needs contribute directly to the bottom line. This is Xantium.
For more information, please visit the Xantium Technology Holdings Web site at www.xantiumit.co.za.
The individuals within Xantium Technology Holdings have the expertise and experience in ITIL-based implementations, having worked with companies like Delta Dental, General Motors, American Express and many more.
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