CASE STUDY
U
nited Arab Bank (UAB), which
has established itself as a leading
solutions provider for a growing
commercial and industrial base across the
seven emirates, has been working closely
with ManageEngine to provide greater
visibility and central control over its IT
infrastructure. Karthikeyan Muthuraj, Head
of IT Service Delivery and GRC at UAB,
tells us about the bank’s IT and network
infrastructure and how ManageEngine has
helped it improve its network performance
as well as its service and operations
management. He also speaks about his
journey in the last two years with UAB, his IT
governance and service delivery initiatives
and how they have resulted in business-
oriented culture changes in IT support.
Can you give us an overview about
the solutions you have deployed?
We have two core ManageEngine solutions
deployed in the UAB IT department:
ServiceDesk Plus and OpManager.
ServiceDesk Plus is the IT help desk tool
we use for enterprise-wide IT service
management. OpManager and its sub-
modules are used for infrastructure
monitoring of day-to-day operations,
monitoring network traffic, measuring
capacity and managing IP addresses. We are
also using OpManager for our configuration
when we deliver. We also needed to track
performance and measure the staffing
level. While IT is seen as a cost centre,
the ManageEngine solution helps us, to
a great extent, justify the operating cost.
Finally, we wanted to enhance the way we
communicate with our internal business units.
In short, size is irrelevant when it comes to
service quality. Even when there is a small
team, the quality of the service needs to be
measured in order to ensure we travel in the
right path. At UAB, the mission of our business
is to offer a superior customer experience, and
we measure our success in terms of our core
values: integrity, customer focus, competence,
consistency and courteousness. In line with
those values, we have implemented this
solution to spread the culture of service
management, which will eventually result in
helping our internal business units to achieve
their goals and targets.
How did the vendor meet your
objectives and what selection
process did you adopt?
Often, we aim for ‘too big’ and end up with
delays and troubles. So when UAB decided to
implement service management processes,
we were very cautious in our objectives,
which are based on SMART methodologies.
That is, we want our objectives to be specific,
measurable, achievable, realistic and time-
WE NOW HAVE GOOD VISIBILITY
ON WHAT WE SPEND, INCLUDING
SPENDING TRENDS WHICH HELPS US
TO OPTIMISE COSTS.
backup and network change management.
In addition, we use NetFlow Analyzer for
network capacity usage and reporting.
What necessitated your decision to
implement the solutions? bound (SMART). The vendor covered these
objectives by breaking down the solution
into phases and POCs. Every workflow
we have created was tested and used in
production to see the benefit and only then
have we moved to the next module.
We needed to know our business and
establish clear accountability on what we
own, whom we serve, how we offer and When it comes to the selection process, the
adoption is more towards cost and simplicity.
We believe in a lean and highly productive
56
INTELLIGENTCIO
staffing model. We do not want to have
additional team members just for managing
the administration tools. So we were looking
for a tool that can be managed by our staff
directly, that’s how we ended up by buying
ManageEngine products.
Is the solution delivering on
your objectives?
Yes. In fact, we started exploring more
options, which we shall use for day-to-day
service delivery. For example, we shall
manage IT projects in the enterprise edition
of ServiceDesk Plus. We also expect to save
license costs on other expensive software
by managing those contracts in ServiceDesk
Plus and linking the contracts to projects.
That will give our senior management a
360-degree view.
How and when will you achieve
return on investment on the
implementation? How have you
calculated this?
We started realising the ROI six months after
implementation. The first milestone was
achieved by measuring vendor-related cases
and dependencies. Around 30% of backlog
tickets were due to vendor dependencies.
Our earlier method was working with emails
and phone calls directly, and we were
unaware of the volume of work performed
by the IT department. Now we calculate
MTTR and backlogs based on support staff
and convert the man days to understand the
effort and estimation per staff.
Also managing physical assets and licenses
is vital to cost savings. This tool can provide
great insight when it comes to IT asset
management. We now have good visibility
on what we spend, including spending trends
which helps us to optimise costs.
What are the advantages of
your new system compared to
your old one?
Earlier, we didn’t have a fully-fledged
service management tool. Also asset
management was done in an Excel register,
which is a totally manual and time-
consuming process. When we implemented
the ManageEngine solution, we gained the
following key advantages:
www.intelligentcio.com