In order to deliver a comprehensive set of IT Management and Support Services to a large client in the banking sector, Bechtle Mannheim decided to rely on the iTop ITSM solution. The company also called in the iTop certified partner ITOMIG to support them on this project.
Markus Peter, Dispatching team Leader and Service Manager at Bechtle Mannheim shares his testimony about the project. A fully operational IT support service for a large client in the finance sector launched in less than 3 months Markus Peter – Dispatching team Leader and Service Manager at Bechtle Mannheim Challenge Deployment of an ITSM solution to deliver IT management and support services to a large client in the finance sector. Solution Implementation of iTop with customized data structure and connectivity to the clients’ highly secured systems, leveraging the expertise of a certified partner. Benefits Fast integration with the customer environment and successful launch of the new services within 3 months.
Early 2022, Bechtle Mannhein was commissioned by a large banking institution in Germany for the provision of IT management and support services. The selection of an ITSM solution was a key aspect of the project. The tool would not only have to help operate the service, but also interact smoothly and securely with the customer IT environment. Having immediate access to expertise on the tool was also a challenge, as a fast ramp up was requested.
In the context of the project, Bechtle Mannhein had to select an ITSM solution that could meet the stringent security and data privacy requirements of the banking sector. They were looking for an on-premise solution that they could securely connect to their client’s own ITSM system, based on HP Service Manager. In short, the key requirements for the ITSM solution were : a flexible configuration management database (CMDB), the capability to interact with other tools and to import data.
Bechtle Mannhein first heard about iTop from their parent company. Indeed, Bechtle AG has been using iTop internally for many years, with the effective support of ITOMIG, an iTop certified partner, for consultancy and development services.
“Our headquarters colleagues were satisfied with the iTop solution. iTop also ticked all the boxes of our major requirements. And we knew we could get expertise on the tool from ITOMIG”, Markus Peter recalls.
Bechtle Mannhein therefore decided to rely on iTop to deliver IT support services to their large banking client.
To provide the expected services, Bechtle Mannheim deployed iTop and integrated it with its customer existing environment, following two principles :
The team had to overcome some rigidity in the customer’s tool in place. Data extraction was not easy and straightforward. “We had to adapt and customize a few objects in iTop to enable data exchange with the customer system. Overall, iTop provided the expected flexibility and was quick to integrate”, Markus Peter comments.
ITOMIG provided very efficient support to Bechtle during the integration phase. The iTop certified partner specifically provided technical training. They also helped with the development of data import and synchronization processes with Webhook and API calls. “The support from ITOMIG is great and they are very quick”, Markus Peter adds.
Thanks to the flexibility of iTop and the support of ITOMIG, Bechtle Mannhein was able to meet the quick implementation schedule requested by their client. The iTop based ITSM solution was integrated and put in production in less than 3 months!
Bechtle Mannheim thus started operating the service for their client on July 1st, 2022. “After the rush to meet this tight deadline, we had a bit of stress as the customer users created a lot of tickets from day one. But iTop is not complex to use. So we could quickly educate our people on the new ticket lifecycle and processes. ITOMIG also helped train our agents”, Markus Peter explains.
9 months after the service launch, 110 people at Bechtle were using iTop to provide support for that single banking sector client. They had processed 21 000 tickets and the iTop CMDB was populated with nearly 40 000 configuration items. “iTop just works and was stable in a very short timeframe”, Markus Peter states.
Last but not least, Bechtle also values iTop’s economic model, as software costs remain constant when volumes and the number of users increase. “The volume of users, configuration items, tickets is quite important, but there is no budget impact, it is scalable”, Markus Peter concludes.
