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Staff&Line UK Publishes Haymarket Result
Published 6th January 2009
St Albans, UK, 5th January 2008: Staff&Line UK Ltd, a European leader in IT management solutions, today announced that it has won a major new contract with global media company, Haymarket Media Group Ltd. Haymarket Media has selected Staff&Line’s EasyVista 2008 IT management solution to support its IT Service Improvement Programme. Haymarket Media is using EasyVista 2008 to underpin ITIL processes, introducing IT service level management into the business for the first time.
EasyVista is being implemented across Haymarket Media’s UK sites with main offices situated in Hammersmith and Teddington in South West London. The new service management system will support over 1,800 staff running a mix of Windows PCs and Apple Macs. With a wide range of media products and a complex IT infrastructure, the demands on Haymarket Media’s IT department are high. Haymarket publishes over 100 magazine titles both in print and online and includes household names such as What Car?, Stuff Magazine and its B2B publishing arm also boasts market-leading titles such as Campaign and PR Week. Haymarket also has a sizeable exhibitions business running events such as Good Food Live, Clothes Show Live and Autosport Live. This means that employees are often working remotely and require timely, expert support.
EasyVista was selected over and above a number of other service desk solutions which included leading vendors such as Axios, Hornbill and Touchpaper in an extremely rigorous and highly competitive selection process. Simon Turner, IT Director for Haymarket explains:
“Implementing EasyVista was part of a wider strategic service management improvement plan. At the beginning of 2008 we set out an ambitious Action Plan that included an overhaul of IT’s relationship with the business, one of the things that we identified very early on was that we lacked a tool to underpin improvements in services. We were looking to generate a new service catalogue and using the ITIL v2 process template, introduce service level management, problem management, and improve existing configuration management, incident, change and release processes, but we didn’t have a tool to help us achieve this.
“We therefore started to research and evaluate appropriate products. After looking at a number of service management solutions we very quickly short-listed two products which really stood out - Staff&Line’s EasyVista and Axios Systems’ Assyst.”
The two remaining competing products were evaluated head-to-head against a key requirements document. In particular Haymarket was looking for an easy way to create incidents, offering a robust solution, as the incumbent Help Desk tool was proving very unreliable and a more efficient way to manage and close over 2,000 monthly incidents was required.
The selection process included the publishing of a formal requirements document, reviewed by all parties, visits to reference sites to see both solutions working to understand how the products might develop when integrated with business process over a period of years, and a review by external consultants.
“From a functionality perspective the two products were comparable but we chose EasyVista because Staff&Line’s project planning, implementation and support services were second to none. Staff&Line is a great organisation with experienced professionals who have a track record not only with ITIL and IT service management but the organisation also understands how to successfully project manage what for Haymarket was a major implementation. This is what closed the deal for us.”
Haymarket is one month into ‘go-live’ of phase 1 with phase 2 starting in early 2009. The implementation went extremely well with Staff&Line’s support. Additionally as Staff&Line was able to provide remote support, response times were exceptionally fast when dealing with any small snagging issues.
Andrew Highland, Managing Director for Staff&Line UK comments: “EasyVista is probably one of the best kept secrets in the market, but it won’t be for long. Organisations are looking to realise value from their service management solutions and be in control of their service environment. Given the economic downturn, CIOs everywhere are going to be asked, “Okay, what can you do to help us get through this recession and from a vendor perspective it is simply not enough to just deliver a product. Companies everywhere will be looking for value-add services and Staff&Line works that bit harder to deliver this.”
Simon Turner concludes: “Phase 2 will include the implementation of Self Service, which with over 1,800 employees will prove very beneficial. This will be a challenge with 600 Mac users wanting to close incidents though the Web Interface, as we have a dual operating system environment. However I am confident that with EasyVista this won’t be an issue.”