ILAYO Software Solutions, a local black empowerment ICT company, has signed a three-year agreement with international enterprise software company Peregrine Systems Inc., to act as local representative of Peregrine’s range of infrastructure management solutions in SA and Africa. The agreement also includes software licensing and experience and skills transfers.
The company says that it will be responsible for sales, support and professional services for all of Peregrine’s products throughout the continent. It has established a 24×7 help desk for customer support.
“Peregrine and iLAYO share the same vision, that of pushing the message of consolidation in service and Asset Management to market,” says iLAYO MD, Inana Nkanza. “Together we want to impress on the market how important infrastructure management is for business today. The relationship with Peregrine reflects our wish to provide solutions and educate companies on the importance of good infrastructure management.”
According to Nkanza, Peregrine’s asset and service management solutions enable companies to accurately measure the performance of their ICT infrastructures. Nkanza says, “iLAYO has a focused, process-driven approach to infrastructure management.
Companies have got lost in their ICT, and, instead of managing it for the business’s sake, it is managed as a separate entity. We bring to market the understanding that ICT is a business tool and must be properly managed as such.”
On the service management side, iLAYO says it will market ServiceCenter, Peregrine’s consolidated service desk solution. New business development manager at iLAYO, Jose de Nobrega, says, “Many companies have service or help desk functionality scattered around the different business units. Using ServiceCenter to consolidate all of the service desks enables a company to improve service across the business units, save costs, create common processes and reduce the number of vendors that need to be dealt with.”
Service desks have tended to be reactive in nature; but Gartner’s maturity model indicates the need to move away from this chaotic, reactive state to a more proactive, service-aligned help desk.
De Nobrega says in order to make this move from reactive to proactive, companies need to conduct root cause analysis and implement change management in the organization.
“Change management is difficult to implement in a company as it involves changing processes and policies, but it is important because by managing change a company can reduce the amount of risk it is exposed to. ServiceCenter provides the tools for a company to consolidate its service centres, and to perform change management and root cause analysis,” he notes.
According to iLAYO, Peregrine’s Desktop Inventory and Network Discovery tools enable companies to create an inventory of all their ICT assets. “Desktop Inventory provides an in-depth inventory of the desktop environment by automatically discovering and tracking hardware and software information, which can be directly leveraged by ServiceCenter and AssetCenter, Peregrine’s Asset Management solution,” says De Nobrega.
Network Discovery is a real time, fully Web-based network discovery, mapping and management solution. The port-to-port physical topology map and inventory of the network provides a company with a reality-based view of the ICT infrastructure. “Over and above managing a company’s assets, these tools ease support and service,” De Nobrega says.
“When a user calls the service desk with a problem, the technician has a complete view of what is on that user’s desk and can assist faster than if he was trying to gather information about the asset presenting the problem.”
With pressure from the business, ICT managers are being forced to do more with less, De Nobrega says. To do this, they need to know what they have and must be able to measure it. “Peregrine’s AssetCenter allows a company effectively to manage its assets, from the moment an asset is acquired to its disposal, and the status of existing assets within a company. AssetCenter provides out-of-the-box functionality, enabling a company to gather all information about an asset and track that asset throughout its lifecycle.”
Nkanza concludes, “We want to echo what Peregrine does and not let ICT run out of control. We believe that with the areas that we are focusing on, and the assistance of Peregine’s offerings, there can be an alignment between ICT and business.”
