Success Stories
VMware's Service Manager provides a perfect fit for Country Energy’s distributed support model
One of Australia’s largest regionally based energy businesses is using VMware Service Manager to provide on-site IT support to a network of widespread and often remote centers.
Company background
Country Energy is Australia’s newest and largest regionally based energy business.
Formed in July 2001 by the merger of three energy companies, Country Energy supplies a range of services, including electricity and gas, Internet services, appliances, green energy solutions and energy management consultancy to 700,000 customers across an area covering 72% of the state of NSW.
Country Energy operates two IT Service Desks providing high level support for IT and Communications to 2,500 employees in 105 regional offices.
The combined Service Desks manage around 3,000-3,300 problems a month. A team of second level support technicians provides on-site support.
Business scenario
Country Energy provides essential services to household, commercial and business customers. Delivering these services efficiently and effectively depends heavily on ensuring that IT and communications related problems are quickly resolved.
The first challenge facing Country Energy following its formation was to have its Service Management infrastructure integrated and operational in the shortest possible time.
The second challenge was providing on-site support to a network of widespread and often remote centers. This regularly involves journeys of several hours for technicians, who need out-of-hours access to details of existing and newly logged jobs while they are ‘on the move’.
These technicians also require access to associated documentation, details of current related incidents and the company’s knowledge base.
Business solution
VMware Service Manager provided a perfect fit for Country Energy’s dispersed operations and distributed support model.
It enables incidents logged by the Service Desks to be distributed across the state and accessed 24x7, without requiring the infrastructure and administration overheads of traditional client-server architecture.
The future
Country Energy plans to extend its use of VMware Service Manager to the automation and deployment of its business processes.
The VMware Service Manager customer portal has the potential to provide employees and regional offices with the ability to self-log incidents and search the problem database.
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