CASE STUDY: CAPGEMINI
October 4, 2019
Capgemini successfully upgrades customer’s BMC Remedy ITSM system using Alderstone CMT.
A GLOBAL LEADER IN CONSULTING, TECHNOLOGY SERVICES AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, CAPGEMINI IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF INNOVATION TO ADDRESS THE ENTIRE BREADTH OF CLIENTS’ OPPORTUNITIES IN THE EVOLVING WORLD OF CLOUD, DIGITAL AND PLATFORMS.
A global leader in consulting, technology and outsourcing services, the Group reported 2016 global revenues of €12.5bn. Together with its clients, Capgemini creates and delivers business, technology and digital solutions that fit their needs, enabling them to achieve innovation and competitiveness.
A deeply multicultural organisation, Capgemini has developed its own way of working, the Collaborative Business Experience, and draws on Rightshore, its worldwide delivery model.
Learn more at www.capgemini.com.
CAPGEMINI SUCCESSFULLY UPGRADES CUSTOMER’S BMC REMEDY ITSM SYSTEM USING CMT
Remedy ITSM upgrades for Capgemini outsourcing’s customers were challenging. The complex upgrade process combined with resource-constraints resulted in long change freezes and a high frequency of post go-live issues. Customer perceptions of the service were negatively impacted.
Capgemini used CMT to simplify the upgrade process and deliver an on-time, on-budget, ‘non-event’ upgrade for a customer, regarded as a major success
by both the customer and account executives.
THE CHALLENGE
Remedy ITSM upgrade process impacts the customer’s service and the bottom line.
Capgemini outsourcing provide BMC Remedy ITSM as a component of managed services to their customers. However, the conventional BMC Remedy ITSM upgrade process used by Capgemini was not working.
- Long-running upgrade projects and difficult-to-manage change freezes lasting several months resulted in customer frustration at not being able to effectively use the service
- Unexpected issues occurred during and after the project due to silent failures during the upgrade process
- A high number of post-go-live issues required high levels of support and caused business disruption for the customer
- Resource-intensive data synchronization using DDM
Customer satisfaction was frequently impacted by an upgrade, consequently upgrades were repeatedly postponed, particularly for sensitive clients.
THE SOLUTION
Transform the upgrade process using CMT.
Capgemini purchased CMT to support a programme of consolidation and upgrades
across their Global outsourcing division.
Using CMT, Capgemini were able to implement an alternative upgrade methodology for the upgrade of their customer’s BMC Remedy ITSM on-premise system that avoided the challenges of the conventional Copy & Upgrade approach.
CMT enabled Capgemini to use the Fresh Install & Migrate methodology that has the following key benefits:
- Significantly reduced change freeze and impact on the customer
- Simpler, cheaper and less resource intensive upgrade process
- Fewer post-go-live issues
Rather than taking a copy of the existing system and upgrading it, Capgemini were able to rapidly build a standard out-of-the-box ITSM 8.1 system and transfer the customisations being used by the customer. This not only reduced the duration of the application change freeze to just two weeks, with a very limited scope and no impact to CMDB reconciliation, but also resulted in a clean and stable application platform.
This compared very favourably to the previous experience of silent and unpredictable failures during the upgrade process, post-go-live issues, and change freezes lasting several months.
Despite resource constraints for both the customer and Capgemini teams the upgrade was delivered using the new methodology on-time and to-budget and required no additional post-go-live support effort.
Initially, we couldn't believe that CMT could deliver everything that was promised, it just seemed too good to be true. However, we were delighted to find that the results really did match the marketing... this thing really works!
– John Lantouris, Project Manager, Capgemini
Our cutover was incredibly smooth and fast, and the go-live has been a success with both end users and engineers with no service impacting issues. Using CMT has resulted in this major upgrade being a non-event and our customer and account teams are delighted.
– Roger Deblock, Technical Lead, Capgemini
PROJECT ANALYSIS
As with most real-world projects, this customer’s upgrade is not the perfect template for an ITSM upgrade project. Common issues such as customer resource constraints, production support and architecture issues impacted the timeline.
To provide a fair comparison, we contrasted the timeline and activities for the customer’s upgrade using the same Fresh Install & Migrate methodology with just one difference; substituting the conventional data migration tool (BMC DDM) instead of CMT to perform the data migration.
Capgemini’s customer went live on BMC Remedy ITSM 8.1 in mid-July 2015, using the conventional BMC data migration tools the go-live would have been early-Decemember 2015, a difference of over five months.
TRANSFORM THE UPGRADE PROCESS USING CMT
DATA MIGRATION PERFORMANCE
CMT migrated the entire customer’s Remedy data set of 68 million Remedy records in less than ten hours.
Using the conventional BMC Remedy tools this would have taken 3 months to perform the initial migration, during which time the data would have been three months out of date, requiring additional catch-up data migrations to complete the same task.
The data migration of 18 million Remedy records during the cutover weekend was completed within 4 hours. Performing the same migration with conventional BMC Remedy tools would have required an 24 day outage.
For a typical upgrade it is necessary to perform multiple “catchup” or “delta” data migrations to ensure that data is up to date for testing and that the go-live outage time is kept to a reasonable limit. However, the customer’s upgrade was performed with only one delta data migration to ensure that during cutover, data could be migrated within a four hour window. CMT significantly reduced the overall effort and complexity.
| TASK | BMC TOOLS | CMT |
|---|---|---|
| Full Migration | 3 Months | 10 Hours |
| Customer Migration | 24 Days | 4 Hours |
KEY COMPARISONS
CMT is able to migrate all data for all ITSM modules meaning that little to no change freeze is required during the upgrade process. However, conventional tools do not support migration of the data from all ITSM modules and require manual migration of some modules early in the upgrade process. Consequently, a change freeze must be imposed at an early stage.
The impact and challenges of managing
an eight month change freeze on the user community should not be underestimated. In the worst case scenario, it may be necessary to restart an in-flight project due to a failure to adhere to an onerous change freeze.
| Comparison | DDM (working days) | CMT (working days) | Reduction (working days) | Reduction % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall Time to Live | 203 | 102 | 101 | 50% |
| Change Freeze Duration | 167 | 10 | 157 | 94% |
| Data Migration Effort | 167 | 20 | 147 | 88% |
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