Three Valleys Water has deployed a performance
management tool from Hewlett-Packard to improve its internal IT
service delivery and monitor its delivery of IT services to other
water companies.
Its IT department supports 1,200 desktops and systems for Three
Valleys Water, Folkestone & Dover Water, Tendring Hundred Water
Services and Veolia Water.
Three Valleys Water's head of information systems, John Pratten,
said, "We need to be able to give them the evidence of not only
availability but performance as well. For a long time, we could
only say the server was up. We could not say an application was
performing very well."
By deploying HP Openview, the IT department aims to identify
availability and performance problems before users contact it to
complain.
The investment has been justified on the time and cost savings
of having fewer end-users contact the helpdesk, but Pratten also
expects benefits from freeing IT staff for business development
work.
He added, "I am also looking at this tool to drive improved
investment decisions in future."
IT systems on tap
Three Valleys Water runs 1,127 applications on 140 servers. Most
of the applications are deployed as thin clients using Citrix. Only
the specialised water-utility software is deployed as thick
clients. The firm is two-thirds of the way through a migration to
Windows XP. The 850 desktops within Three Valleys Water have
already been migrated and the remaining 350 desktops, which are
based at the companies it sells services to, will be upgraded by
the end of January next year.