Global Bank Service Desk Transition

Overview

Our global Partner won the contract to provide the Managed Service Desk services in ASIAPAC for this leading global bank and Intersoft was chosen as the local Managed Service Provider for the Japanese site(s).
The kick-off for this project was in January with a gathering of the bank's ASIAPAC heads, our Partner's Programme and Project Managers along with Intersoft CEO and key staff.

Service Model and Methodology

The bank's goal was to trim down the cost of managing its service desk by outsourcing this. This required all sites in ASIAPAC to be involved in a large amount of site assessments, document gathering, knowledge-base enrichment and knowledge transfer. Unfortunately, many of the incumbent staff in the service desk needed to be moved or replaced with the managed service team - which required dealing with various sensitivities.

The 1st Level Support Desk would be provided remotely in Malaysia
The 2nd Level Service Desk would be provided locally, on-site by Intersoft's team

After a couple months of gathering data to gain visibility on the needs and resourcing requirements, the new team was hand-picked - and confirmed by the global Partner after careful screening and interviews.

The Transition Period was the most sensitive and important part of the success of this service and Intersoft brought in an experience Transition Manager to see the service from transition stage through to Managed Services.

Keys to Success

Being able to deal with all the key players from the global Partner, to the engineers - both incumbent and new as well as the bank management was vital to making sure information and communication was being moved and acted upon. In any project there is bound to be slight bumps along the way - and this was no exception - but as long as the team's mind-set is positive, the goal within range and the resources are on hand, you should always find success. Knowing the transition would be very sensitive, taxing and bumpy, we made sure we had more than enough staff - further in advance than was initially expected. All managed services will need to account for attrition, sickness and sudden events. With this in mind, we employed the core staff - along with 2 extra back-fill staff being fully trained.

Lessons Learned and Value Added

As with any event, lessons will be learned - and this was very true of this service.
As of the time of this writing (2010-08) we are past the go-live date by over one month, having provided Managed Services post-transition well within expected SLA. The transition showed many areas internally for Intersoft, the Partner and the bank where processes, procedures, communication and work-flows could be improved - which was also an expected outcome - and becomes part of the added value of the service offering. This required some pain, discussion, compromise and lots of communication.

We have no doubt that this process has provided a much better informed, more streamlined and cost-efficient service for the client - the bank - and with on-going improvements, will provide further value over the coming years.

Office Move with IMAC Service and IP Telephony (Intersoft VOIP Service)

One of our clients, a global Shipping Insurance Company headquartered in Europe, needed some immediate assistance for moving to their new office. Their new office would have the following layout;

• Lobby/Entrance
• Guest Room
• Meeting Room
• Conference Room
• Kitchen Corner
• Office Space (for about 10 staff)

The Conference room was designed specifically for conference calls and video meetings between their Japan office and HQ.

During the Project's initial discussions, it was understood that they would need to replace their old NEC PBX system with "something" new. As part of our role, we presented a number of options that included a package from NTT, USEN, PBXL and our own Intersoft VOIP Service. Given the great cost-savings and simpler implementation, our client decided to go with our VOIP Service. The following were the requirements of the Project;

• 12 x Hard-phones - with POE (Power over Ethernet)
  • 10 normal desk-top type IP Telephones
  • 2 Wireless phones
• 1 x Polycom "Octopus" type conference device
• PC & Telephony Cabling throughout the office
• Server Rack
• UPS
• 48 Port POE Switch
• Wireless Hub
• Canon Projector - for the conference room, to be connected to the Video Conferencing System
• 13 x DID - "03" Tokyo Telephone numbers

Within one month we had the details of the requirements for the project and procurement and had initiated orders.
During the second month, we had begun implementation, such as cabling, setting the Channels and DIDs.

We were working to the line on this project as we were called a bit late in the game, but on the move-in day, we had all the whole office moved, PCs set up, Projector operating and phones making and taking calls.

This project was a great success - and our VOIP Service has not had a glitch since.*

Currently our clients have installed VOIP Software on their iPhones and PCs and are completely connected with their business communications wherever they are.

* We initially set up our VOIP PBX Server on a XEN-based virtual server - and soon found that it was unstable.
We migrated our VOIP PBX Server over to a secure data center that provided Parallels Virtuozzo-based virtual server - and it has been running perfectly ever since - with zero downtime - 100% SL.