Spark Ventures adopts ‘cloud first’ to IT service management

Peter Yates, head of operations and platform delivery at Spark Ventures, shares the steps taken before the group implemented BMC RemedyForce.

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“Cloud first is our mantra,” says Peter Yates, head of operations and platform delivery at

Spark Ventures, which delivers digital services through businesses that include Bigpipe and Lightbox.

Spark Ventures applied this perspective as they revamped their IT service management system. They identified the need to achieve speed and agility as they operate in fast evolving markets.

“The main challenge was we did not have an IT service management solution across all our ventures,” says Yates.

“We could not get good reporting out of the existing system and could not escalate tickets as well,” he states. “The incidents were tracked by email. It was very time consuming.”

“We wanted cloud first wherever we could, and that led me to look at ITSM solutions.”

Related:CIO to COO: Lessons from the cloud Peter Yates at Spark Ventures discusses how his experiences in consumption based IT services can be transposed to his new domain – operations.

In September last year, Spark Ventures implemented BMC RemedyForce, a cloud based product built on Salesforce.com’s platform.

Spark Ventures was already using Salesforce, making the integration between the two systems very simple, says Yates.

Remedy Force met 90 per cent of their requirements “out of the box” and needed very little customisation, he states.

Get good user cases for your business to test in advance

Peter Yates, Spark Ventures

Speed was one of the benefits as automation helps the team resolve issues and implement changes in hours instead of days. The reports are also automatically emailed to business owners. As well, the detailed reports empower the support teams to set relevant response SLAs, with 98 per cent compliance in a recent month.

"Operational staff were freed to work on other business priorities," says Yates.

His key advice for enterprises checking out cloud based ITSM? “Make sure you understand your requirements.”

“Get good user cases for your business to test in advance,” he adds. “It makes a big difference to go through all these steps to ensure you test how you will use the tool, and make sure it addresses your requirements.”

He says he spoke to customer references prior to the implementation, which was completed in six weeks. These companies were also “in the same boat” using Salesforce and combining these with manual processes.