We are Corporate Vendor Members of the itSMF in the US, UK and Australia and have an individual membership in Germany. We have ISEB certified field engineers. All of our US field sales and support engineers have attended ISEB certified training courses presented by CCS, a global provider of IT Service Management training. Our ITIL reference clients include Abbey Bank, DFS Air Traffic Control (Germany), Talkline Communications, Toyota and Qualcomm. Proxima Technology was the world's first IT vendor to support Six Sigma in an ITIL Service Delivery context, beginning in 2001.

Preferred Solutions Partner

Jorg Kundler, Head of IT Services, DFS

"Proxima Technology most definitely stands alone in designing its product around Six Sigma practices and procedures very early on. Two to three years ago, Proxima took a stand that Six Sigma would become important for IT service management and moved forward to build a product with Six Sigma functionality.”

Lisa Erickson-Harris, Enterprise Management Associates, 2003

Centauri Business Service Manager and ITIL

Centauri provides comprehensive support for the Service Level Management function of ITIL Service Delivery and provides integration to ITIL Service Support to provide a comprehensive solution for organizations embracing this best practice. It allows IT organizations to capture, measure and track user perception of service; create service catalogs; define, monitor and publish adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs); automatically alert administrators to service breaches and manage the configuration that provides a service. As a result, IT organizations have the information they need to continuously improve service -- responding faster to intermittent problems and eliminating fundamental architectural or configuration flaws that inhibit service.

Service Level Management - Centauri Business Service Manager underpins ITIL Service Level Management (SLM), allowing IT organizations to maintain and improve business-aligned IT service quality. It ensures Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) and other contracts are met and that adverse impact on service quality is minimized. These activities center around the definition of SLAs that are meaningful, maintainable and measurable, providing information that allows business executives to determine the value of IT to the overall business.

Planning the Process - SLM planning begins with identifying critical business processes and gaining insight into the user's perception of the service being delivered in these areas. Centauri provides a unique solution by allowing IT to survey users' perception of service via Web-based questionnaires. This information gives the SLM project team vital information which is used to scope the service problem, provide baselines to measure improvements, calibrate SLAs based on meaningful "real word" data, and track user perception of service against the actual service at any given point in time.

Implementing the Process - During ITIL SLM implementations, service catalogs are produced that list each service together with information about who is responsible for the system and other background information. These are derived in part from information gathered by Voice of the Customer (VOC) user surveys. Service catalogs defined in Centauri with each service decomposed into detailed SLA specifications are monitored automatically by Centauri. Multi-tiered SLAs can be defined as service- or customer-based according to the ITIL SLM process. For efficiency, SLA components can be shared across services. Centauri's tree-like definition also allows the SLM project team to analyze and implement similar SLAs that differ by location.

A critical success factor for any SLA is that it is measurable. The complexity of distributed computing environments means there will be many sources of data for the service calculation and the SLA will inevitably be cross-technology and cross-platform. Centauri integrates with a wide range of data collectors. Multiple collectors can provide data for analysis within any single SLA. Data collectors include proprietary management tools, such as BMC Software PATROL; native interfaces, such as Microsoft WMI; and industry standards such as SNMP. Adaptors are also available to collect status data directly from applications such as Oracle, SAP and e-mail systems

Ongoing Process - Centauri provides support for the ongoing SLM process by retrieving measurement data, calculating service compliance and providing reports. Reports show current service as well as service by hour, day, week and month. Reports are extensible and are easily tailored to meet the requirements of business users and IT personnel: allowing users to track service and IT personnel establish the causes of service problems. Color coding and other graphic symbols can be used to further annotate the report and add meaning. For example, a service breach can be highlighted with a red traffic signal. Where service breaches and other critical problems occur, Centauri alerts the responsible parties. With this feature, system administrators and operations personnel are immediately notified of problems by either pager or e-mail.

Service Support - Centauri integrates with tools that support ITIL Service Support through the Centauri Service Support Integrator Module. This provides bidirectional links to your help desk and configuration management database (CMDB). Integration with help desks allows trouble-tickets can be raised or closed automatically. Integration with the CMDB allows configuration item (CI) changes applied in the CMDB to automatically update Centauri's service catalog.

For more information

Please visit the downloads section where you will find additional success stories, data sheets, white papers and news items.