Global Crossing benefits from Digital Fuel IT cost management solution

SAN MATEO, USA: Digital Fuel, the leader in On-Demand IT Cost Visibility solutions, today announced that Global Crossing has put Digital Fuel’s ServiceFlow IT Cost Management and Service Level Management applications to work as a core business application to reduce service costs, drive efficiencies, and help ensure world-class delivery times for its service portfolio.

Using ServiceFlow, Global Crossing has improved tracking for a number of its telecommunications services by merging financial data from numerous sources into a single business application that automatically aggregates margin and cost information tied back to specific services.

“ServiceFlow is not intended to replace Business Intelligence, data warehousing or reporting tools. Instead, we find it to be a powerful augmentation to those tools,” said Tim Hallowell, chief architect for Global Crossing.

“We use ServiceFlow for three purposes: to analyze revenue, costs and margins for our services; to measure service performance; and to better manage our end-to-end service delivery cycle. In so doing, ServiceFlow helps us continually improve our services, our cost to serve, our profitability, and our customer satisfaction.”

Global Crossing is one of the world’s foremost IP solutions providers, offering voice, data and video services to 40 percent of the Fortune 500 as well as to 700 carriers, mobile operators and ISPs around the globe.

With operations on six continents, Global Crossing uses an advanced service delivery model to bundle its products into comprehensive, integrated solutions. With ServiceFlow, Global Crossing can analyze costs and margins associated with the delivery of each solution to improve efficiency and accurately distribute charges based on automated cost allocations.

ServiceFlow is Digital Fuel’s suite of Web-based solutions that helps service organizations cost, price, bill, charge for, and control IT spend and usage. The IT Cost Management application provides the cost visibility necessary to operate a service organization like a well-managed business, reducing costs in an optimized way for maximum business benefit.

“Global Crossing is a leading global service organization,” said Yisrael Dancziger, CEO of Digital Fuel. “The company’s entire business depends upon a disciplined approach to managing service costs. That they’ve chosen Digital Fuel as a driver for their overall customer- and business-facing service management initiatives is a testament to ServiceFlow’s position as an industry-standard solution for service cost management from a business perspective.”

Proactive service cost management
According to Hallowell, ServiceFlow is serving as a unified decision support system for revenue and margin analysis at Global Crossing. He explained that ServiceFlow helps Global Crossing normalize the disparate data sources that are inherent in a large organization and transforms them into a new level of business information invaluable for making better, proactive service decisions.

“Whether we need to get data out of general ledger, Sybase, SQLserver, DB2, spreadsheets or billing systems, ServiceFlow will dynamically pull that data into its unified platform and automatically create a new level of business information with cost and margin visibility,” he noted.

Service delivery analysis
While Global Crossing currently uses ServiceFlow primarily for product-centric revenue, cost and margin tracking, notification and analysis, the company is exploring ways to exploit more of the application’s Service Level Management (SLM) capabilities as well.

“We are always looking to get more efficient. With ServiceFlow, we’re able to better manage our product delivery cycle, since even a one-day improvement, multiplied many times over, will improve our bottom line,” Hallowell stated.

Since implementing ServiceFlow at Global Crossing, the application is making believers of executives and managers who in the past used various reporting tools to track revenue and margins.

“We keep finding new ways for ServiceFlow to provide benefits without the pains of trying to do it with other tools like a data warehouse that ServiceFlow is designed to quickly augment,” commented Hallowell.

“It uniquely complements our existing tools and brings a business process automation approach to managing our services that is focused on services, customers, cost drivers, and our business objectives. ServiceFlow quickly turns isolated data into unified business level information for better decision making. The new level of business information, and the speed at which we are pulling it together, are extremely impressive.”