An All-In Package in just Three Steps

Most people rely on experts who know their business.This principle from everyday life is being taken up by more and more businesses for their IT.

 

An important executive decision needed to be made when the Ista Group recently moved its German head office from Münster to Essen in order to bring it under the same roof as its international headquarters. The Group meters power, water and ancillary costs for consumers worldwide . The Group’s executive management needed to decide whether Ista would set up a new computer center of its own, or whether to outsource its IT infrastructure from now on. “These days it is hardly worthwhile for a medium-sized business like ours to build and run a new computer center ourselves”, says Guido Müller, director of the computer center at Ista Shared Services GmbH, the IT service provider of the Ista Group. That’s why the Group decided to conclude a so-called housing contract with T-Systems. This means that the servers and mainframes are brought together in a single computer center, run by T-Systems. 

Fluid transition

Housing contracts like that with Ista are part of T-Systems’ hosting portfolio. This is aimed at businesses who wish to outsource their IT infrastructure and operations to a professional provider. Medium-sized businesses, in particular, can save costs and minimize risks, while still benefiting from a more flexible and powerful IT system. The hosting portfolio consists of three stages. “The transitions between the various stages are fluid”, explains Jörg Glöckner of T-Systems, who is responsible for product Management IT: “Each customer can select precisely the stage that suits him”.

Stage one is Housing. Customers retain ownership of their hardware and software, but house it in a high-tech, secure computer center, where specialists ensure optimum storage and connections. The second stage is so-called Managed Hosting. In this case, customers lease the systems in the computer center. The staff at the center look after the running of the basic software. The third stage is Dynamic Services. In this case, the customer entrusts the operation of its hardware and software completely to T-Systems. Resources such as storage space, computing capacity or applications increased or decreased to order, even at short notice. The customer only pays for what he uses.

No worries

This service is used by pharmaceuticals company PharmaZell GmbH from Raubling near Rosenheim, for example. T-Systems provides the company with the necessary infrastructure in its own computer center in Düsseldorf, where a partner company runs the Microsoft Navision ERP system as a dynamic service. “We no longer need to worry about this and can concentrate entirely on our own core business”, says PharmaZell’s IT manager Detlef Belstler. “This is a genuinely care-free package”.