Outsourcing as a Road to Partnership

CASE STUDY
Managed Services

Outsourcing
as a Road to Partnership

CASE STUDY
Managed Services

From the IT aspect, DDOR Novi Sad is an insurance company that has always been innovative and technologically driven. This is also demonstrated by the fact that one of the first mainframe devices in the country, more than 30 years ago, was used by DDOR, and was managed directly from Manchester, UK!

How much DDOR is an advanced and modern company is also evidenced in the fact that in the last ten years or more they have an innovative and regulated IT sector that follows the latest trends in technology - from virtualization of infrastructure, database organization to disaster recovery and organized backup infrastructure ... So, infrastructure layers are well organized, and their IT sector can be said to work perfectly!

More than 10 years ago, DDOR started with managed services for its core IT infrastructure and IT services. During this time, their IT sector actively participated, through the consideration of the needs of business processes, the development of infrastructure, the expansion of business applications, etc. In fact, we can say that DDOR is one of the pioneers in our country that began to apply managed services as an IT support model.

When a user is innovative, both in terms of IT and business model, then it is easy to achieve effective collaboration. They are not only clients, but partners with whom we successfully implement the most complicated projects. Such a partner for us is DDOR Novi Sad.

What did we do with our managed service user?

In this project, Saga has done „roll out“ of infrastructure through an outsourcing model. We modernized the equipment, we made a new "sizing" infrastructure, in fact, we changed the generations in an infrastructure view, and we optimized the existing resources (for example, there was a small number of servers, because additional virtualization of the infrastructure was done). 

In addition to the aforementioned outsourcing infrastructure model, some additional services have been introduced: Microsoft Exchange administration, reporting and monitoring, VMware virtualization and others, which led us to take a step further in managed services. Thus, we did not only the maintenance and outsourcing of the infrastructure, but also we have introduced advanced services through this project.

Why is this solution better for the client?

With outsourcing, the total financial resources that the client should allocate are smaller, and an investment can be treated as an operating cost, which can be planned and controlled in the long run.

The most important advantage of outsourcing, in these long-term projects, is that with the credible partner, such as Saga, the company can count on long-term, fair and quality support, as well as the dispersion of IT operational risks. A small number of incidents that arise are resolved within the existing SLA efficiently and in very short deadlines.

Users rely on the model of services guaranteed by the contract, which is raised to a much higher level within the outsourcing. Saga provides knowledge, spare parts and support within very strict deadlines. This way, client’s internal IT sector gets the flexibility to, in addition to spending smaller budgets, provide an infrastructure that it considers as adequate business support and which will be functional and available to end-users whenever necessary. The company itself receives a strategic partner in the further development of its IT and IT operations. Therefore, they can address other strategic issues and let us perform day-to-day operational tasks. 

After a year, the first phase of the data center equipping was completed with the appropriate storage, network infrastructure and virtualization servers. The implementation itself lasted for three months, while for the next year of the operations, under the SLA contract, full support was provided by Saga to DDOR.

That's why the project got its sequel.

With the confidence gained from the results of the first phase, we have begun the second phase, which has a focus on an additional expansion of IT infrastructure to the level that is expected to be sufficient for the next five years.

Confirmation that outsourcing is the right choice is important not only for this specific project, but above all for expanding the areas of cooperation and joint development of the future IT strategy. Thanks to this project, another one was implemented parallel to this one - the outsourcing of equipment for customer support

The future surely brings new forms of cooperation. The current quality of work and the implementation of adequate solutions are certainly the most important factors that have led to new discussions with DDOR about some future projects in which, we are sure, our partnership will further develop and deepen.