Client background

Client: A leading European energy company

Industry: Utility

Products/Services: Power, electricity, and gas

Area of operations: Across Europe

Number of employees: Over 30,000

Challenge

The client has a disparate estate of over 3,000 servers, 5.5 million batch job instances, and more than 230 critical applications in a diverse landscape containing a mix of applications hosted on-premise and public cloud.

The client embarked on a journey of digital transformation with automation as an integral part of the endeavour. Bringing automation in the complex landscape of such a vast distribution network was a huge challenge. Majority of activities were manual and great efforts were spent on non-scheduled and ticketed activities, like provisioning new servers, databases[UK(M1] [BG(M2] , proactive alerts, service requests like enabling access to AIX Servers, re-setting password for Solaris root, user creation, etc. There was limited transparency on operational performance parameters for consistent improvement and automation initiatives. A lot of time was being spent on manual reporting.

Solution

Wipro implemented a phase-based service improvement program. It started with identifying key areas for automation across ticketed (alerts/service requests) and non-ticketed activities in infrastructure and application services.

Wipro HOLMES™, Wipro’s next gen artificial intelligence and automation solution platform, performed the following tasks for the client:

• Provided automated service provisioning of servers, databases and multiple other services[BG(M3] , which included updates made to financial portals for effective resource unit billing
• Offered cognitive infrastructure management solution that automates individual operational tasks, thus offering zero manual intervention. Over 30 use cases, identified across Wintel, AIX, Oracle DB, SQL DB, Solaris application management, were addressed with HOLMES orchestration solutions
• Brought proactive monitoring to business-critical applications using Wipro HOLMES Application Health Check. HOLMES automated health check of 50+ applications
• Automated reporting and provided transparent governance dashboards for service performance and capacity management by providing operations insight
• Automated test regression suites
• Deployed Predictive Insight in UK business unit to forecast future alert trends based on historic data, thus moving from descriptive to predictive analytics

Business Impact

The client successfully brought in automation to its complex infrastructure and application landscape through Wipro HOLMES and enabled greater efficiencies across the organization leveraging Wipro’s proactive infrastructure management solution, monitoring solution for applications and automated reporting.

 Wipro HOLMES delivered several high-impact benefits:

• 50-70% reduction in the turnaround time for complex datacentre activities
• Transparency in cost due to real time update in finance reports, which provided visibility on the actual resource units being utilized
• High adoption of shift left methodology - most service requests are either, closed through automation or L1 support
• 25% of infrastructure alerts serviced without manual intervention
• 65%  reduction in incidents related to infrastructure
• 50% reduction in application maintenance due to issues being identified proactively by automation causing improved business continuity
• Resolution of 70% of application service requests the same day, leading to enhanced user experience
• Standardization of application health check process and reduced manual effort due to automation
• Elimination of unplanned business outage and enablement of well-informed decisions with predictive analysis

“Wipro HOLMES™,  through its cognitive capabilities, helped the client in overcoming the challenges of bringing automation in a complex landscape across data centre management, applications support and application development. Through its proactive infrastructure management solution, monitoring solution for business-critical applications and automated reporting, Wipro delivered enhanced customer satisfaction”

Suresh Kakkar – Head of Cloud Infrastructure Services Automation, Wipro