Clarion Events
Continually evolving Managed Service for high growth, fast paced, acquisitive global events organiser.
Clarion is one of the longest standing customers of Panoptics. Historically the services provided had been around specific technologies – LAN Support, Project management and WAN services. However, Clarion went to market to evaluate partners to provide a full Infrastructure Managed Service for the entire group and invited Panoptics to tender. Panoptics along with the incumbent provider and other suppliers were evaluated for their capability to provide services to suit Clarions’ specific requirements.
The perfect IT outsourced partner
The nature of Clarion’s business is in continuous flux, changing to meet new event and market opportunities whilst ever evolving via multiple business acquisitions to complement their global portfolio. In order to support this they required an IT partner who not only understood their sector and the specific requirements this creates but also a service design with a stable but flexible Infrastructure that enables rapid growth. As an established partner, Panoptics already had greater insight into exactly how to structure and deliver the service.
During previous IT engagements, Clarion had minimal internal IT capabilities and as a result there was a gap between the suppliers providing standard services and the translation of those services into the IT function that Clarion actually required. As a direct result, it was identified that the new service must provide a significantly closer relationship between business and supplier, along with a clear & well defined onsite presence.
The service requirements were comprehensive, including the delivery of Service Desk, onsite deskside resourcing, Infrastructure monitoring and management, alongside Service Management for deployment across the globe to approximately 550 users.
The Challenge
The delivery of IT Service Design normally leads IT providers to a centralised resource model or service delivery across many customers with large numbers of support analysts – all as a means of keeping costs down and ensuring consistency. However, this means that it’s very difficult for a provider to ‘go native’ and whilst they may be able to provide value for money and access to industry standard services, they struggle to provide tailored services to deliver IT as if it were an internally delivered service.
The Solution
Panoptics approach to Service Design is to create a POD. Rather than the traditional model of scaling service lines horizontally, the POD delivers all of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd line resources in a single team. This enables rapid triage and diagnosis of issues by avoiding calls bouncing between support teams until they find an owner. In turn this approach increases the efficiency of the team meaning that better more expensive resources are employed. All of which leads to a much better customer experience both from an end user perspective but also from the people responsible for IT. As an additional benefit of this approach it is possible, when the requirement is large enough, to create a dedicated POD that is onsite with the customer, as has been deployed at Clarion, allowing for much greater alignment of cultures which lead to further benefits and a partnership.
The service delivered now supports approximately 1000 users across 8 countries. It has also managed the IT transitions of 10+ business acquisitions in the first year alone. As Clarion continue to evolve and grow so does the Panoptics service, with the delivery now incorporating Datacentre and Hosting capabilities, 3rd party management and support of SaaS platforms. Furthermore, Panoptics provide a modular tech platform enabling Clarion to easily deploy private clouds based on enterprise technology such as VMware, HP Storage Virtualisation and Microsoft. Alongside this, a single unified backup strategy utilising Veeam has been implemented which is agile, fast to deploy, easy to manage and simple to scale. All culminating in a service that can flex and scale with any Clarion requirement including new Applications, Infrastructure or simply new businesses across the globe.
The Results
Panoptics continue to consistently meet all of the Key Performance Indicators, as well as enabling over 80% growth in the business itself. Processes and end user experience are better than they ever have been before and all at a reduced cost to Clarion.
The Benefits
We strongly believe that the delivery of this service not only validates our approach but also ensures that our employees, Clarion employees and the service itself is now aligned to enable growth and flexibility that benefits all. Panoptics employees are empowered to make decisions in a controlled environment for Clarion, end users get access to the services they need in a more personal way and Clarion as a business are able to confidently acquire new businesses and better serve their customers, assured by the knowledge that the technology will be there when they need it.