CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Australian IT Services Provider Spurs Business Growth with BMC Software’s Remedy IT Service Management

SYDNEY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Applaud, a national provider of managed IT, service desk and professional services, has steadily scaled its business to provide mission-critical services to a number of well-known Australian organisations. However, the rudimentary help desk ticketing system used for its clients was threatening to stifle growth and continuous service improvement. To eliminate this roadblock to growth, Applaud selected BMC Software’s (NASDAQ: BMC) Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM) solution.

“The biggest benefit we’re getting is being able to service our managed service customers a whole lot better by managing the lifecycle of their assets properly and helping them quickly remediate any problems.”

BMC prevailed over competitive solutions from ServiceNow, HP, and Altiris in Applaud’s rigorous vendor selection process.

“We chose the BMC platform for its scalability and alignment with the ITIL® disciplines we wanted,” said Mark Richards, Managed Services Practice Manager, Applaud. “BMC Remedy has allowed us to give our long-standing customers the confidence that we’re maturing as a business and growing with them. If you can deliver a consistent ITIL-standard, outsourced managed service that in itself is a differentiator because there are not too many companies that can do it.”

Richards continued, “The biggest benefit we’re getting is being able to service our managed service customers a whole lot better by managing the lifecycle of their assets properly and helping them quickly remediate any problems.”

The volume of tickets handled by the Applaud service desk is significant – typically receiving 6,000-7,000 per month from its 15 customers. Because of this, the improved end-to-end ticket management has delivered the greatest benefit. Measured by mean time to repair, ticket management has improved substantially. This has enabled Applaud to take a more proactive approach in terms of identifying and fixing problems, interrogating the knowledge base for support, and having complete transparency regarding what is going on at the service desk.

“BMC’s solution provides us with a superior and comprehensive IT service management platform. This enables us to go after a previously untapped sector of the market – which seeks the intimacy of an on-premises solution, with the scalability and efficiency of cloud,” said Richards.

Applaud is currently running two instances of the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite. The first is a multi-tenant instance that is available for clients who do not need a high level of configuration and integration and are happy to simply link with their active directory. The second is a dedicated instance for clients that want a more sophisticated level of integration and in some cases special branding of the Remedy tools for in-house use. Both instances are provisioned from Applaud’s cloud.

The company plans to roll out more sophisticated dashboards and analytics in order to deliver smarter and more refined reporting for customers. The company is also looking at how it can use BMC’s service request management (SRM) functionality for cloud provisioning. Currently a manual process, Applaud believes the SRM system could act as the foundation for a self-service portal for customers to provision desktop virtualisation.

According to Richards, “BMC has given us every opportunity to punch above our weight and we are doing that consistently. I look forward to the next 12-18 months as we scale this out.”

For more information on Applaud IT’s implementation of the BMC Remedy solution, please visit:

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