CUSTOMER SUCCESS: THAI Flies High with BMC Software

Airline empowers business users and enhances customer service with BMC

BANGKOK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The reputation of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited (THAI), the national carrier of the Kingdom of Thailand, is unsurpassed in the airline industry. Famous for its ability to both retain customers and attract new ones, THAI drives a culture of rapid innovation, agility and operational efficiency in the face of fluctuating market conditions and changing passenger preferences. The company has been a tremendous success in an industry filled with many challenges, posting continued strong growth.

“We worked closely with BMC Consulting Services, which developed an installation and configuration blueprint that led to BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management being fully deployed in our test, development and production environments.”

To capitalize on significant new market opportunities, the carrier decided to consolidate and streamline the management of its business processes onto a company-wide private cloud. To achieve this, THAI added the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management product to its already extensive portfolio of solutions from BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC).

“THAI realized a cloud-based solution could deliver the speed that the business needed without sacrificing the governance and efficiency that the IT group depended upon,” said Mr. Saroj Yuttatri, THAI Vice President of Information Technology Services Department. “We worked closely with BMC Consulting Services, which developed an installation and configuration blueprint that led to BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management being fully deployed in our test, development and production environments.”

THAI has more than 24,000 employees and a fleet of nearly 100 aircraft deployed around the world to serve the needs of millions of flying customers each year. Agility – from the individual employee all the way to the entire business – is key to success in the rapidly evolving business of commercial flight.

To enable this culture, the airline has made significant investments in leading-edge information technologies to streamline and manage its operations. THAI had a robust and reliable IT infrastructure, but its largely manual server and business service provisioning process introduced roadblocks for business users who wanted to quickly roll out new applications to better serve customers. The airline’s IT department realized that cloud computing offered the opportunity for even greater reform that would more tightly integrate IT processes with business service priorities, which were themselves shaped by an overarching desire to continue to delight customers.

In August 2012, the airline went live with a state-of-the-art cloud computing system, allowing key business personnel to automatically dial up computer power, storage and business services necessary to stay ahead of the game. As a result of adopting the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution, THAI achieved the following benefits:

• Business solutions that might have taken weeks to provision are now up and running 85 percent faster than before.
• With transparent access to the service level catalogue and a granular understanding of the costs associated with information technology, the business users are now in the driver’s seat.
• IT administrators have confidence that proper governance processes are being observed and that the BMC solution automatically manages the day-to-day management of patches, upgrades and maintenance required by the newly deployed solution.
• IT professionals who were previously spending much of their time manually provisioning servers and business services have been redeployed to more strategic IT activities.

“The business benefits are clear; instead of waiting two, three or four weeks, business users can go into the portal, select the marketing service they want, provision the number of servers and storage systems they need and then share the user IDs of people who will have access to the system. As a result they get a faster go-to-market in a competitive situation,” said Ms. Wannikar Chuanpraphan, THAI department manager for Systems and Network Technical Support.

Ultimately, THAI will provide wide access to the platform, allowing authorized business executives to increase the computing power and services they deem necessary to maintain and grow the airline’s competitive position.

THAI is now embarking on the second phase of its deployment of the Cloud Lifecycle Management solution, which will leverage the BMC Cloud Operations Management tools to provide business users provisioning services with a view of what servers, storage and systems are available ahead of time. This will help avoid situations where a business user attempts to provision a service only to receive an error message noting that, for example, the appropriate levels of storage are not currently available.

This functionality is expected to be rolled out in early 2013, again putting the power in the hands of business users and ultimately enhancing customer service.

BMC Consulting Services worked with local reseller and systems integrator, Songkhla Finishing, to implement the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution at THAI.

BMC Software has delivered a complete solution with integrated product modules that include:

• BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management
• BMC Cloud Operations Management

For more information on THAI’s implementation of the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution, please:

• Read the full case study
• Watch the THAI video
• Access the BMC Cloud Communities
• Visit the On the Mark blog
• Follow @BMCSoftware on Twitter
• Become a fan of BMC on Facebook

Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software.

Business runs better when IT runs at its best. Tens of thousands of IT organizations around the world -- from small and mid-market businesses to the Global 100 -- rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives with the broadest choice of IT management solutions, including industry-leading Business Service Management and Cloud Management offerings. For the four fiscal quarters ended December 31, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion. www.bmc.com

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