As operating costs and resource requirements to manage large enterprise systems increase, many organisations are turning to a Managed Cloud Service or Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
For businesses using Maximo, the benefits of using a Managed Cloud Service are:
- Reduced risk
- Cost efficiencies
- Allows you to focus on day-to-day operations
Peacock Engineering is an experienced IBM Gold Business Partner with a strong track record of providing Managed Cloud Service for over a decade.
Our dedicated specialists focus solely on tailoring a Maximo® Managed Cloud Service offering that is right for you, while continually providing new innovations designed to enhance the service.
The customer service team ensures that clients view us as their Managed Cloud Service partner of choice, providing peace of mind around licencing, hosting and support.
Allowing the experts at Peacock Engineering to manage the service leaves you free to concentrate on your business. At the core of our Managed Cloud service delivery is excellent customer service.
Customer Service – at the core of what we do
Peacock Engineering’s Managed Cloud Service is about much more than being just a secure and reliable hosting and support partner. Peacock Engineering’s cloud customers can use our innovations such as:
- license management tools
- automated deployments and testing
- short term Sandbox provision
These are all delivered as part of the service to truly help clients transform. We try to integrate and be an extension of internal teams, and bring our relationships with partners such as IBM to the table.
Support for your industry
The 24/7 Helpdesk is not purely ticket or incident management; our Maximo® trained Support Consultants are proactive in their approach to Customer Service.
Often drawn from the industries we serve, each team member is given the opportunity to use their project and service management skills to deliver an analytical and methodical investigation to identify root-causal factors.
Part of their role is to learn the operations of each client, consult the service management agreements and devise Statement of Works & Purchase orders for minor changes, and manage these from start to finish.
We focus on 6 main industry sectors:
- Facilities Management
- Energy & Utilities
- Life Sciences
- Manufacturing
- Oil and Gas
- Transport
With challenges and priorities differing across these industries, there is also an increasing importance of non-functional requirements like security and service delivery.
Reliability
A reliable system is essential – which is why our primary hosting provider is Rackspace. Their leading
international standard certifications combined with our high availability options and load balancing minimises any disruption by routing traffic to an alternative service source.
We can also offer clustered server architectures for improved scalability. Regular backups and disaster recovery mirroring to replicated environments in separate geographical locations, guarantees clients the reliability they need for compliance.
All hosted production environments carry full 24/7/365 incident support for any incident or problem which may cause any kind of unplanned outage or unscheduled business disturbance. Incidents such as system services, server resources, high capacity or URL availability are constantly monitored and any critical severity incidents of unplanned service outage are dealt with instantly.
Secure, Flexible, Scalable
Security
Data security and information control are key drivers for successful delivery of our Managed Cloud Services. All information is access-controlled and distribution managed. Rackspace data centres feature:
- ISO27001 certified
- highest available bandwidth
- physical and geographical redundancy
- resilient DR and backup systems
All client data access is tightly controlled through external and internal vulnerability monitoring.
Systems and subsystems required to support Maximo® (WebSphere, database, reporting and integration tools) are also monitored for access control and activity monitoring, with regular audits on access and activity.
We also ensure that your data is GDPR compliant and any personal data with a GDPR impact is anonymised for development purposes and restricted where it is required for operational or testing purposes.
Flexibility
The benefit of a Managed Cloud Service is the ability to flex the service in line with your changing business needs. The Managed Cloud Service packages are tailored to your requirements, providing you with competitive pricing options.
We offer Foundation, Advanced and Custom levels of service which can and do meet the needs of organisations from SMEs with a pure cost focus, through to Government and Utilities clients with highly stringent security and quality requirements.
Customised options for clients to consider include:
- control over patching and updating of server and OS platforms;
- specific regulatory compliance needs
- log-in and sign-on options (including SSO)
- a range of security access measures (such as 2FA)
- hosting options within the public or private cloud
- connections required to client data-centres for external system integrations
- dedicated hosting platform requirements
Scalability
Scalability is always available in our Managed Cloud Service provision and any growth in client business, user numbers, complexity or customization can always be scaled up appropriately as and where required.
Our Managed Cloud Service provision always starts with an initial tuning of the service based on normal and peak usage conditions to guarantee that the service will always be available and working at optimal performance.
The type of Managed Cloud Service contracted to clients is tier-based using points such as complexity, size of data and records, number of concurrent users, peak time load and maximum user capacity. Any changes to system size, complexity or user numbers within your business means the service can change or expand while still providing optimal user performance and system responsiveness.
Exclusive Tools & Technologies
Automated Deployment Tools
Peacock Engineering has designed and configured an automation engine that deploys any Maximo® or Fingertip solution (and corresponding database configuration) repeatedly and consistently across multiple environments – increasing quality and speed in deployments, and reducing the possibility for error in deployment.
Short Term Environments
Combining the automation engine for deployments and technology available from our hosting providers, we provide unparalleled enabling capabilities and cost
reductions for customers in DevOps and Agile; providing short-term environments with any configuration of Maximo® and Fingertip and the corresponding data required.
Change & Release
For end-to-end governance and transparency of deployment, testing and sign off, deployments are managed in the live environment using our Change & Release procedure. Record keeping is managed in our tailored IBM Control Desk & Change & Release platform.
The Configuration Tool
The Configuration Tool provides standardization of configuration artefacts and deployment automation to controlled test & production environments, removing variability of configuration choices and ensuring traceability of change to configuration artefacts.
Licence Manager
Our Managed Service customers can request reports from Peacock Engineering’s Licence Management tool which supports all Maximo® licence variants and provides customers with an accurate understanding of their compliance and concurrency statistics. This reduces the cost and overhead of vendor audits and unexpected licence compliance shortfalls.
Why use Peacock’s Managed Cloud Services for your Enterprise Managed System?
Total Cost of Ownership
The Peacock Engineering Managed Cloud Service provides Maximo® users with a compelling solution that reduces costs, minimises risks and creates business value.
The total cost of ownership provides multiple benefits:
- Costs savings – no personnel required to support system
- Retaining the skills set which are often flight risks to a business
- Skill set and reliability – Peacock Engineering provides the right level of skill at all times
- No issue of scaling the systems – Cloud systems can be scaled up appropriately
- Improved benefits for a service that less than an on premises solution
Onwards Maintenance
One of the major factors that any organisation considering moving to a Managed Cloud Solution is the ongoing support and maintenance.
This means four things:
- the availability of the provisioned solution with minimal risk of unplanned downtime and disruption (targeted at 99.5% uptime within our SLA)
- the support for incidents (major and minor) to a response and resolution time SLA through the inbuilt provision of our Extended Support product
- a schedule of planned and preventative maintenance – works to ensure the optimal performance of both the underpinning platform infrastructure as well as the provisioned software product itself to vendor best practise
- a dedicated and specialist customer support service that is focused on your business
Resources
Peacock Engineering’s experience, expertise and support tools mean that clients are free to develop more capability in the system or scale back on internal resources as required.
Business Value
In addition to removing the cost and complexity of supporting Maximo, system issues are also eliminated, allowing clients to concentrate on enhancing their system rather than repairing.
Efficiencies
Three key factors why clients choose a Managed Cloud Service – cost efficiency, better resource utilisation and improved business value. Companies who have moved to a cloud managed service have seen a reduction in IT costs of up to 40%, and up to 20% savings on infrastructure spend.
Reducing your costs
Our Managed Cloud Service has been providing a lower cost base for almost a decade. In addition our software purchase model means the cost is spread through a lease.
Case Studies
Big Six Utility
Peacock Engineering worked with the UK’s largest electricity generation business, which was undergoing a major business transformation with Maximo® at the heart.
The contract comprised a range of business improvement and asset management initiatives which involved bringing Maximo® from 7.5 into the current supported version of 7.6.1, whilst moving to an integrated managed cloud service. We worked collaboratively to develop comprehensive security protocols and standards to meet their needs as a Critical National Infrastructure operator.
Peacock Engineering provided several controlled environments on cloud infrastructure integrated to the
client’s on-premise systems and hosted by our partner Rackspace. Users can access their environments via secure VPNs.
Comprehensive SLAs were agreed whereby Peacock Engineering operate a schedule of planned and preventative maintenance works and tasks. This ensures that optimum performance, responsiveness and capacity is achieved and maintained for users from all of the provisioned controlled environments on a continual basis.
This was an entirely bespoke cloud solution to replace a complex and highly integrated infrastructure, with all aspects of core and Maximo® infrastructure provided and captured in a framework agreement to allow for growth.
PCI Pharmaceuticals
PCI required an enterprise asset management solution to support their manufacturing operations in the UK, which are FDA and EMA regulated.
Peacock provided the implementation capabilities and ongoing supply of Maximo® as a Managed Cloud Service. This implementation of a fully validated cloud solution continues to deliver a reliable and high performing solution to PCI’s manufacturing operations.
What the client said:
“Peacock Engineering clearly understood our requirements and the team was able to demonstrate, from the start, that it had the business and technical skills required to deliver the project to our specific needs. We will look to further develop Maximo® so that we can better schedule downtime.”“
Maintenance Manager, Penn Pharmaceuticals
DHL
DHL required a rapid implementation to hold commissioning faults of a major new distribution facility. Peacock Engineering’s Managed Cloud Service was selected and Maximo® was implemented in a 12 week timeframe. The IT system was supported by a cloud service delivery model as this accelerated delivery timeframes and reduced the effort on a busy team. DHL has continued to develop the solution and embarked on a second phase, to implement Fingertip to support mobile working. Peacock Engineering have successfully managed, tuned and supported the solution, with no major production incidents.
What the client said:
“Peacock delivered this project against tight timescales, to ensure we had the system available to capture commissioning defects. It is now providing the benefits we require to keep the facility fully maintained.“
Project Manager, DHL