CTG Luxembourg PSF leverages Centreon as a key selling point

“If I had to assess the before/after effects of implementing Centreon, the main observation would be that we’re more confident. We know that everything is under control and that if there’s a problem, we’re alerted immediately. Anomalies are resolved faster and we have the tools to meet regulatory requirements. It’s also easier to offer our clients new services that enhance their monitoring and business reporting.”
Gilles Haven – Operations Director

The project in a nutshell:

Strategic objectives: Meet regulatory compliance and client expectations

Guarantee process and data security as part of FSP certification (financial sector professionals)
Provide clients with the means to audit their suppliers
Modernize service offerings around reporting
Make monitoring a key selling point

IT objectives: Modernize monitoring to better anticipate issues and manage private, public and hybrid clouds.

Get the right capabilities to monitor public, private and hybrid clouds from a single console
Track all alerts as deeply as possible
Understand and anticipate issues before clients are impacted
Improve daily issue resolution performance

The solution: Centreon MSP Edition

Key benefits: Enhanced customer service and reliability

Greater peace of mind for operational management
Significant reduction in the time to resolve alerts and incidents (MTTR) by 1^st, 2^th and 3^th level support.
New opportunities to add value leveraging Centreon’s reporting capabilities and qualities

Summary

CTG Luxembourg PSF , the Luxembourg subsidiary of the CTG group, was looking for a solution to modernize monitoring within the private, public, and hybrid cloud management solutions that are provided to clients that outsource to CTG part or all of their IT management. The previous monitoring tool CTG was using could no longer meet PSF accreditation regulatory compliance requirements. Also, clients were asking for more powerful reporting capabilities for effective oversight of managed services. Not only could Centreon meet all of these criteria, but the monitoring solution also enabled the company to enrich its service portfolio, seamlessly ensure SLA compliance, reduce MTTR, and increase trust and transparency for clients, thereby enhancing the company’s brand reputation.

CTG provides outsourced development, infrastructure, support, and testing services at the client’s premises, as well as a la carte services and projects. In this context, the company had extensive IT monitoring needs, especially on the infrastructure side, which delivers private and public clouds, explains Gilles Haven, CTG’s operations director: “We need to monitor all activities for private, public or hybrid clouds. Our clients entrust us with the management of all or part of their IT systems, and they expect us to be able to proactively manage incidents and recommend infrastructure upgrades.

CTG Luxembourg PSF has a PSF (Professionals of the Service Sector) support accreditation, which requires adherence to very strict monitoring standards that were difficult to meet with the previous monitoring solution. Beyond these constraints, the decision, in 2022, to upgrade the monitoring solution was also motivated by demands from clients, as Robby Melin, Sales Director, points out: “We needed to modernize our monitoring. The sales team supported the decision to change the monitoring solution because we were getting more requests from clients for better visibility.”

When the teams at CTG Luxembourg PSF began their search for a more advanced monitoring solution, they quickly turned to Centreon for several reasons: first, its ability to manage private, public, and hybrid cloud environments all from a single console was a key factor; and second, the solution’s ability to provide a higher level of reporting. As Sébastien Rivière, a systems specialist who is responsible for monitoring explains: “It took less than 3 weeks to deploy Centreon for our clients in the banking, family office, healthcare, insurance and fiduciary sectors, thanks to its auto-discovery features and connectors.”

To date, just under 500 hosts, 11,000 services, 40 business activities and a dozen maps have been deployed in pre-production and production environments, which are maintained in parallel. When asked what Centreon has changed in his day-to-day work, Gilles Haven is eager to share: “If I had to do a before and after analysis, I’d say that I’m more confident now that Centreon is installed, because I know that the environment is monitored and all under control. If something isn’t working properly, we can see it immediately… We also save time in resolving anomalies (MTTR), we can quickly see where the problems lie, and we can more easily provide additional advice, especially regarding the use of cloud capacity.”

CTG’s sales teams are also involved in the project. Thanks to the access provided by the technical teams, they can access the reports to track the health of their clients’ IT and recommend new services based on the data collected and provided in the Centreon reports, as Robby Melin, Sales Director, confirms: “Before switching to Centreon, we were providing fairly basic reporting at monthly meetings. Today, we have real-time visibility and can offer new, more modern, advanced services to clients, such as new dashboards. With Centreon, we are better at responding to the needs of our clients, and the software is now a key selling point.”

The full story

CTG Luxembourg PSF, the Luxembourg subsidiary of the CTG group, was looking for a solution to modernize monitoring within the private, public, and hybrid cloud management solutions that are provided to clients that outsource to CTG part or all of their IT management. The previous monitoring tool CTG was using could no longer meet PSF accreditation regulatory compliance requirements. Also, clients were asking for more powerful reporting capabilities for effective oversight of managed services. Not only could Centreon meet all of these criteria, but the monitoring solution also enabled the company to enrich its service portfolio, seamlessly ensure SLA compliance, reduce MTTR, and increase trust and transparency for clients, thereby enhancing the company’s brand reputation.

CTG Luxembourg PSF: Accelerated Transformation

CTG Luxembourg PSF is the Luxembourg-based financial services subsidiary of the CTG Group, which has operations in the Americas, Europe and India. With a team of 650 employees and revenues of 60 million euros, CTG Luxembourg PSF provides 200 clients with solutions and technologies to accelerate their digital transformation and make it a lever for competitiveness and performance. As a leading provider of technology solutions, CTG offers its clients around the world in-depth and extensive sector-specific experience. Its subsidiary CTG Luxembourg PSF has developed expertise in banking, finance, and private organizations in Luxembourg.

“We must monitor all activity for private, public or hybrid clouds. Our clients entrust us with the management of all or part of their IT systems, and they expect us to be able to proactively manage incidents and recommend infrastructure upgrades. The primary goal of monitoring is to ensure that our clients’ environments are running optimally, but also to enable a predictive approach to reducing incidents.”

Strategic objectives: Meeting regulatory compliance and client expectations

CTG Luxembourg PSF holds the PSF (Professionals of the financial sector) support accreditation, which is essential to serve clients in the banking and financial sector. This accreditation requires the adhere to strict monitoring standards that were difficult to achieve with the previous solution. “With a PSF accreditation comes rights, but also duties, in particular those of providing our clients with security, monitoring, control, and quality requirements. We needed to evolve our monitoring solution to meet these and enable our clients to work with us with complete peace of mind,” says Gilles Haven.

Beyond these constraints, the decision to upgrade the monitoring solution in 2022 was also motivated by client demands, as Robby Melin, Sales Director, points out:

“We needed to replace the previous monitoring solution because of compliance requirements, but also because we needed to modernize the way we monitored. The sales team was supportive of this change because our clients were asking for more visibility into our services as a PSF provider and into the type of alerts and how they were being handled. We’re expected to deliver a high level of reporting because our clients are also accountable when they decide to outsource their IT.”

ITOM objectives: Modernize monitoring to develop a predictive approach

When the teams at CTG Luxembourg PSF started looking for a more modern monitoring solution, they quickly turned to Centreon, which appealed to them for several reasons. Firstly, the ability to manage private, public and hybrid cloud environments from a single console was a game changer, as Gilles Haven confirms: “Since the Covid health crisis, clients are more receptive to using the public cloud, which requires us to be able to monitor this type of solution as well. There is certainly more portability outside of Luxembourg, but we need to remain in control and be accountable to our clients.”

The second reason for choosing Centreon that convinced the CTG Luxembourg PSF teams was its ability to meet the needs of clients with higher reporting requirements.

On the technical side, the choice was also influenced by the fact that Sébastien Rivière, the system specialist in charge of monitoring, was already very familiar with the solution:

“When I saw the specifications – and the first requests for customized reporting – I immediately understood that the Centreon model met our needs and those of our clients. Our choice was doubly confirmed when we presented the solution to a key client and they were immediately enthusiastic about it!”

The project: Deployed in less than 3 weeks, client onboarding included

At the end of 2022, the decision was made to go with Centreon, and the rollout for CTG Luxembourg PSF’s clients was completed very quickly, as Sébastien Rivière explains:

“In less than 3 weeks, we implemented Centreon for our banking, family office, healthcare, insurance, and fiduciary clients. We are still in the customization phase to better filter alerts and remove false positives, but we already have robust indicators.”

As an administrator, Sébastien particularly appreciated Centreon’s auto-discovery and monitoring connectors:

“Auto-discovery and the connectors allowed me to deploy Centreon in less than 3 weeks, which is extremely fast. I was also able to do a POC for one of our clients in less than half a day after restoring the entire infrastructure, including VMs and about fifty machines.”

To date, just under 500 hosts, 11,000 services, 40 business activities, and a dozen maps have been deployed in pre-production and production environments and maintained in parallel. “Dashboards cover a variety of topics, such as alerts taken acknowledged by support, license management, capacity planning of all volumes for all clients, security (firewalls at data center entry points) or the various services (replication and backup, for example) with a highly visual weather section.“

Currently, 65 people use the Centreon solution on a daily basis, including 50 from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support, a dozen sales people and service managers. Eventually, clients will be added to the list in addition to these regular users.

The Centreon solution is also used by the IT department of CTG Luxembourg PSF for internal purposes.

Results: Greater confidence, performance, reliability and improved reputation

When asked what Centreon has changed in his day-to-day work, Gilles Haven is quick to confide:

“If I had to do a before and after analysis, I’d say that I’m more confident now that Centreon is installed, because I know that the environment is monitored and all under control. If something isn’t working properly, we can see it immediately… We also save time in resolving anomalies, we can quickly see where the problems lie, and we can more easily provide additional advice, especially regarding the use of cloud capacity.”

Sébastien considers that the support teams are the main beneficiaries of Centreon, thanks in particular to the solution’s ability to anticipate anomalies and malfunctions:

“What has changed since we adopted Centreon is that the support teams, especially the first line, have clearly gained in efficiency. First of all, they’re not missing any incidents, whereas some might have been missed before because the monitoring was not as extensive. What’s more, we’re now enabled to handle issues proactively, we are the ones calling our clients to alert them to an issue, rather than the other way around. The solution allows us to go further than we could before.”

Another interesting point is the ability to rely on Centreon and its highly visual reporting and mapping tools to convince decision makers, as Gilles Haven explains:

“Centreon’s dashboards and reports speak volumes to senior management. Centreon’s data has enabled us to build business cases with great precision that go beyond mere sentiment and highlight the impact of the changes to be made. This allows us to discuss recommendations based on factual elements.”

The Operations Manager also appreciates the local access to Centreon’s sales team: “On the sales side, we’ve always found answers and support – that’s the advantage of having people close by and available in Luxembourg. It’s easier to do business.“

Using monitoring as a selling point to offer new services to clients

The first stage of the project was to monitor both the client’s and the company’s IT environment in order to ensure compliance to SLAs regarding the service quality delivered to the client. The next step for the sales teams will be to sell new services based on the Centreon solution.

Sales teams have a stake in the project, technical teams are providing them with an access to the reports so they can find out about the health of their clients’ IT and recommend additional services based on the data collected and delivered in the reports, as Robby Melin, Sales Director, confirms:

“Before Centreon, we used to provide fairly basic reporting at monthly meetings. Today, we have real-time visibility and can offer new, more innovative services to our clients, such as new dashboards. We’re meeting our clients’ needs with this solution, and Centreon has become a key selling point!”

The opportunity is to develop the service portfolio around Centreon. In fact, the choice of Centreon is not so much based on the need to reduce costs as on the desire to increase performance and offer new services to meet client needs, as Robby Melin explains:

“We are evolving our business model because we want to sell the capabilities that Centreon enables. We didn’t advertise our old monitoring tool before, but now we have specific sections in our business proposals that are dedicated to the services Centreon provides. The opportunity is to turn a cost center into value-added services.”

While alert management remains an integral part of the standard offering, the idea is to propose more value-added services around two axes: customized dashboards and reports with dedicated access to the platform and, for organizations whose IT is not outsourced, a specific monitoring offering, a real gateway to the service.

Sébastien Rivière is already thinking about the new dashboards he will be able to offer clients to demonstrate IT availability, but also to provide feedback on the number of incidents handled, resources used, capacity, etc. All directly accessible to the client or the sales team that advises the client.

Pro tip

“Beyond the product itself, it’s the quality of the people who will use and deploy the product that’s critical. We’re fortunate to have two people who are masters of their craft. This is a prerequisite for using all the tools that Centreon offers. It’s important to have the skills in-house, to have specialists. It’s very reassuring for our clients”.

Emmanuel Adam, Head of Unit – Infrastructure at CTG LUXEMBOURG PSF

To go further

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With Centreon, CTG Luxembourg PSF leverages IT monitoring as a key selling point