Axon puts $1m into upgrade

By ADAM GIFFORD

IT services firm Axon has spent about $1 million on software and systems from American business software maker BMC to manage its customers' infrastructure and applications in greater depth.

The investment underpins the company's expectation it will increase its revenue this year by 25 per cent to about $70 million.

Chief executive Matt Kenealy said Axon's contract business, which includes long-term support rather than one-off projects, had grown by 30 per cent a year over the past three years.

"We need systems to support and sustain that growth," Kenealy said.

"In the past we have built many of our own tools because the systems management products available in the market were not of a New Zealand scale.

"They were made for people with bigger budgets and organisations than we have here.

"There are now systems which can be appropriately scaled."

Axon also wanted tools which support ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), the best practice guidelines developed for the British Government which have become the world standard for service management.

"We have been using ITIL much more over the past 18 months," Kenealy said.

"Traditional service level agreements aren't good enough now. The whole organisation needs to be focused on the business impact of everything we do for the customer."

Axon is implementing Patrol Express, which monitors the performance and availability of servers, applications and storage and network devices, Remedy help desk and service management software and BMC Event Manager, which enables administrators to detect and fix IT problems before they affect services.

BMC country director Mike Davies said it was the most comprehensive use of BMC tools in New Zealand.

Kenealy said the workflow capability in Remedy was being laid over Axon's internally developed electronic procurement tools, enabling the company to improve its ability to offer procurement as a service.

"We can treat a request for a proposal or follow up a missed arrival time as if it were any other service call."

He said new customers, such as Tower and Parliamentary Services, and older ones such as Fulton Hogan and ASB Bank, wanted deeper levels of support than the straightforward desktop and network support Axon built its business on.