The City Government IT department ensures that citizens who want to contact the offices to schedule services such as brush pick up and mulch delivery are not inconvenienced by a non-working website and scheduling system. In addition, all jobs must run on-time to ensure that city workers can access schedules to make deliveries and pickups throughout the county each day.
In 2009, the City Government IT department was restructured and was left without extensive IBM i knowledge for several key software applications. Without this expertise, overnight backups did not work correctly and the system was not being monitored accurately. A solution to the problem needed to be found quickly. The department looked to their technology partner to recommend a potential solution who suggested they look to Halcyon for their systems management challenges.
Easing Implementation
After reviewing a myriad of different solutions, the IT department purchased Operations Center Suite (Level 4), Halcyon’s flagship software suite, which provides administrators with advanced job scheduling; system message handling; manual task automation; and performance, disk, and spooled file management, as well as templates to assist with the monitoring of ERP business applications.
“I was immediately impressed with Halcyon’s customer support," said the systems analyst. "From the moment we contacted them, they listened to all of our needs and offered us numerous solutions. I especially like Halcyon’s hands-on approach.”
A representative from Halcyon went to the client’s offices for several days to manage the installation of the technology and provide one-on-one training. The Halcyon representative was very patient and ensured that the IT department’s staff understood all of the aspects of the technology.
“I’ve been in this industry for nearly 40 years and I’ve completed many technology implementations—the installation of Halcyon’s technology was the easiest implementation I’ve ever been involved with. It was a wonderful experience,” added the systems analyst.
The staff is very pleased that they can now receive email messages when something in the system goes awry and they can quickly set up new criteria or parameters. They also like being able to be notified of any system issues on their smartphones, allowing them to resolve issues with simple system commands when on the go.
Delivering IBM i Expertise
Halcyon’s Operations Center Suite solution saves the department significant time and reduces cost by automating many of the processes that had previously required an appreciable amount of specialist knowledge and manual intervention. Critical processes, overnight backups and key applications are closely monitored and automated by Halcyon’s software to ensure things happen when they should. In addition, the software also assists them with the performance tuning of the system.
“The Halcyon system is very versatile. I am very impressed with it. I have never worked with a system that has as many features and such robust functionality. We’ve had the technology for approximately two years and we are still scratching the surface—there are many more features that we can tap into to help create a more powerful solution. The technology was a very good investment for every aspect of what we need to do”, concluded the systems analyst.