Halcyon Days Ahead For SASIT Customers

New business partner in New Zealand extends access to Halcyon solutions

Halcyon Software, a leading global provider of monitoring, scheduling and automation software, has signed a reseller agreement with SASIT, the Auckland-based Managed Services Provider, to become its first business partner in New Zealand. As sole national reseller, SASIT will provide customers using the IBM i series with access to Halcyon's full range of solutions.

SASIT has been using Halcyon products to manage its own IBM Power Systems running the IBM i operating system since 2011. The company began evaluating systems management products two years ago as significant business growth meant either increasing headcount or implementing higher levels of monitoring for its IBM Power Systems.

Staff members were previously reliant on constantly watching for alert messages on terminal sessions. They also had to perform manual checks on systems which, in many cases, needed to be repeated every two hours. The amount of work required to perform these checks was getting beyond SASIT's ability and reliance on alert messages was becoming increasingly challenging. This situation occurred because the communications methods for error reporting were no longer suitable for the size of their environment and the inability to perform any filtering to reduce noise from common, but unimportant, operator messages.

After extensive evaluation, Halcyon's management suite was selected as it met SASIT's immediate customer requirements by delivering greater monitoring sophistication. It would also meet more complex customer needs in the future by minimising the requirement for manual operation. In addition, the ready access to technical and after-sales support from Halcyon Software, and its responsiveness to questions and issues, has been impressive.

A major benefit for customers is that Halcyon's Systems Operations Suite (SOS) provides SASIT with a single integrated view across its IBM Power Systems as well as a more efficient means of monitoring rule maintenance and increasing speed of deployment. This is critical as the number of Power Systems that the company manages has tripled in the past three years without having to increase the size of its operations team.

SASIT employs Halcyon's Message Management Suite (MMS) where system monitoring and message management is required, and the Systems Operations Suite (SOS), which has additional functionality to automate manual tasks and checking procedures normally carried out by operational staff. SASIT also uses the Enterprise Console, a centralised GUI, which provides a single dashboard to view and manage all alerts.

Significantly, one of Halcyon's solutions provides monitoring of the enterprise-wide ERP environments for Lawson M3 customers to deliver improved levels of availability. It automates key routine tasks with automatic actions to fix issues and send warnings of impending business problems. SASIT will be introducing Lawson M3 customers to this new enhancement for their systems. One of Halcyon's Australian resellers is Team Computing, which is also a business partner of SASIT. Together, 'Team SASIT' can offer trans-Tasman customers all the benefits of the Halcyon alliance.

SASIT CEO, Phil Martin, is delighted with the new partnership: "We know how much IBM Power Systems users will benefit from Halcyon's solutions and these will become a part of our standard operating environment. They will be applied when new customers opt to have their infrastructure managed by us, either on their own premises or in one of our data centres. Where we take over existing systems with less sophisticated monitoring systems, they will be migrated to Halcyon SOS over time."