Macro 4 partners with SMT Data to sell cloud-based IT business intelligence solution

Helping customers ‘lift the lid’ on IT costs of business decisions.

Crawley, UK, January 13, 2015 – Software and services company Macro 4, a division of UNICOM® Global, has signed a partner agreement to sell and market SMT Data’s cloud-based IT business intelligence (ITBI) solution as part of Macro 4’s performance management solution portfolio, initially across Europe. The ITBI software provides business intelligence (BI) insight to help organizations optimize their IT infrastructure and operations, resulting in significant cost savings and improved alignment with business priorities.

“Typically delivering an average 10-20% saving in operational IT costs, SMT Data’s IT business intelligence solution brings greater transparency to the relationship between IT costs and business activities to help control expenditure and inform business decision making,” said Jim Allum, Director, Commercial and Technical, at Macro 4. According to SMT Data, most IT departments typically cannot attribute IT costs to business activities, so key business decisions have to be made without knowing how IT costs will be affected. The larger and more complex the IT environment, the harder it is to understand the IT cost implications of making operational changes within the business. ITBI has been designed to address these information gaps. Another key advantage of ITBI is its ability to identify poorly performing applications as candidates for tuning using Macro 4’s application performance management software.

“ITBI perfectly complements Macro 4’s performance management solutions and can pinpoint areas where our existing portfolio can then be used for further capacity and performance optimization," said Allum. "It also has the benefit of being a cross-platform solution. That means it will help our customers drive up service levels and drive down costs throughout the enterprise by rationalizing their mainframe and open systems environments.” Available as a cloud-based service, the ITBI software works by collecting and processing the enormous amounts of data generated by an organization’s IT infrastructure, including performance, capacity and other operational data. Using data warehousing and business analytics, the data is analyzed and mapped against business activities - for example, the CPU cost of a business transaction or the disk storage used by an application can be visibly mapped to the relevant business unit. The resulting findings are presented through a Web and mobile management dashboard to inform planning and decision making. Commenting on the partnership with Macro 4 Jan Vilstrup, CEO of SMT Data said: “This cooperation enables us to provide optimal solutions for those Macro 4 customers with very complex IT infrastructures. With complete insight and transparency regarding capacity, performance, and software utilization, ITBI helps companies make decisions based on facts – not guesswork or supplier estimates. By partnering with Macro 4 we can also help businesses to reap further cost savings through deeper analysis and optimization of their core business applications.”

About SMT DATA www.smtdata.com SMT Data's IT Business Intelligence (ITBI™) solution delivers transparency into the relationship between IT and business. This transparency allows customers to optimize their IT infrastructure, operations, finances, and application development, resulting in significant cost savings and better alignment with business needs. SMT Data is a privately held company founded in 1990. Headquartered in Copenhagen, the company employs a team of highly skilled specialists in software development, professional services and sales and supports a growing network of partners across Europe.