Meanwhile, DeLuca says, it's been tough convincing all of Cookson Electronics' end users that IT doesn't directly handle trouble-ticketing anymore.
"The biggest challenge is getting our users to utilize [the service]," he says. "They love to grab IT people at the water cooler and in the halls [for help]. We're always fighting that tradition."
Cookson Electronics won't outsource the hosting of its mission-critical applications, but using an ASP to run its PC and server configuration was a no-brainer: Inventory and trouble tickets from these applications do not contain sensitive data, so there's little business risk.
"We would never trust an outside vendor with critical data like ERP," says Paul DeLuca, Cookson's director of global infrastructure. "We debated the letting-go and [potential] security issues, but ultimately, there was nothing confidential in the [PC and server configuration management] data itself."
Deploying a management platform in-house for configuration management was too costly, DeLuca says--more than $200,000 for just one division, factoring in the up-front deployment costs and associated consulting fees. The ASP model was a better fit for Cookson's newly consolidated IT organization, and it was priced on a monthly per-end point fee.
