December 2002, London, England - Hornbill Systems Limited, an innovative provider of support and service management systems, has won the contract to supply its Support-Works Helpdesk Professional solution to outsourced services company Medas.

The contract is valued at £230,000 for software, services and maintenance and is a significant milestone in Hornbill's evolution. "Hornbill has been advancing steadily over the last two years and our license volumes have soared but with this deal our Professional Services Division truly comes of age." Commented Gerry Sweeney, Managing Director of Hornbill Systems.

Established in 1997 Medas provides outsourced services that include financial transaction processing and system development, implementation and support. Medas works with the BBC to provide transaction processing on a vast scale - making almost a million payments a year to third parties and paying the salaries and expenses for around 24,000 staff. Last year Medas rolled-out SAP to the BBC to further streamline their accounting services. The deployment of Support Works is seen as an important component in their customer support strategy.

Medas is only too aware that any outsourced contract has to continuously prove its value and the emphasis has to be service and support, the ability to respond and resolve issues quickly and the ease to report to the customer upon changing status, incidents and problems. Consequently Medas places considerable investment in these abilities and after reviewing the incumbent helpdesk applications they concluded the means to improve customer support was severely constrained. Medas produced a tender for an IT support and outsourced services helpdesk solution.

Hornbill's response was pragmatic offering a multi-support environment from one single solution that strategically enables Medas to underpin their operations and deliver enhanced support services to their customers.

The tender invited leading IT service management vendors to pitch and as Keith Cannon, General Manager at Medas, explains Hornbill had a distinct advantage. "All systems have a strategic importance to Medas and often their deployment becomes part of the services we sell. Understanding this critical element was core to how Hornbill approached the project, always leveraging our business requirements to demonstrate how Support-Works could be configured to mirror our business structure and customers' service demands".

Added Gerry Sweeney, Managing Director at Hornbill Systems. "Increasingly Support-Works is being seen as the service management system of choice where an organisation's helpdesk requirements start with IT but branch out to other support functions and, as in Medas' case, the servicing of external customers. Our architecture supports multiple operational databases and can deliver one or more helpdesks defined on the server by the view offered to the support analyst. One system for a diverse support environment, one solution for a universal corporate support and services strategy."

Medas employs over 400 support services staff and when deployed Support-Works will allow 135 concurrent users access for all support levels and customer access via e-mail, telephony and web integration. Core functionality required by Medas includes extensive service level management, automated workflow and routing, comprehensive call management complemented with a powerful knowledge base and the ability to integrate asset, configuration and change management all from an easy-to-use, fast and flexible platform.