Claude Marais, ISG: Blazent Partnership to Enhance Ability to Manage Infrastructure Complexity

January 26, 2012

Information Services Group has entered into a strategic alliance with Blazent to enhance visibility into IT infrastructure and services, enabling businesses to reduce costs and optimize operations.

Under the partnership, ISG will incorporate Blazent software into its innovative Governance Services toolkit and Managed Services offering. ISG Managed Services provides a combination of management expertise, processes and tools to help clients reduce value leakage from their outsourcing agreements and third-party contracts.

"Monitoring IT assets and how those assets are being utilized has traditionally been a manual process, and an ineffective one at that," said Claude Marais, Partner, Governance Services, ISG. "By automating and improving that process, Blazent software greatly enhances our ability to help clients manage infrastructure complexity."

Typically, businesses lack a clear understanding of what IT assets they have and what services are being delivered on those assets. This results in increased service management costs and greater security risks.

Blazent's SaaS-based solution automates the validation of the consumption of hardware resource units, enhances operational compliance by verifying backups and anti-virus software, identifies redundant and unused assets, and provides a highly accurate consolidated source of information on hardware assets.

Coupled with the process management and governance expertise of ISG, the technology will enable optimization opportunities by closing process gaps, managing fact-based information and retiring redundant or obsolete systems to lower costs and improve operations.

"We're excited about the value this partnership brings to clients," said Gary Oliver, CEO of Blazent. "By combining the complete visibility that Blazent provides with the domain and process expertise of ISG, they will have a very powerful solution for effective infrastructure governance."

Marais added that Blazent's SaaS platform matches well with the ISG service model. "The cloud-based approach means that software doesn't have to be loaded locally. This creates a potential for long-term relationships across a number of business areas."