Red Hat drives informed use of IT resources and smarter business decisions with ServiceNow

Red Hat open source technologies help organizations prepare for the digital future
Red Hat uses a community-powered approach to deliver and support high-performing, open source, cloud-native technologies that integrate, automate, secure, and manage complex environments for enterprises.

Providing these technologies and supporting its user community requires Red Hat to collect and store internal inventory and IT infrastructure data until it’s needed. In the past, Red Hat relied on multiple IT environments with small datasets only available to a limited set of teams.

“There’s a lot of data we deal with, and there was limited visibility into that data. My role is to make data about our inventory, IT infrastructure, and office space environments available to stakeholders so they can make smarter business decisions,” says Severin Launiau, CMDB Manager at Red Hat.

Red Hat needed to unite IT services and deliver end-to-end workflow automation across the business
Red Hat had multiple IT environments and needed to create greater visibility for IT employees and other business units. Due to the complexities of this environment, Red Hat determined that a configuration management database (CMDB) would help achieve its goal. A CMDB holds all the relevant information about the hardware and software components used in an organization’s IT services and the relationships between those components in a single location and makes that information available to all business units.

Building this platform to organize and store the data would be a tall order, though. According to Severin, “85% of companies fail in implementing a CMDB.”

This is where ServiceNow entered the picture.

ServiceNow provides the foundational platform for a successful CMDB implementation
Red Hat selected the Now Platform to store and manage all of its disparate data. A unified CMDB and Service Mapping enhance the visibility of IT resources and enables the IT team to manage service health and optimize service spend.

Severin continues, “Most of the data comes from remote data sources. But those sources have end-to-end workflow automation that is also orchestrated from ServiceNow. The data comes into the CMDB and is made available for normal consumption.”

In combination with the technology business management solution, the CMDB allows Severin’s team to show how much an IT investment will cost a business unit.

“This is the value we bring to our customers: We can make smarter decisions on where to deploy our applications, whether it’s on the physical server, on virtual machines, or in the cloud with containers,” Severin says. “Our stakeholders have a global view of the applications’ footprint across all our data centers and cloud services, which they did not have before. We’re now able to eliminate housekeeping activities that were supporting applications previously retired. We can make smarter decisions on where to drive our deployments for IT and our customers in a more cost-effective way.”

Red Hat expands use of ServiceNow to handle IT needs for non-IT groups
Red Hat employees are also benefiting from ServiceNow. In fact, ServiceNow IT Operations Management replaced the company’s previous legacy IT service management solution and is used extensively for IT and non-IT groups. HR, facilities, payroll, finance, and legal use ServiceNow to handle incident knowledge, problem change, request management, and more.

“As a result, Red Hat employees can better serve the Red Hat community of customers,” says Cal Wallace, Application Development Manager at Red Hat.

ServiceNow provides greater visibility to measure service performance and drive improvements
ServiceNow allows Red Hat to collect the metrics that are important to people, such as time to resolution or ticket volume.

“We have metrics that show the benefit of this system and where processes need to be shored up,” Cal says. “The gaps get pretty evident; sometimes it’s more evident than people want. It can be disheartening, but now that we know what we need to do, we can focus on fixing the problem.”

Looking forward: Red Hat works toward integrating ServiceNow with its products
Thanks to ServiceNow and the enterprise service management system, the previously siloed organizations that support Red Hat employees are unified with seamless processes. Cal says, “Red Hatters are seeing that whatever happens behind the scenes, we’ll deliver to the customers.”

“Working with ServiceNow really has been a fantastic experience,” Severin says. “We’ve been able to deploy a CMDB successfully, and we’ve adopted a product mindset to not only implement a CMDB project and move onto the next thing, but we plan to expand it over time to make our teams more efficient and cost effective. We’ve got a great partnership with ServiceNow, and we’re now working toward integrating ServiceNow with other Red Hat products.”

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