Belfast-based B.I.C. Systems has won the contract to provide a global helpdesk and managed services support to the cross-border agency Tourism Ireland.
Under the terms of the contract B.I.C. will supply Tourism Ireland with a fully integrated managed help desk service with remote telephone support and remote access to sites, servers and PCs.
The aim of the deal is to allow Tourism Ireland to maximise productivity of its technology resources and enhance customer service in Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada and various European locations.
Tourism Ireland was established under the framework of the Belfast Agreement of Good Friday 1998 to promote increased tourism across Ireland as a whole, and is made up of individuals representing tourism interests north and south, such as Bord Fáilte and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board.
The deal is structured around a service level agreement (SLA) that addresses end user technology issues. A key element of the technology roll-out is GuardianAngel, a web-based system hosted on B.I.C. Systems’ servers, designed to provide performance and availability monitoring for servers, software applications and network devices. The project will mark the first deployment of such technology.
The technology for GuardianAngel comes from BMC Software, an IT partner of B.I.C., aimed at monitoring critical technologies and allowing the IT support organisation to take proactive measures to remedy difficulties as they arise.
The SLA will ensure that the progress of the integrated solution will be measured against key performance indicators, explained B.I.C. sales director John Convery. “The project is a good example of how we can leverage our end-to-end solutions expertise to resolve IT issues for our clients across all business functions”, he said.
Tourism Ireland’s information technology manager Conor Marshall explained: “Our mission is to increase the level of interest in Ireland, north and south, as a travel destination. Because of this our capacity to handle the numbers of potential tourists to Ireland who are contacting us is absolutely critical.”
By John Kennedy
