Mobile phone retailer creates 'ERP for IT'

This Best Practice is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

The company

The Carphone Warehouse is the world's largest independent mobile phone retailer, as well as one of the UK's leading telephone and Internet service providers. Carphone Warehouse has more than 2,450 stores in nine EU countries and 1,000 Best Buy Mobile locations in the U.S.

The challenge

Knowing what's "under the hood" of our IT organization has been a particular challenge for us, exacerbated by our rapid growth and acquisition of Talk Talk (AOL UK). We were under pressure to achieve greater control and reduce costs within IT. "ERP for IT" was our vision for achieving that increased efficiency. Specifically:

• Post-acquisition, we had no definitive measure of our 1,400+ server estate and inter-dependencies
• We had no reliable, centralized database to support information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) initiatives
• Integrations with our configuration management database (CMDB) were slow (which translates to expensive)

The solution

We deployed Tideway Foundation™ across our four data centers, with the ultimate goal of providing a complete view of all our physical and virtual assets. The initial baseline provided us with a single system of record for configuration item (CI) inventory and dependencies, and delivered data directly to our CMDB which supports ITIL processes.

How it worked

Tideway provided an automated baseline of our global infrastructure, which allowed us to:

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