Aylesbury Vale District Council upgrades to Hornbill's cloud-based ITSM tool in IT refresh project

Council said product was best cloud-based ITSM tool on the market despite not trialling any other solutions

Aylesbury Vale District Council has upgraded from Hornbill's on-premise IT service management solution to Hornbill Service Manager, the cloud-based ITSM tool, despite not trialling any other solutions.

The council, which serves more than 174,000 people across north Buckinghamshire, had used Hornbill Supportworks on-premise ITSM solution since 2008, but as part of its IT refresh, which looked at migrating many of its products to cloud-based services, it identified Hornbill Service Manager as the ideal replacement.

Adam Haylock, IT service delivery manager at Aylesbury Vale District Council, told Computing that the council had been happy with the on-premise product but felt that it needed to upgrade the solution for some time to add further functionality. However, he was keen to take the software-as-a-service (SaaS) route, particularly as the council was attempting to move to cloud-based services.

"[The IT refresh] was a perfect opportunity to look into what we could upgrade to. We wanted to see what was out there in the market which was a SaaS product," he said.

Haylock said that he created a brief internally and submitted it for recommendation. The council then looked at what options were on the market and found that Hornbill's cloud solution was the perfect fit.

But Haylock said that despite carrying out "due diligence" and "looking at the market", the council did not actually pilot another product.

"We just took a look at the market, researching what was out there and the costs associated with the products. We made sure it was appropriate but there were no trials of anything else," he said.

According to Haylock, the new product had enhanced capabilities and it would improve flexibility and reduce the costs and complexity of on-site infrastructure, management and software upgrades.

"Removing the need for servers, SQL licences and back-up costs has already made the project cost-neutral and we will see further savings in staff time as the project continues," he said.

"It has already offered clear benefits in ease of use, functionality and cost, with more to come. We are hoping to make greater use of the collaborative features of the underlying Hornbill platform and open up use to end-user customers as well as the service team," he added.

Haylock was particularly impressed that Hornbill managed to migrate the council from the on-premise solution to the cloud solution in 30 days.

"I had to make sure that we didn't use too many IT resources because we were busy with a lot of other work, so [reducing the amount of time spent on migrating] was a key factor of the proposal from Hornbill in how they would support us," he said.

The IT refresh is the latest part of the council's overarching IT strategy, which began to take shape in April 2012 when it said it planned to move from multiple offices in the district to a single location on the outskirts of Aylesbury town centre. At the same time, it planned an overhaul of its IT environment; moving to a cloud-based infrastructure that enabled staff to access services from any location. The council states that it was one of the first in the country to move to Amazon Web Services, and is dedicated to only procuring cloud-based IT services, such as Microsoft Office 365.