Net.works and Evergreen are merging!!

Well this is very big news for us.  You often hear of mergers of equals, and you don’t believe it.  Well you can believe this.  Both companies are the same size and are in highly complementary market spaces.  

Both company names have strong brand equity within the HP customer and partner community, but the executives of both companies decided to trade as Evergreen Systems given its stronger brand recognition in the market at large (marketing dollars and blogs at work).  But the real question is…what value does this bring to you, our customers? 

To answer that let’s look at what is happening in IT operations.  For many organizations, ITIL principles are well on the way to being adopted, and a strong focus / desire exists to run as IT as one organization, not many distinct silos.  This focus on IT service management / delivery across IT has led to an uptick in technology buying to enable the new enterprise processes.  

But still, improvement is often slow and hard to measure.  Why?  We have service catalogs to streamline IT services ordering but executing those orders is still difficult.  We have improved change process management but executing those changes end to end is still laborious and largely manual.  We have the same detailed actions occurring in every IT silos thousands of times each year, and yet these actions are sill largely manual.  We are trying to respond from request to outcome—and yet we still have not done simple business process re-engineering from start to finish on repetitive requests.  

It is time for another big leap.  It is time to dig into the high volume processes underneath ITIL best practices, re-engineer them, and truly automate them end to end.  We must put the work into the technology. 

Our merger powers this idea.  Evergreen brings the ITIL experience, the process re-engineering, the IT service management experience, the service catalog (demand management), and the change management.   Net.works joins us at change management, bringing the configuration management experience, the end client management and automation, and the data center (server) management and “run book” automation.

Together we believe we can truly lead our clients to measurable, quantum leaps in productivity, agility, accuracy, proactivity, compliance, security, and quality—along with a significant reduction in risk.  

So how about…Let’s Automate!  Its now time.   

Don Casson

CEO Evergreen Systems, Inc.

Ron,  thanks for reading…I read your blog regarding quick wins and ITSM  I’m a bit concerned that you left out bubble gum, bailing wire and Velcro (my personal favorites) J Seriously though, in my fifteen plus years Program/Project Management experiences in IT and Service Management and software development, I’ve found the requirement to establish rapid time to value (aka “quick wins”) as simply the “nature of the beast” .  This is not some phenomenon unique to Consultants or IT Service Management… It’s a reality -  based upon straight up, out of the box project management and large program successes mindful of a corporate bottom line requirement for year to year return on investment.It’s a pretty good practice to put a monkey in the capsule & circle the earth a couple of times before you shoot for the moon.  

Of course getting too “quick win”,  schedule pressure focused , can also be illustrated with some not so pleasant space program analogies too.   IMHO, demonstrating measurable value enables you to continue on a much longer and more valuable journey – whether that’s in ITSM, SOA, large software development projects…or a family journey with the kids.    Ok, I’m an idealist at heart, who’s developed some real life scar tissue.   I’ve never seen long programs succeed that didn’t’ demonstrate enough wins to keep the sponsors/executives happy enough to continue the funding year in and year out. 

Simply put, It’s about balance to me.    Of course, like always, your mileage may vary J  Scott M. Davis

Process Consultant

Evergreen Systems512 983-6492