IKB: IT innovation excellence
As one of the largest companies in Tyrol, Innsbrucker Kommunalbetriebe AG supplies intelligent energy and infrastructure solutions. Talking about IT innovation, IKB attaches great importance to sustainability and energy efficiency.
As a domestic energy supply company, IKB takes responsibility for the region, the environment and the next generations and wants to become clima neutral by the end of 2030.
To support these important projects as well as to keep an overview of the different business areas, the company's IT must be continuously optimized and adapted. The overall goal of IKB was to create transparency with regard to its application landscape, to minimize risks, and to ensure the maintenance of stable IT operations.
Txture as a holistic transformation solution offers a future-proof foundation for sustainable enterprise asset and architecture management through the further focus of cloud readiness analysis.
Challenge
What was the starting point concerning the search for a tool?
The starting point was our need for transparency, risk minimization, and maintaining stable IT operations.
We were looking for a tool that would help us to get an overview of the dependencies in the IT landscape in order to ensure that all dependencies are taken into account when making changes in the systems. It was also important to take appropriate measures to ensure a stable IT operation. Moreover, the documentation of the IT landscape should be harmonized. Many lists were kept that had to be brought together with the support of asset management to provide information at a glance and up-to-date.
What did you want to change about the situation at that time?
We wanted to get away from unstructured disjointed lists. Consistent representation of the IT landscape including dependencies to create transparency. With the help of the Txture Tool, we can now determine the dependencies of our systems in a very short time, in order to be able to act more sustainably and get quicker when making architectural decisions. Furthermore, the integration of source systems as well as the simple updating of the data at a central point was important to us.
Solution
Why did you choose Txture? What expertise did Txture bring to the table?
The POC phase quickly showed that Txture has the potential to show and document our blind spots. By creating its own metadata construct, various requirements from surrounding sub-projects could be implemented. The always competent advice and prompt support left little to be desired.
Who is using the solution now? And in which situations mainly?
In the first phase, application owners were asked to evaluate important information concerning their applications by means of a questionnaire. The focus lied on the acquisition of interfaces between individual applications. Subsequently, all newly created virtual machines are automatically loaded into the Txture repository and enriched with additional metadata.
Outcome
What's the greatest benefit you've experienced so far?
The possibility of a cross-linked view of IT-internal assets from hardware to software, their related interactions as well as the connection with elements of the business architecture such as cost centers or processes creates a broader understanding and also increases information availability and quality. All of this has a positive effect on short decision-making processes, for example with regards to migration decisions.
The positive benefits of the product were quickly recognized. The circle of users is gradually expanding, and a high level of willingness to use and accept the product is evident.
Customer Tip
Think big, start small.
Customer Quote: Alexander Hauser, IKB.