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SMT Data utilizes TARGIT to optimize customers’ cost drivers
About the company

SMT Data delivers transparency into the relationship between IT capacity costs and business activities. Their software product gathers enormous amounts of data about the customer’s IT operations and maps these to business activities using analysis and reporting tools on top of a data warehouse. Their customer portfolio includes KMD, Danske Bank, Coop, TDC, and DNB, among others.

Their Challenges
  • SMT Data's static reporting capabilities limited the possibilities for detailed analysis.
  • They needed an end-to-end analysis tool that could visualize complex data in a simple yet powerful way.
  • The company also wanted to help customers understand their cost drivers in a very large complex site installation.
How we helped
  • TARGIT is now the first point of contact for SMT Data's customers to visualize their key data.
  • SMT Data's consultants create standard reports in TARGIT, and customers can also create their own unique reports.
  • Users can now explore their data in greater detail by slicing and dicing along different dimensions to understand anomalies.
TARGIT allows us to open up the data, drill into it, slice and dice it along different dimensions. To understand anomalies or patterns, that’s where TARGIT is really powerful. 
- Steven Thomas, CTO, SMT Data

Understanding and Visualizing Key Data with TARGIT

Thirty years ago, SMT Data was just beginning to discuss performance capacity data and producing static reports. SMT Data’s customers would have to create reports themselves through SAS or other developmental channels. Unfortunately, this approach to reporting lacked critical capabilities and did not effectively bridge the gap between data and visualization. 
 
“We needed a BI solution that offered functionality, ease of use, and considerable power,” says Steven Thomas, CTO of SMT Data. Thomas has been a crucial part of SMT Data for over ten years and is responsible for consulting and presales.
 
Today, SMT Data is utilizing TARGIT Decision Suite to provide valuable insight to their customers. The business intelligence (BI) platform and interface help SMT Data’s customers tackle their daily operational challenges while:
  • Saving costs
  • Improving performance
  • Regaining control
  • Making informed business decisions
  • Reducing the skills dependencies
  • Securing IT efficiency

 

Before TARGIT, providing customized reports to their clients was much more difficult. Now, SMT Data consultants can rely less on their developers and more on TARGIT, which allows an understanding and a visualization of the data. Having access to this valuable information has changed how SMT Data drives its business.
 
Business Intelligence Dashboard overview Illustration-1

 

Specific Business Practices Impacted by TARGIT

 

“We’re taking huge amounts of performance capacity data for our biggest customers — it’s terabytes of data every day, and we’re aggregating that data and filtering it into a data warehouse. Then, we put TARGIT on top of it so the customers can quickly access and understand the cost drivers, and then optimize their business,” Thomas says. At the push of a button, the users have instant insight into their critical data and the ability to drill down into details to get a comprehensive understanding of the numbers.

SMT Data gathers performance and capacity data from their customers' mainframe installation and servers. Within TARGIT, SMT Data's customers can simply look at the capacity usage over a specific period to determine the peak hours when they are using the most capacity. TARGIT quickly helps determine their peak utilization and allows them to analyze the underlying cost drivers during specific time frames:
 
 
SMT-data-dashboard-TARGIT
 

The goal is to save money, so SMT Data's customers often need to move the workload away from peak hours or optimize the factors that can or cannot be changed. 

Embedding TARGIT into their software allowed SMT Data and its customers to start building custom reports that pick up where static reporting leaves off for companies.

“TARGIT allows us to open up the data, drill into it, slice and dice it along different dimensions. To understand anomalies or patterns, that’s where TARGIT is really powerful.” Thomas says.
 
 

What's Next for SMT Data?

 
SMT Data evolved from a reliance on static reporting to implementing a data warehouse and complete business intelligence solution. In the future, Thomas says, “We’re looking to move more into artificial intelligence and data lake technologies to get even more insight from the data. Of course, TARGIT will be an essential part of our future.”

Thomas emphasizes that the collaboration is more like a partnership than a customer-supplier relationship due to TARGIT’s prominent role in the solution: “The fact that we have a close working relationship, and receive support from consultants, the development team, and the management team within TARGIT is very important to us.”
 
Business Intelligence Dashboard overview Illustration
Originally published March 26, 2021. Updated October 11, 2023
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