Information Technology
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 was looking for an analysis tool that could easily visualize complex data in a simple and powerful way
  • The static reporting capabilities limited the possibilities for detailed analysis
  • The company 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 visualizing their key data.
  • Customers can use TARGIT to create their own reports and SMT Data's consultants can create standard reports.
  • Users can now explore their data in greater detail by slicing and dicing along different dimensions to understand anomalies.
TARGIT makes SMT Data unique and it plays a very important role in our solutions. 
- 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. It did not bridge the gap between data and visualization. This type of reporting lacked tremendously.
 
“We needed a BI solution that offered functionality, an ease of use, and considerable power,” says Steven Thomas, CTO of SMT Data. Thomas has been a crucial part of SMT Data for over 10 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 are enabled to 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 the way SMT Data drives its business.
 
 

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 very quickly can 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 key data and the possibility 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 will quickly help determine their peak utilization and allow them to analyze the underlying cost drivers during specific time frames:
 
 
SMT-data-dashboard-TARGIT
 

The goal is to save money, so it's important for them to move the workload away from the peak hour or to optimize the factors that can or cannot be changed.

Implementing TARGIT gives SMT Data and its customers the ability to build custom reports and 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 having static reporting to implementing data warehouse and business intelligence. 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.”
Originally published March 26, 2021. Updated February 9, 2023
Do you want to turn your organization into a data-driven powerhouse? 
- Jared Cornelius, Director of Presales Consulting, TARGIT
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