Locally-hosted SMAX-as-a-Service now available in South Africa
OpenText’s exciting new partnership with UnlimitIT and Axiz brings the SMAX-as-a-Service experience to local cloud infrastructure – with various commercial models available.
SMAX – a market-leading ITSM solution by OpenText – is designed to simplify service management by providing an excellent user experience and increased affordability.
Many businesses already use SMAX for their ITSM, ITAM, and ESM needs – but have their implementation either hosted on-premise or overseas.
On-premise SMAX implementations are difficult to scale, as businesses must invest in costly hardware as they expand or adopt the latest SMAX services.
They also require dedicated technical expertise to manage their implementation, which can be difficult to find and expensive to retain.
Overseas-hosted SMAX implementations come with major regulatory obstacles for your business to overcome.
You will also be billed for your overseas implementation in foreign currency, which is expensive for a South African business.
Changing the industry
Through an industry-defining partnership between OpenText, UnlimitIT, and Axiz, these challenges are a thing of the past.
South African businesses can now access a locally-hosted, locally-managed SMAX-as-a-Service offering, which delivers massive cost savings and improved operational efficiency.
This offering is partly powered by Axiz – one the leading technology distributors in Africa.
With a presence in most African countries, Axiz has over three decades of industry knowledge and know-how to bring vendors and partners together to drive business.
It provides technology intelligence to its business to drive new and advanced technologies to the market in the following areas:
- Edge Technologies
- Advanced Technologies
- Cloud Technologies
- Axiz Field Services
- Solar Technologies
- Axiz Digital Platform
Axiz is offering its world-class Lenovo servers and platforms, while leading managed services provider UnlimitIT will deliver the managed component of this offering.
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UnlimitIT COO Dewald Du Plessis said that some customers feel left behind or struggle with their cloud consolidation strategies because of the additional cost associated with converting the perpetual license to cloud-based licensing.
This also impacts legacy discounts and expansions on their current invested estate.
Some customers also prefer commercial models whereby the usage of capex is included.
Therefore, one of the major benefits of this new as-a-service offering is its innovative billing model – using CapEx in combination with OpEx.
“In the past, organisations had a good balance between CapEx and OpEx, but many other SaaS solutions have increased the OpEx portion, creating challenges for customers,” said Du Plessis.
“Additionally, if you look at a SaaS model that is purely OpEx driven, the total cost of ownership is 20-30% higher over 4-5 years, and you often get big surprises with pure SaaS models after the cycle of renewal.”
Du Plessis added that with pure SaaS models, moving and surfacing your data is often not as straightforward as initially thought.
Keep your licences
Du Plessis explained that businesses with SMAX licences can also easily shift and drop their existing implementations onto Axiz’s local infrastructure.
They will receive the full SaaS and cloud experience almost instantly, without rebuilding their SMAX services from scratch.
“Once we have shifted these businesses’ SMAX implementations onto the cloud, they can scale at any point in time and don’t need to have specialised resources to do this,” said Du Plessis.
“Technology changes frequently and processing needs increase, but by running your SMAX implementation on the cloud, you don’t need to worry about that.”
Instead, companies can access the best-of-breed ITSM solution – with endless scaling opportunities, fewer regulatory hurdles, and lower costs.
“To top it all off, you are being a good corporate citizen by investing in the local economy,” said Du Plessis.
We unpack two use cases of this SMAX-as-a-Service offering below.
Use case – SMAX integration with OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
OpenText ECMs are cloud-based content management and collaboration platforms designed to help organizations securely manage and share their documents and content.
Integrating SMAX with OpenText ECMs enables you to embed an ECM widget in SMAX so that users can leverage the industry-leading content management capabilities powered by ECM.
The ECM Features include:
- Enterprise document management
The embedded widget centralizes document storage and access.
It ensures that all documents, regardless of their source, are stored securely in one location for easy retrieval and management
- Workflow automation
The embedded widget automates, manages, and tracks document-centric processes.
It streamlines tasks, routes documents, assigns responsibilities, ensures compliance, and enhances collaboration for efficient business operations.
- Version control
The embedded widget tracks the version history and ensures that everyone accesses and works on the latest document versions, minimizing confusion.
- Secure external sharing
This capability enables controlled and audited sharing of documents with external partners, clients, or vendors.
This ensures that sensitive data remains protected.
Use case – Knowledge and Aviator Tier 1 operations
SMAX is built on OpenText IDOL – a market-leading knowledge discovery and analytics platform.
IDOL allows SMAX to index knowledge articles from various external sources.
Examples of external knowledge sources include a website, a SharePoint site, or an OpenText ECM.
These indexed knowledge articles are then available to the SMAX portal users and SMAX agent users to be used in the following ways:
- Global search
When users perform global search, the system includes the external knowledge articles (identified by the “External Article” or “External Knowledge” badge) in the search results.
The search results contain a brief summary of the knowledge article.
The users can click a button next to the search result to open the article in its source system.
- Aviator / virtual agent
When users interact with the Aviator or the virtual agent, the system uses the external knowledge articles (as well as other data stored in SMAX) to answer the user’s questions or provide suggestions.
Depending on the version of the virtual agent, the system displays external articles (identified by the “External Article” badge) as suggestions or references in the answer.
The users can click the link to open the article in its source system.
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