In this Run and Reinvent podcast my colleague Dave Schmidt and I chat with Trung Quach, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Operations at Videotron, about how his company is leveraging BMC solutions to improve service management with remarkable results. Videotron is a leading Canadian telecommunications provider with over 7,000 employees. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.
Dave Schmidt: Can you give us a quick summary of Videotron, its business and some stats?
Trung Quach: We’re a telecom company of 7,000 employees that provides services for TV, Internet, house phone, and cell phone. We have a bit more than two million customers for an annual sale of $2.2 billion.
Dave: I would imagine with a company of that size, your ITSM environment has got to be fairly substantial and fairly robust. Can you describe what your environment is and the size of your organization? Give some data points of what it takes to support and service this type of organization.
Trung: I’m in the IT team, and our infrastructure is in two data centers. We have 23,000 assets so far. We have 40 servers for all the BMC products, for everything that you guys sell that can push us forward. And the most important thing is we did the ITIL service management. So, we have 49 management servers with all the CIs.
Dave: Oh, that’s great. So, when you look at all the complexity in your business, all the things that you have set up there, what are the major challenges that you face in today’s business environment?
Trung: So, a year and a half ago we tried to compete a lot in the telecom industry. We got a new OSS, TV and Internet; and a DSS, so the IT part was stacked with a lot of new vendors – third parties – that’s coming to help us manage the business instead of internal teams. So, this is a big shift for us in term of business and in term of internal.
Dave: So, when you look at that shift, what was the major motivation for making that type of shift?
Trung: We saw a lot of our competitors going big. So we had to do it, too. We had to reinvent our business for years to compete with them. So, it was a choice, but we had no choice.
Dave: No, and I totally understand. I mean, obviously, in today’s modern world, you have to move at the speed of business and that does take a transformation and definitely looking at what you’re trying to accomplish with your goals. When you look at your transformation, what was a strategy, or strategies, that you came up with to address these challenges?
Trung: So, we’re trying to go forward with more buying and building because we believe it’s faster and it’s more standard. When we did that, we found out that we have to do transfers as well, and manage services. We couldn’t do everything ourselves. For the I&Os on my team, we went about it at the same time. We orchestrated ITIL because the speed is increasing. So, we couldn’t do it manually. We even went cloud brokerage, stop service, and AI ops is our last hope.
Dave: Let’s now go to a deeper dive into IT service management and your experience with BMC technologies and IT service management. Can you just give me overall impressions, what your experience has been, and how BMC’s solutions have helped with your IT service management?
Trung: Yeah. So, the product is great. It’s exactly what I heard of it when I was at other companies that didn’t have it. Great features, innovation features – pretty good. But I think the two main things that made us very good in business, especially from the mindset of the people who access the technology and the help of BMC support for the sales team has been great. Because many times we came to a conclusion that it was not doable. And then, we brought in BMC and they said, “Yes, it’s doable, but you have to do this, that, and that.” And then we accomplished it.
