Electronic Workplace / Market Launch

Go-to-market in Switzerland following the successfully completed implementation project at the health insurer Sanitas Krankenversicherung. Already more than 900 users benefiting from "AC EAP" live operation. The cost drivers identified within typical corporate IT landscapes leading to a service-oriented process landscape within the Managed Service Center. Cost-savings potential helps stimulate growth.

Wettingen, Stuttgart, 16 January 2008 – AC-Service (Schweiz) AG of Wettingen is taking great strides in expanding its range of managed services and has begun the market introduction of its newly developed "AC EAP" electronic workplace. AC EAP encompasses all the business workplace services you might need including internet telephony, workplace hardware (PC/wireless devices/PDA), WAN/LAN connections, access to software applications and peripherals (printers/scanners), not to mention their upkeep, maintenance, support and operation. Depending on customer-specific wants and needs, it mostly supports software application landscapes consisting of SAP, typical back office applications and special solutions. A centralised ServiceDesk ensures comprehensive, first-level user support. What's more, AC EAP also incorporates services such as licence management, inventory, software installations and updates, along with the technical support of the workplace hardware - also known as "client management". Based on an exact process and role model specified in the project phase, each user in the company gets precisely the workplace he or she needs for their respective duties.

"In designing and developing AC EAP, we included outside specialists and systematically analysed the cost drivers in typical business applications and identified their significant dependencies", explained Daniel Kaiser, the managing director and delegate of the administrative board of AC-Service in Switzerland. "Although many conventional IT operating models optimise various sections, the critical processes surrounding them remain untouched. With AC EAP on the other hand, we address both the primary and secondary IT processes of larger midmarket companies as a whole, which means realising considerable savings potential," added Markus Grütter, the chief of service delivery. And so the development of AC EAP at the IT and full-scale SAP service provider AC-Service has led to the establishment of a thoroughly service-oriented catalogue of products and systems coupled with the related process landscape. The actual production infrastructures in the Managed IT Service Center work in the background as a means to an end. At the forefront are of course services, which, because they are closely geared to the customer's enterprise processes, can support these in a highly cost-effective manner.

The market launch of this electronic workplace in Switzerland was preceded by the successful start of AC EAP live operations at the Zürich-based Sanitas Krankenversicherung. It was with this electronic workplace at this Swiss health-insurance company that AC-Service supported a major IT consolidation in the course of Sanitas' takeover of the insurance companies Wincare Versicherungen AG and Wincare Zusatzversicherungen AG. Currently some 900 users at work in the headquarters and at over 15 offices in the field are enjoying the benefits of AC EAP. The market launch of AC EAP is closely connected with the dynamic expansion of the Managed Services business. This segment, which operates in Switzerland under the "AC" brand and in Germany and Austria as the brand "All for One" with the endorsement "Member of AC-Group," posted combined sales of EUR 17.8 million after the first 9 months of 2007 (9 months 2006: EUR 13.4 million) for a considerable double-digit increase in business volume over the year-earlier period.