The Challenge

CGI experts are constantly automating, innovating, and increasing efficiency for their global customers. The company’s 2024 study of more than 1,800 executives found that digital leaders are making IT a top priority, modernizing and accelerating their IT landscape, and tightly aligning business and IT to support a shared agenda.

With its unique view into client priorities, CGI challenges itself to do even more:

• To be more predictive and see every aspect of a customer’s network.
• To increase visibility at individual levels.
• To prioritize which systems are most valuable and should be brought back online first if there is a major outage.

That’s where BMC comes in, delivering visibility to make decisions and react quickly.

Jason Campbell is CGI’s Director of Tools for Global Technology Operations in Canada, leading a team focusing on end-to-end services. CGI works within customers’ environments to set up, maintain, and even run their IT services. Campbell describes the challenge from one client’s perspective, saying, “We work with a customer that has many, many stores, and we need to give them visibility, predictability, and action. It’s about so much more than telling them that there is a potential issue at a store—a faulty point-of-sale system or printer. With visibility, you can address a problem before it becomes a more widespread outage. At the same time, if multiple stores in an area go down, you need to track and identify a potentially larger network outage or power outage and act right away.”

The Solution

CGI has thousands of end-to-end service clients and deployed BMC Helix Discovery for full visibility into and control of its customers’ IT assets and services. The solution scans and identifies network devices, providing detailed information for each asset while continuously monitoring the network for changes.

Before using BMC Helix Discovery, CGI would plan out upgrades and manually check software, then create code to extract insights. The automated and agentless solution gives CGI and its clients comprehensive visibility while helping ensure efficient management, security, and resource optimization.

CGI also uses another BMC product, TrueSight Automation for Servers, for security patching and automation. It empowers IT staff to focus on innovation and strategic projects rather than maintenance by automating vulnerability management, patching, compliance with regulations and operational policies, configuration management, and service provisioning.

As a managed service provider (MSP), CGI has BMC’s continuous support.

“With BMC Helix Discovery, we can just quickly search for information and pull it out, and TrueSight is the arm that we have out in the environment,” says Campbell. “So, between the two, we have both the visibility to help us make decisions quickly and the ability to react quickly.”

The Results

CGI’s automation, innovation, predictability, and efficiencies continue to improve rapidly. Using BMC tools, CGI has: 

• Used BMC Helix Discovery to give customers visibility, increasing trust and transparency.
• Shortened provisioning time from 30 hours to two or three hours per server by managing thousands of servers through TrueSight.
• Automated security patching, empowering a six-person team to assign four members to other challenges.
• Rapidly built out service blueprints, enabling services to be modeled and understood on an ongoing basis.
• Increased time-to-value by 85% through automation when deploying new services.
• Reduced downtime by 40% with proactive monitoring and predictive capabilities.
• Established a Center of Excellence (CoE) to showcase BMC tools for customers, demonstrating how the technology works and planning the next steps.

Looking ahead, CGI is exploring a move from legacy monitoring to BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps. The tool would give CGI the power of causal, generative, and predictive artificial intelligence (AI) with observability to identify and prevent IT issues before they happen. Its predictive capabilities would help improve both the performance and availability of CGI’s IT services.

CGI’s customers are getting ready to join the AI for IT operations (AIOps) journey. The firm is already deploying its first instance with a CGI customer that operates numerous stores. “We have dashboards tracking every store they have and the devices stored within those sites,” Campbell says. “It's a visibility that they've never had before. It’s more predictive and preventative than what they even have today. It reduces downtime. It's helping plan out where they need to focus time, trying to get to issues before they're an issue, and it's providing a lot of value quickly.”