When Nextel merged with Sprint two years ago, it brought more legacy network management tools and one-of-a-kind data collection systems into the Sprint fold, exactly what John Montross, VP of Sprint's managed network operations, didn't need.

	Sprint's Montross got the ITIL message from customers Photo by Michael Crouch

The telecommunications marketplace was moving rapidly toward the convergence of voice and data, and Sprint needed to be able to offer its customers customized combined services. Before it could do that, its operations information had to be gathered and standardized. Services couldn't be packaged or tailored for customers if the knowledge in one operations data warehouse wasn't available to a service built with another, and few of those data warehouses could talk to each other.

To make sense of this Tower of Babel, Montross turned to the IT Infrastructure Library, a set of best practices for IT data center operations and services encapsulated in eight volumes published by the British government. ITIL is sometimes referred to as "the manager of managers"--a way to establish standard practices over how IT staffers manage data center operations and how they use information captured by a data center's network management, systems management, and troubleshooting tools. Done right, use of ITIL can shave off 25% of a company's annual IT operations expense, Forrester Research says.

CUSTOMER PUSH

Sprint is still early in the adoption process. It completed the operations assessment last September and full-scale adoption of ITIL is going to take another three years, says Montross. Because Sprint is a services provider, though, it's feeling some heat. Customers regularly ask him what he's doing with ITIL, Montross says. One, Fidelity Investments, has already adopted ITIL and urged Sprint to do so as well. "It's on everybody's radar screen," he adds.

One reason is because ITIL makes the processes that govern data center operations documentable, auditable, and repeatable. Sprint's customers like that because it helps in compliance efforts for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other government regulations. For instance, a financial institution might have to provide details about network performance to banking regulators.

Besides compliance, ITIL helps Sprint assure its customers that best practices are being followed for security purposes. "Customers come in and ask, 'Tell me how your network is secure,'" Montross says. "It's the same conversation, over and over again."

Most companies are interested in ITIL for help with their internal integration and standardization efforts. The increasing popularity of service-oriented architecture is driving ITIL adoption, according to a survey of 333 IT managers conducted by Ovum Summit. SOA will strain IT management tools and techniques "to the breaking point," Ovum analyst Mary Johnston Turner warned when the survey was published in August. "Traditional IT management approaches assume tight connections between systems, while SOA environments are much more loosely coupled," she said. Customers who have implemented ITIL best practices "are twice as likely as other firms to report that their SOA investments are meeting all their IT business goals."