Keeping Serbia’s Buildings in Top Condition with
More Responsive Maintenance Services
Government
Public company JP Gradsko Stambeno maintains more than 13,600 buildings in Serbia, mobilizing work teams via its contact center and emergency departments to carry out an average of 400 tasks daily. As demand for its services grew, the organization began looking for ways to respond faster, and identified its ageing IT infrastructure as a bottleneck on performance.
With significantly higher IT performance enabled by Nutanix technology, JP Gradsko Stambeno accelerated operations: its call centers can now handle more citizen requests using the same resources, and its work units are sent out to jobs faster. The organization estimates that the Nutanix solution is ten times easier to manage than the legacy platform, freeing up its IT team to focus on innovation.
Everything runs faster on Nutanix. Our call center was able to reach its target of handling customer calls within three minutes on average. As a result, they can take more calls per day and reduce the time people spend waiting.
JP Gradsko Stambeno is a public company that has been taking care of buildings in Belgrade, Serbia for 54 years. It provides emergency interventions, long-term enhancements, and ongoing maintenance, cleaning and administrative services.
Citizens can access JP Gradsko Stambeno’s services by contacting its call center or emergency department, or visiting its offices. From there, the organization mobilizes construction and maintenance teams across ten municipalities.
“At JP Gradsko Stambeno, we never stop trying to improve the way we deliver services to the public,” explained Dimitrije Putnik, Head Manager of the organization’s IT department. “Since we maintain residential buildings, it’s vital that our teams get to where they need to be fast or it could have a negative impact on people’s lives. We had the digital systems we needed to achieve this goal, but our ageing hardware was beginning to cause performance challenges.”
For example, JP Gradsko Stambeno’s call center wanted to be able to handle calls more quickly, but found that systems loaded too slowly. The organization also recognized that its IT team was spending too much time managing the complex IT infrastructure and securing support from multiple IT vendors. To ensure that it could continue providing great service to Belgrade’s citizens, JP Gradsko Stambeno decided the time was right for an IT refresh.
To enable greater performance and simplicity, JP Gradsko Stambeno chose to replace its legacy platform with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) from Nutanix. The five-node cluster is virtualized with Nutanix AHV and managed with Nutanix Prism.
“The HCI concept appealed to us immediately as it allows us to swap the finger-pointing you sometimes get with multiple vendors for a single point of support,” said Dimitrije Putnik. “Nutanix technology is the right choice for us because it is easy to connect and manage, and the price-performance ratio is impressive. As a public company, we have to justify purchases to our management, and we had no problem building a compelling business case for the Nutanix platform.”
JP Gradsko Stambeno engaged partner Global Vision Consulting to advise on and deploy the solution. Value-added distributor ALEF also participated in the project, providing technical pre-sales support.
“Global Vision Consulting have been a partner of ours for 15 years and counting,” recalled Dimitrije Putnik. “They worked seamlessly with ALEF to design the best possible platform for us and migrate our applications with zero disruption to our employees.”
One week after acquiring the Nutanix technology, JP Gradsko Stambeno was up and running—with an immediate impact on response times. By giving its workforce faster access to the information they need to work effectively, the organization is providing a better level of service to citizens.
“Everything runs faster on Nutanix,” said Dimitrije Putnik. “Operations that used to take two or three seconds now happen near-instantly. Our call center was able to reach its target of handling customer calls within three minutes on average because they can both input and pull up information more quickly. As a result, they can take more calls per day and reduce the time people spend waiting for a response.
JP Gradsko Stambeno is seeing performance improvements across its application landscape. One application, used for document archiving, runs so much faster that users have commented on the change.
“A job that used to take 20 minutes completes in 1.5 minutes on the Nutanix solution,” commented Dimitrije Putnik. “Of course some of this is down to having newer hardware, but we believe that the hyperconverged architecture also contributes to the speed.”
Using its new Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, JP Gradsko Stambeno can now make copies of its Oracle database and E-Business Suite environments for test and development faster and more efficiently, accelerating innovation. Dimitrije Putnik added: “Before, provisioning compute and storage resources for development was a slow and tedious process, and we were reaching the limits of our storage systems. With Nutanix, deduplication has saved us lots of storage space and our test and development instances run at practically the same speed as production environments!”
The JP Gradsko Stambeno IT department is also experiencing the benefits of the new platform. The team is saving time on administration and enhancing its planning capabilities. “We estimate that the Nutanix solution is ten-times easier to manage than our previous infrastructure,” commented Dimitrije Putnik. “It’s given us visibility and control of IT resources like we’ve never had before.
We can optimize performance on an ongoing basis and plan more accurately for our future infrastructure needs. It gives us great peace of mind that we can give our employees the tools to work as productively as possible. And when we have contacted Nutanix support, they have been very responsive and knowledgeable.”
Looking ahead, JP Gradsko Stambeno is preparing to deploy Nutanix Frame to provision digital workspaces for employees at its branch offices. The move will help the organization save money and effort, enabling it to provide even better value to citizens for public spending.
“Before we started this project, I estimated that we were only using our application landscape to ten percent of its full potential,” concluded Dimitrije Putnik. “With Nutanix, the sky is the limit. We plan to build on brilliant concepts such as Nutanix Frame to do the best we can for our workforce and, in turn, the citizens of Belgrade.”