IT Outsourcing Services for European Southern Observatory

About Southern Observatory

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a leading intergovernmental astronomical organisation in Europe, and the most effective astronomical observatory in the world. ESO provides astronomers with state-of-the-art research equipment. The observatory is financed by Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Italy.

Annual contributions by the member states amount to a total of 140 million euro, and the organisation employs over 700 staff in Germany and Chile. ESO’s central headquarters is located in Garching near Munich, Germany and house the scientific, technical and administrative centres of the organisation.

Situation Before Implementation with Comarch

In recent years, IT support was provided for ESO, in both Germany and Chile, by previous providers under a mix of outsourcing and body-leasing model. Employees hired by outsourcing company performed the required work and ESO settled accounts with its partner on the basis of resources involved in a given project. However, the organisation decided to switch to a service based model and rely on a precisely defined scope of services and SLA parameters. Thus, ESO ensured that it would receive IT services in accordance with Service Catalogue that can be monitored in an ongoing fashion, and the provider renders these services by means of competent and properly trained engineers.

Tender Porceedings

According to ESO’s internal policy, tender proceedings must be conducted under strictly defined terms and conditions and at strictly defined intervals of time. Information concerning tender proceedings is publicly available on the institution’s website. The first stage is always “prequalification”, during which bidders are formally verified with respect to their experience, reliability, financial situation and other key parameters. Companies qualified for the next stage of IT Out-Tasking tenders submitted price bids for a precisely defined range of services, separately for the headquarters in Germany and the facilities in Chile. Both bids from Comarch were recognised by ESO as complied with technical requirements and the most attractive from the costs perspective.

Scope of Services

Comarch signed two separate contracts with ESO for rendering of IT Out-Tasking services, covering the same range of IT services – one for ESO’s central headquarters in Germany and the other for facilities in Chile (all except Chajantar observatory). In the terminology used by ESO, “IT Out-Tasking services” are a comprehensive set of outsourcing services, consisting of the following services:

Service Desk for users
Support for workstations (Windows, Linux, MAC,OSX)
Server infrastructure administration (Windows, Linux/Unix)
LAN/WAN network administration
Administration of telecommunications infrastructure (VoIP telephony and videoconferencing systems)
Database administration
Administration of virtualisation, storage and backup environments
Support of the data centre and telecommunications
rooms

Benefits of Choosing Comarch

Well-established world-wide position (all eso facilities supported by a single provider)
Team of experienced it engineers working on-site for eso chile and both on-site and remotely from cracow, poland for eso germany
Central headquarters in an eso member state high quality of services, according to defined sla parameters, as confirmed by technical certificates (including cisco ccnp, cisco ccie, microsoft mcse, red hat rhce)
Attractive price
Flexibility and a partner-oriented approach to service performance