COMSOFTs IT Services ARTAS Maintenance & Operational Support Officially Certified

KARLSRUHE/GERMANY, May 2011 The Provision of IT Services ARTAS Maintenance & Operational Support was successfully certified in full accordance with ISO/IEC 20000-1, thus confirming COMSOFTs IT service management system based on the philosophy of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices is compliant with the required standard. As a result, the German ATC expert now enjoys a leadership position within the ATC/ATM industry, proving compliance with the ISO/IEC 20000-1 standard, which is best practice for high quality service management in IT-based industries.

ARTAS is the European standard with respect to Surveillance Data Processing systems. It is used by most European ANSPs and forms the core of modern ATC/ATM infrastructures. Next to its leading-edge functionality supporting all modern surveillance data sources, one of its key benefits is the framework of reliable high-quality IT services which COMSOFT offers for ARTAS and which provide complete system lifecycle support. Part of this service framework are the support services, which are also the backbone of Europes Centralised CAMOS, but not limited to this project.

COMSOFT applies the ITIL philosophy to the ARTAS support services resulting in an IT service management which is certified to comply with ISO/IEC 20000-1. ITIL provides guidelines for IT service management and covers the complete range of processes required for service delivery and service support (incident & problem management, change management, release management, configuration management, etc.). Moreover, quality & safety assurance procedures contribute to enhance the overall safety environment. Continuous improvement of the IT services forms a further cornerstone of the approach.

ISO/IEC 20000-1 is a standard coordinated with ITIL and represents the quality benchmark. The goal of this standard is to provide a common reference standard for companies which offer IT-based services to their customers.

The reliable, traceable, structured, documented IT service procedures and the high quality services are effective measures to counteract the steadily increasing costs and improve overall efficiency and productivity, thus contributing to maintain an optimum cost-performance ratio. Furthermore, the integrated quality processes undergo a recognised certification by saving operational figures.

COMSOFT was one of the first companies to be certified in accordance with ISO-9000 in 1991 and is now again a forerunner in the industry in terms of providing certified high-level IT support services. However, for the German ATC expert this is merely an intermediate stage, not ceasing to strive for continual improvement with regard to both internal and external services as an integrated service provider.