Norwich life subsidiary, D&E Health Benefits has implemented 500 seats of Seagate Software`s Desktop Management Suite (DMS) to track assets residing on its network and identify Year 2000 related issues across the country.
Seagate DMS will allow the company to identify the number of machines, their configuration and serial numbers regardless of location - dramatically reducing man hours normally allocated to this labour intensive task.
Applications residing in the software bundle include Seagate WinINSTALL for software distribution, Proxy for remote maintenance and administration control, Seagate WinLAND for network inventory and Seagate WinSMART for software metering.
"We were looking at streamlining our IT infrastructure. Manual labour would prove to be too costly and it is difficult to expand or upgrade hardware and software if you do not know what you have," says Werner Lunow, LAN manager at D&E .
"The original plan was to remotely distribute software using WINInstall, but we soon identified other needs such as network maintenance, the monitoring of systems and the provision of support on our LANs and WANs."
Chris Roux, MD of Seagate Software sub-distributor, Intelligent Systems, says the suite of applications offers D&E support staff remote network access to reconfigure machines on the network. "The company no longer has a need to dispatch technicians to carry out routine repair work. Not only have travel expenses been reduced, but users may now be trained and supported in a shorter amount of time, anywhere in South Africa," he says.
Jack Smith, Seagate Software accounts manager at Intelligent Systems VAR and Seagate Software TeamExec programme member, Tac Tec, says WinLAND allows D&E to detect unwanted software on the network and generate an alert when illegal programs are loaded onto a PC.
"In addition, if any hardware is stolen, or a hard drive replaced for a smaller capacity unit, the application will notify an administrator as soon as the PCs are booted up," he explains.
An added benefit stems from WinLAND`s ability to identify how many of these machines are Y2K compliant. Using WinLAND, its IT managers can run a series of tests to generate the necessary information and use this to address the issue and plan a Year 2000 adherence programme.
"D&E has been wanting to go this way for some time now. DMS fits in with where we want to go - a managed IT environment that offers performance enhancements across the board and considerably reduces support and IT infrastructure replacement costs," says Lunow.
D&E`s first DMS implementation took place in Cape Town in April this year. Sites at Durban and Johannesburg were soon brought up to speed and Port Elizabeth will also be brought on board before the end of 1998.
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