Standardising on Dell computers has resulted in a total cost of ownership reduction of 80 percent at SAGE Life Employee Benefits, a division of the SAGE GroupLife. In order to streamline business processes, this the insurer Employee Benefits division acquired 62 OptiPlex 100`s, a PowerEdge 6300 server and three Latitude notebooks.
Walter van der Merwe, senior manager for Employee Benefits at SAGE Life, says prior to installing Dell products, the department made use of so-called "clone" PCs, which were purchased at a lower initial cost but in time resulted in escalated support costs and down time.
"In a fairly big department, such as ours, support can in the long run be more costly than the initial purchasing of the product, and having fallen into that trap before, I was adamant not to repeat the same mistake." he adds. "The reinstallation cost and patching that had to be done on those machines far outweighed any initial cost reduction,"
EDS provides SAGE with helpdesk support on their machines and oversees hardware problems. However, Brent Hamilton, MD for Dell SA, says Dell`s own support team is also available to help with installation and networking problems.
Says van der Merwe: "When our desktops arrived, we experienced problems with the network in Cape Town and could not install some of the PCs properly. Despite it not being a Dell problem they were dedicated to solving it and worked at it till all the equipment was installed and each one registered on the network."
Currently the Dell machines run Windows 2000 and the Office 2000 productivity suite. "Our workstations are critical to the operation of this department with electronic mail be an integral part as we use it for both internal and external communication," continues van der Merwe.
A nightly backup stores the day`s working files on the server, so should a workstation fall over, the user will not loose much as they will be able to retrieve data directly from the server. "Since our installation of the Dell server in November last year, we have not had a single minute downtime with it," concludes van der Merwe.
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