Two years ago, Telkom made the significant decision to migrate its network infrastructure from Novell NetWare and Groupwise to Microsoft`s Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000.
In a major undertaking known as the Summit Project, 32 000 PCs and over 1 000 file, print and mail servers will be migrated to a Microsoft platform, and each desktop will be upgraded to the latest version of Windows and Office. To date, more than 20 500 PCs have been migrated and updated and the server back-end infrastructure deployed.
Telkom considered Microsoft`s product offering after conducting extensive research into the scalability and maturity of its solutions.
"We felt that Windows 2000 and the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server range of products had made significant strides in the market with third party developers increasingly buying into the Windows 2000 environment," says Andy Mills, Telkom executive for IT service delivery. "We have been impressed by Microsoft`s product and solution set for telcos which has provided us with a base architecture and platform that has effectively allowed us, Telkom IT Services, to provide world-class services to Telkom."
Telkom has benefited in many ways from working with Microsoft. For one, Telkom now has an integrated solution, from PC up to high-end server, on a standardised platform.
Manageability solutions including Microsoft Operations Manager and Microsoft Systems Management Server have provided Telkom with the operational knowledge necessary to keep mission-critical applications and systems running smoothly. These solutions support an IT administrator to manage the uptime of technology to ensure 24-hour availability, analyse whether systems are running at an optimum level and analyse the existing costs of maintaining the IT infrastructure. These solutions have assisted Telkom to achieve greater levels of control and manageability of assets and services, reduced support costs and improved productivity.
Microsoft Windows and Office have contributed to improved return on investment by providing enhanced reliability, performance and security. Additional features such as document recovery, application compatibility and the ability to lower IT costs by decreasing the time needed to plan, deploy and maintain the desktop have played a significant role in the efficient roll-out of this initiative.
Microsoft`s value-add services which are offered on top of the installed infrastructure have provided an additional benefit. The Microsoft Services Group have implemented a Metadirectory for Telkom which presents a single, reliable directory service designed for distributed heterogeneous computing environments, allowing Telkom to centrally manage and share information on network resources while providing a trusted source for the network security systems. This eliminates huge volumes of duplication and high costs of data maintenance. For the first time, Telkom has a synchronised organisational structure available and accessible to use in any application.
In addition, Microsoft Services Group supplied some of its best skills, project management design frameworks and expertise on the project and ensured a transfer of skills to Telkom staff, to assure ongoing maximum benefit from the solutions installed.
"By mapping Telkom`s business requirements onto a next generation platform, we have been able to provide them with a new, exciting set of competitive applications and services, assisting Telkom to become a world-class provider of telecoms services," says Cyril Belikoff, telecommunications industry manager at Microsoft South Africa. "In addition to all these benefits, Telkom now have a comprehensive platform to deploy new and agile applications."
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