Agriculture supplier and services group, WPK, is using Novell eDirectory as their platform to facilitate the provisioning of IT services between 68 affiliate offices around the country.
The low cost of ownership of Novell`s eDirectory and WPK`s complement of in-house Novell skills, are the two primary reasons for the large agriculture group`s decision to upgrade the entire operation to NetWare 5.1 and to build on the eDirectory platform with Novell GroupWise for its most important effort - to streamline internal communications. WPK is a public company that, together with its subsidiaries and well-established infrastructure, offers a wide range of products and services to the agriculture industry, primarily in the Western and the Northern Cape. WPK strives to apply its infrastructure and expertise to doing business outside the agricultural sector as well. Currently the Group has approximately 68 operating points in 38 towns from where services are rendered. WPK`s clientele covers almost the entire spectrum of farming activities over a number of geographical areas, as well as the general public. "It is WPK`s priority to provide the best IT services to keep these business activities alive. Communication is very important and our biggest effort currently is building collaboration between our network of affiliate offices. I am working to provide a strong platform to facilitate this communication collaboration and it is to this end that we have involved Novell. Essentially we are building an IT Services Platform based on Novell eDirectory," says Paul Brand, IT manager at WPK.
The WPK IT infrastructure is centrally controlled out of the Paarl head office. The central server at this point links the national outlets where IT services are required through a Wide Area Network (WAN). Some of these branches are WPK retail outlets and others are affiliate companies including insurance offices and irrigation firms. Several of these offices host their own Local Area Networks (LANs) and in total, the central server in Paarl feeds information through to 500 workstations (300 PCs and 200 basic terminals).
WPK recently upgraded their network operating system from NetWare 3 to NetWare 5.1, and rolled out eDirectory across the entire infrastructure. This has provided the best platform for WPK to provide IT Services objectives - the first of which was to facilitate better collaboration between the offices. Thus the company has successfully deployed Novell GroupWise, which Brand confirms is fulfilling its objectives comfortably. "I discussed my needs with Novell and they were able to give structure to my vision. Novell Business Expert, Unihold, added the colour to this strategy."
The second initiative in the collaboration effort is to effectively provide desktop support to the 500 workstations in the organisation. "Our need for efficiency by design and cost effectiveness is leading us to evaluate Novell`s ZENworks Suite. We are also enticed by Novell`s SecureLogin (Single Sign-on) technology and iChain solution for security," says Brand.
"Our relationship with Novell has picked up significantly over the last 12-18 months during the collaboration effort. Novell is our solution of choice because of its significantly low total cost of ownership. The cost of deploying Microsoft Exchange is high and the demands on bandwidth are increased, so investing in our existing, familiar Novell infrastructure made more sense than replacing what we have with something unfamiliar and unproven."
"Novell`s vision is a world in which all types of networks work together as One Net to simplify the complexities of eBusiness and provide the power and flexibility organizations need to succeed in the Net economy," discusses Marius Agenbag, "At Novell we strive to understand our customer`s business and to provide solutions for their business needs. In the case of WPK we are providing them with an industrial strength Security, Digital Identity and Collaboration platform that will enable them to develop solutions that will integrate with existing legacy systems as well as tightly integrate with the newly created Security and Profiling platform."
"Given our environment we had only one choice in vendor and that was Novell. Novell is very competitive with best of breed solutions in the marketplace. I do not conduct business with products but rather with people and as such, I only do business with people who I can build a strong relationship with. I feel that Novell cares and that is key for WPK. I wouldn`t do anything within our IT Services infrastructure without consulting Novell first," concludes Brand.
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