A large amount of employee time was spent on manual operations. Also, the customer did not have up-to-date and reliable information about what the landscape of the current ARM infrastructure (automated workstations) looked like, since the infrastructure was growing, the number of workstations was increasing, and a large number of changes were made during the maintenance of workstations.
To manage the client infrastructure, the company used Active Directory - group policies were used to deploy software; Directum software was used to automate processes. At the same time, there were no inventory tools. Many tasks were performed manually or using their own automation scripts.
The customer decided that it was necessary to move away from manual administration, as well as understand the state of the current ARM fleet and minimize infrastructure support costs. To achieve this goal, the customer decided to implement a full-fledged device management product.
Key Challenges
- Conduct testing of the Colibri-ARM product for centralized management of the IT infrastructure in the pilot circuit.
- In case of successful piloting, implement Colibri-ARM in production.
The project was divided into stages: piloting and implementation in production.
Piloting
To solve the problems set by the customer, the ICL Services team decided to choose its own platform Colibri-ARM as a new system for generalized management of user workstations.
For this, various tools were analyzed. As a result of the analysis, the Colibri-ARM product was selected for testing based on the combination of available functionality and attractive price.
ICL Services experts implemented the Colibri-ARM product as part of the system piloting, and also conducted an inventory - collected information on the range of hardware and software used, as well as its location.
The highly qualified technical support service of the product showed itself to be excellent, distinguishing it from solutions from other manufacturers. The support service specialists not only professionally carried out the implementation and helped the customer to conduct pilot tests, but also got involved in solving specific business problems.
In particular, they set up automation that made it possible to solve the problems of mass updating of software packages used in business operations. To do this, the vendor's experts independently packaged and configured several complex, integrated applications.
For example, a scenario was implemented for updating the Oracle Client corporate software, which, using the current approach, would have entailed hundreds of hours of labor costs for the company's IT staff for debugging, installation and monitoring of the result.
The customer was convinced that with Colibri-ARM the task can be fully automated and completed in just a few clicks, and the installation result on each device is available to the administrator in real time, which frees up the time of IT specialists for project activities.
The piloting results were recognized by the customer as successful, and a decision was made to purchase the Colibri-ARM product.
Implementation
The vendor's implementation and support team implemented a project to implement the current version of the solution on the production circuit, after which the product was put into operation.
Products and technologies
- Colibri-ARM
- Active Directory
- Windows 7, Windows 10
Results
- Based on the piloting results, the customer was convinced that Colibri-ARM really allows to significantly reduce labor costs for managing the ARM infrastructure.
- The customer received accurate and up-to-date information about the current state of the user infrastructure and received a means of its full control in the pilot circuit.
- The Colibri-ARM product was implemented in production and was put into operation.