By moving its mainly mobile workforce to a virtual private network,
US accounting firm McGladrey & Pullen saved money while
increasing productivity
Since the Big Six consolidation occurred, Ken Thygesen likes to
boast that McGladrey & Pullen is the sixth largest accounting
firm in the US. But if McGladrey & Pullen, of Minneapolis,
Minnesota, wants to play in the big league, Thygesen knows the
company's network infrastructure must offer first-class support to
its 3,300 employees around the country, most of which are
mobile.
To keep up with technology, McGladrey & Pullen recently
replaced its direct-dial RAS infrastructure with a Virtual Private
Network (VPN). The VPN, which supports as many as 2,700 mobile or
remote users, is based on AT&T WorldNet's Virtual Private
Network Service (VPNS). VPNS provides secure remote access to
corporate local and wide area networks, intranets and extranets.The
VPN rollout replaced a patchwork of dial-up centres with
remote-access servers ( each with different configurations and
equipment. By moving to a standardised VPN setup, the company
enjoys economies of scale. The goal is to give remote users the
same capabilities they would have if they were connected to the
office LAN. Remote users at McGladrey & Pullen usually connect
to the network using Toshiba SatellitePro notebooks with 233MHz
Pentium processors.Thygesen's team took advantage of the accounting
world's summer doldrums to start the rollout. The first step was
replacing the company's Lotus cc:Mail dial-up email server with IP
dial-up connections. The old system was adequate for sending and
receiving email, but IP dial-up offers more."We considered building
our own dial-up centre, but we aren't a 24-hour operation and we
support people across the country in different time zones. It
became pretty clear that some sort of outsourcing would make a lot
of sense for us," Thygesen recalls.McGladrey & Pullen
considered both AT&T's VPNS and MCI WorldCom's managed
services. AT&T won because it allowed the firm to leverage its
existing wide area network. WorldCom Advanced Networks wanted to
use its own T1 line. That made a real difference to Thygesen who
supports a variety of locations that have between 25 and 300
people. "Often we dedicate eight channels of T1 access to voice and
two to eight channels to data. We wanted to make sure the system
worked well with the system we already had in place."AT&T also
agreed to bill McGladrey & Pullen by the hour, something
WorldCom Advanced Networks refused to do. By using per hour
billing, the firm pays for what it uses ( nothing more. "I don't
have to worry whether a particular employee used up his 10 hours
this month," Thygesen says. "It's a shared pool of time. It saves a
lot of money and it's much more efficient."Thygesen also found that
the technology changes resulted in cost savings. "In our cc:Mail
layout, we had a post office in every office with modems hanging
off of them." But with the new VPN, the firm has gone to a central
server to which everybody connects. Explains Thygesen, "It really
helps reduce our costs. Because we can keep the technology at a
central site; we don't have to disperse it to manage
it."
Compiled by Ajith Ram( Petersen Co