Consolidation is flavour of the month for IT departments. It
helps businesses lower the cost of IT management by reducing the
number of physical servers, desktop PCs and network infrastructures
that must be supported. Consolidation also fits neatly into a
company's green strategy, since less IT equipment produces less
carbon and contributes to lower electricity bills. Here are four
examples of IT consolidation.
CASE STUDY 1
Virtual desktop infrastructure: Leicestershire Constabulary
VDI keeps bobbies on the beat
Like most frontline public services,
Leicestershire
Constabulary has turned to technology to reduce bureaucracy,
while also keeping costs down.
Inspector Sanjiv Pattani of Leicestershire Constabulary says
when the government released
£50m to fund mobile policing initiatives following the
publication of the
late-2007 Flanagan report, the Midlands force was already
looking at ways to use existing IT to increase officer
productivity.
"We decided on a mixed economy of devices - Blackberry mobiles
for selected teams without vehicles; demountable Panasonic
Toughbooks in mobile units. The fundamental element to both was
remote desktop access," says Pattani.
James Pearce, Leicestershire Constabulary information systems
analyst, says the IT team had to translate the business case and
user requirements into a successful delivery project. "It was
decided to take the standard physical platform and make it virtual
and accessible," he said.
The force was able to take advantage of the fact that it was
already using
Citrix
Presentation Server for application delivery. "We wanted to take
the virtual desktop infrastructure [VDI] and co-locate it anywhere.
So implementing Citrix XenDesktop seemed a good fit, as we did not
have to reposition the apps," says Pearce.
Although some bespoke development work was required to make key
applications - such as Crime & Intelligence and Command &
Control - work on the various mobile platforms, Pearce says the
roll-out benefited from previous experience of the Citrix
interface.
By September 2008, Leicestershire Constabulary had worked with
Citrix reseller Point-to-Point
to deploy 150 mobile handheld and laptop devices to frontline
staff. Pattani says this has reduced the amount of time they spend
at the police station by 35%. There are further plans to deliver
over 300 more data terminals according to role-specific
responsibilities in the near future.
"The VDI project has enabled officers to complete full crime
reports at the scene in a way that is less manually intensive,
while also improving the quality and accuracy of information, as
well as our efficiency and visibility in the community," he
says.
CASE STUDY 2
Server virtualisation: The Eden Project grows a greener IT
infrastructure
Just like any mid-sized business,
The Eden Project relies
on its IT infrastructure for key day-to-day operations. But unlike
other growing businesses it had more reason to look for
"green" products when it began to experience space, cooling and
power problems, on top of regular electricity "brown-outs" in the
area.
Jon Curry, head of IT at The Eden Project, says that as far as
energy consumption is concerned, the IT team is "always trying to
do the right thing". It has achieved some easy wins by factoring
the energy performance of equipment and IT suppliers' green
credentials into the procurement process.
He says server virtualisation offered a potential solution to
the disaster recovery challenges posed by its growth and power
issues, that would also support the
core environmental remit of the popular Cornwall botanical
visitor attraction.
"We have UPS [uninterruptible power supply] units on site, but
the vast majority of our server estate is due to be replaced within
the next three years," Curry says. "One of the advantages of server
virtualisation was that we would be able to restore data to any
point, as opposed to taking on a major disaster recovery
contract."
The Eden Project worked with third-party virtualisation
specialist S3
Consulting to consolidate its datacentre infrastructure using
NetApp storage
virtualisation and VMware
server virtualisation technology running on
HP ProLiant servers. Curry says the project has gone smoothly,
with virtualisation technologies deployed across a dozen of its
servers so far.
The visitor attraction has already reduced its physical storage
requirements by 50% using the storage virtualisation deduplication
and thin provisioning features. Application performance and systems
resilience and capacity have improved. And the removal of
decommissioned servers, along with their space and cooling
requirements, is expected to reduce IT's power consumption by 35%
this year.
"We made the business case not by how much we would save, but
against how much it would cost us in patching, downtime and solving
other such problems if we did not do this," Curry says. "We expect
the project to pay for itself within 18 months."
CASE STUDY 3
Software-as-a-service: SaaS streamlines online customer
contact for Comet
When Comet established its
goal to become "Britain's most trusted electrical specialist", it
turned to self-learning customer relationship management (CRM)
software to improve its online customer contact processes.
Simon Parkinson, general manager of the Comet customer
information centre, says, "We had a bunch of in-house systems to
support the customer contact process that were time-consuming and
did not allow us to react to the consumer as we can now."
Within three months of deploying
RightNow Technologies' CRM
software and its self-learning knowledgebase in 2003, more than 40%
of enquiry e-mails were eradicated. Today, this has increased to a
50% reduction in e-mails coming into the Customer Care team because
94% of customers opting for self-service are able to successfully
access the constantly updated knowledgebase via the website's
questions and answers page.
Parkinson says monitoring what customers are saying about
thousands of different products and managing the knowledgebase this
creates between Comet and its hundreds of suppliers would be
extremely difficult to do manually. "The self-learning capability
of RightNow is a key differentiator," he says, enabling the team to
refine customer-related information for the rest of the business to
better match customer expectations and requirements.
The fact that RightNow employs an on-demand, or
software-as-service (SaaS), delivery has also been a key factor in
its continued, successful use by Comet, where a 100% first-time
contact resolution rate has been achieved, even during
peak shopping seasons.
Parkinson says that because it is fully hosted it is easier to
manage the SaaS model in terms of long-term costs, and the process
of upgrading the CRM software - which the retailer is about to do
again - was easier compared with traditional, on-premise
systems.
"There are also a huge number of standard or bespoke reports,
which form the main output of our work, but RightNow provides
accurate data that we can track, deal with and respond to in a very
short time," he adds. "We know who each customer is, when we spoke
to them and what the resolution to their contact was."
CASE STUDY 4
Unified communications software: Midlands Mental Health Trust
unifies communications
Birmingham and Solihull
Mental Health Foundation Trust (BSMHFT) wanted to reduce staff
dependence on pagers and radios by creating a communications
platform that could easily integrate new technologies.
As one of the largest and most complex NHS-based mental health
trusts in the UK, it needed to find a better way of easily staying
in contact with staff when they are away from their desk.
Richard Rennalls, BSMHFT telecommunications manager, says the
Trust wanted to create a
next-generation communications platform to improve staff
contact in support of more responsive patient care.
As in all public sector organisations, the platform investment
had to enhance patient service levels while also lowering costs. So
BSMHFT last year invested in a voice over internet protocol (VoIP)
based
unified communications platform supporting voice, data, remote
access and video to improve staff mobility.
The Trust selected
Siemens' OpenScape and HiPath products to run over its existing
wireless large area network (Wlan), coupled with Siemens'
fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) technology, HiPath Mobile Connect,
to automatically switch between its telecom operator's cellular
network and the Trust's VoIP network, even during a call.
"Siemens was the only supplier able to offer a true, open,
session initiation protocol (SIP) solution [at the time], with a
complete enterprise feature set," says Rennalls. In addition, a
high level of integration with BSMHFT's existing integrated
services digital exchange (iSDX) network was key to achieving a
lower total cost of ownership.
Since implementation, overall operating costs have dropped. A
new contact centre, designed to take over from a series of smaller
units, has also been introduced. It uses Siemens' multimedia
customer query routing, tracking and handling system, HiPath
ProCentre, to improve the ability to resolve customer enquiries on
the first call.
Rennalls says the unified communications implementation has
introduced technology that fits with the strategy of the Trust. "In
particular, WiFi and applications such as DACS [Digital Alarm and
Communications Server] and FMC are key to potential cost and
efficiency savings."