Fujitsu Consulting

Fujitsu Consulting Reins in IT Costs While Enhancing Worker Productivity and Mobility

Through a series of strategic acquisitions and new hires, Fujitsu Consulting has grown its workforce significantly while managing to keep IT costs down. The company intends to sustain this record with a deployment of the Windows Vista™ operating system that will reduce imaging time by 30 to 35 percent, save two hours monthly per user by automating updates, save 14 hours monthly for each help-desk professional by better safeguarding against malware, and cut help-desk calls related to network issues by half.

 

Business Needs

Fujitsu Consulting has grown rapidly into a major provider of management and technology consulting services to customers in financial services, government, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, and telecommunications. Through a workforce of some 6,500 people across the United States and Canada, the organization offers enterprise information management, packaged application implementation, legacy systems modernization, IT governance, managed services, and business process services.

Our goal [is] to serve twice the number of users with just 20 percent growth in our IT department. We believe that with Windows Vista we can achieve this goal. Jay Lendl Vice President, Microsoft National Practice, Fujitsu Consulting

In recent years, Fujitsu Consulting more than doubled in size through acquisitions, a strategy whose success depended on keeping IT costs under control even as the user base grew significantly. “Our goal was ultimately to serve twice the number of users with just 20 percent growth in our IT department,” explains Jay Lendl, Vice President, Microsoft National Practice, Fujitsu Consulting. “To do this, we needed a cost-effective way to keep users outfitted with the latest operating system and applications and to keep them up and running without unnecessary downtime.”

Lendl explains that with a user force that is both highly mobile and highly dependent on having the latest tools and technologies, Fujitsu needed an easy way of delivering operating-system and application updates. Imaging, he adds, was vital, considering that in the past IT was burdened with managing and maintaining 15 core images, one for each of 10 laptop models and 5 desktop models.

Users, too, spent unnecessary time implementing updates and restoring their environment after completing projects. “Moving from customer to customer, a consultant might easily reimage his or her computer more than a dozen times per year,” Lendl explains. “For many users, the biggest problem was hunting down media for the latest software service packs. That’s not the best use of time for these valuable professionals.”

A related concern was the time spent on addressing the stability and availability problems caused by malware that found its way into users’ work environments due to the widespread practice of maintaining administrator rights on client machines. “Most help-desk calls stemmed from the inadvertent installation of incompatible or malicious applications,” Lendl reports. “This was a productivity drag on IT professionals and users alike.”

Solution

To address these issues, Lendl and his colleagues joined the Microsoft® Technology Adoption Program for the Windows Vista™ operating system and began migrating Windows® XP–based machines in late 2006. By the start of 2007, some 100 users were running the new operating system; that number is slated to reach 1,000 by the middle of the year, and all 6,500 Fujitsu Consulting employees are expected to be migrated shortly thereafter.

Fujitsu Consulting also will deploy the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in an effort to further the anticipated productivity gains of the overall deployment.

Benefits

Even early into the deployment, Lendl and his colleagues reported solid advantages in IT costs and user productivity.

• Simplifies imaging. Instead of having to manage and maintain 15 different operating-system images, IT professionals are using Windows Imaging Format to reduce that number to one or two for desktops and one or two for portable computers. “Windows Imaging Format gives us a robust, file-based image format, with all files in a single container, and powerful, accessible tools for editing the answer file,” says Mahesh Punyamurthula, Lead for Windows Vista Application Compatibility Project, Fujitsu Consulting. “As a result, we expect to reduce the time that IT spends dealing with images by 30 to 35 percent.”
  
  
• Automates updates. Service-pack and driver updates will be far easier, thanks to the Windows Update Service that is built into Windows Vista. “This is a key difference between Windows Vista and Windows XP,” Punyamurthula says. “Windows Update Service is working in the background, freeing users from having to seek out updates without disturbing them as they work. This ‘self-diagnosing’ and ‘self-healing’ system will reduce support costs and save up to two hours per month for every user.”
  
  
• Keeps machines more stable and available. By enabling users to run diverse applications without needing administrator rights at the client level, the Windows Vista User Account Control will help Fujitsu Consulting safeguard itself against malware that reduces productivity for IT staff and users alike. “I estimate there will be at least one fewer help-desk call per employee per month, for a monthly savings of about 20 minutes per employee and 14 hours per help-desk professional,” Punyamurthula says. “This makes Windows Vista a powerful tool for infrastructure optimization.”
  
  
• Provides a more powerful mobile environment. With the Windows Vista Mobility Center, Fujitsu Consulting’s mobile users will more easily discover and connect securely to multiple networks. In addition, the Sync Center will help users collaborate more easily with multiple customers, and updated presentation settings will enable them to configure and save settings. “These are huge advantages for our mobile professionals, especially those who do frequent presentations,” Punyamurthula says. “Plus, we expect to cut help-desk calls related to network issues by half.”
  
  
• Helps users make the most of existing content. According to Lendl, the pervasive search capability of Windows Vista will make it easier for users to access technical knowledge and insights within existing proposals, specifications, project reports, and other resource documents. “Consultants can take better advantage of work they or their colleagues have completed,” he says. “This means that when they arrive at a new customer site, they will be even better prepared and able to provide more value.”

 

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