Choosing a PC operating system is about more than just giving end-users a nice new interface. Making the right decision can bring many benefits to a company: easier management and a low cost of support can free IT staff resources for more value-added work. At Nissan Ireland, an upgrade to the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista will extend the life of its desktops and laptops, allowing the company to drive its IT strategy forward.
Situation
Nissan Ireland distributes the full range of Nissan cars, commercial vehicles and forklifts within the Republic of Ireland. A staff of 80 works directly for the firm, backed by an extended network of 55 dealers employing more than 1,000 people. The company’s Irish operation consistently has Nissan’s highest car market share in Europe. Nissan Ireland has chosen to deploy Microsoft technology on a wide scale throughout the organisation, according to chief information officer Rory Donnelly. As it happens, the company had been planning an extensive IT upgrade late last year when it emerged that it would also be moving headquarters. The company has implemented already several changes to its IT infrastructure at the server level in order to make the move easier to manage. As part of this, it wanted a future-proofed desktop operating system that would be easy to deploy.
Since a hardware upgrade in 2001, Nissan Ireland has had a policy to extend the longevity of its desktop and laptop systems as much as possible. This meant equipping the hardware with extra RAM memory. As part of the pending hardware refresh for all 75 PC users in the company, Nissan also wanted to implement a standardised desktop. Whereas the 32bit version of Windows Vista has a threshold of 4Gbyte, its 64bit equivalent can run on machines with a larger amount of addressable memory, meeting Nissan Ireland’s requirements.
Donnelly says there were several other requirements the new operating system had to meet: desktops in the company’s new premises would have to be easy to deploy. In addition, Nissan Ireland uses a Unix-based ERP package called Autoline from ADP, and any new operating system had to be seamlessly compatible with it. “We needed to go down the road of looking at application compatibility, testing everything. I suppose were lucky because practically every application we use is Windows-based and the vast majority of them are Office applications. We only have one application that links through to our ERP system based on a Unix system and we very quickly found out that that is Vista 64bit compatible so that effectively was a very happy position for us to be in. We have no legacy issues with incompatibility, so we’re very comfortably moving to 64bit Vista,” says Donnelly.
Solution
Currently there are seven test Vista machines deployed with power users at Nissan Ireland. Donnelly and his team will roll out Windows Vista 64-bit to all PC users in the company when the relocation to new premises happens this October. “It’s going to be much easier to get user acceptance of a new operating system and productivity suite – Office 2007 – as part of that,” he adds. “In saying that, the people we’ve rolled Office 2007 and Vista out to already have been extremely positive about it.”
From a human resources point of view, Nissan Ireland’s Vista desktop deployment programme will allow the IT team to reduce significantly the amount of time spent troubleshooting PC problems. “Historically, desktop issues could take hours to find, whether it be due to some registry corruption or software incompatibility. With Server 2008, Group Policy and Vista Enterprise x64, we can manage that in 30 minutes max. The rule is, ‘if it can’t be fixed in 15 minutes, re-image’. This allows us to better make use of the resources within the department for more business-oriented purposes,” says Donnelly. Management is eased further by Nissan’s ability to provide a single software image for the entire PC estate, according to Ronnie Dockery, client business group lead with Microsoft Ireland. “If you have different hardware in your system, in the old world you would have to have separate images appropriate for the hardware. With Vista you can just have one single image and deploy that across the whole company. With Policy Manager you can manage your PCs across the board with a single policy,” he says.
Nissan also changed to an Open Value Subscription licensing agreement and has taken advantage of this to roll out training materials on the company intranet. Users will be able to avail of these and Donnelly says this extra knowledge should reduce the number of support calls to the IT department. Just as Nissan ensured its ERP system was Vista-compatible, businesses do not have to worry that their mission-critical applications will be affected by upgrading to Vista, according to Dockery. “A lot of compatibility issues have been ironed out,” he explains. “There are 79,000 components supplied out of the box; 99pc of the top selling consumer applications are compatible. Application compatibility has gone away as an issue. If on the off-chance there are legacy applications that have a problem, we can address that with virtualisation, whereby we can set up virtual Windows XP or Windows 2000 machines to run those applications that are harder to convert.”
In some cases, Vista users have reported lower support costs by up to 15pc. Similarly, Donnelly says reduced IT support is absolutely a desired outcome for Nissan Ireland. “If we spend less time supporting Vista desktops than non-Vista ones, then I’ll push Vista rollout quicker. It means we can get on with the more business-oriented projects that contribute to the bottom line. My CEO doesn’t want to know how many desktops we fixed this week, but if we cut even a point off our maintenance costs, or avoid an increase in personnel numbers, then the business benefits directly. My CEO wants to know all about that.”
|
Benefits
Improved productivity
Donnelly is very impressed with Vista’s built-in search capability and says retrieving information will become much easier for all staff at Nissan Ireland. “In the past, we have all spent huge amounts of time religiously filing our e-mails into separate folders based on subject or project or whatever. We are now at the stage where Outlook really only needs two folders: ‘Inbox’ and ‘Filed’,” he says. “Start typing a relevant word or phrase in the search box, and watch the matched hits appear. It’s far quicker than finding the right folder and browsing through it to find a specific item. The fact that the search indexing is now extended to both local and networked locations, and the fact that your search now looks inside attachments like Word, Excel and Acrobat, it's hard to believe how I ever lived without it, because I know I couldn’t now.”
Ease of management
Windows Vista x64 has a mandatory driver signing feature. While it has been common for organisations to run modified drivers for various hardware and peripherals, this can leave systems open to vulnerability. Not so with Vista, says Donnelly. “If even one byte of the original manufacturer-signed driver is changed, then the driver cannot be installed. From a management point of view, this ensures that only official drivers can be updated on our client PCs. Our responsibility is to provide an efficient, stable platform for our end-users. Our time is better served working on providing increased efficiency and productivity for all our users, and not in troubleshooting issues that shouldn't have arisen in the first place.”
Rolling out intranet-based training for users has allowed the IT staff to step back from first-level support to being more focused on operations. “If we can start using tools that mean we can make better use of our nine to five jobs in IT in terms of maintaining these systems and keeping them up and running and available, we’ll deploy them,” Donnelly declares. “It’s all about making the best use of the resources that you have. We have all this extra technology and we have the same wage bill. We’ve actually got less staff in IT than we had in 2000 and it’s not because we have less to do.”
Prevents unnecessary software changes
User Account Control is another great management tool. It manages to stop users doing things that could break corporate software policy in terms of licensing and stability. As I mentioned in relation to mandatory driver signing, IT as an organisation should strive to move things forward, and not struggle to keep things where they always have been. We must work at providing solutions and improvements, and time spent troubleshooting or recovering avoidable issues takes away from that.
Reduced IT support costs
Donnelly says he is pleased so far with the ease of administration that Vista offers. “Of the Vista desktops we have in production so far, we don’t get support calls from those users relating to system performance or stability. The fact that they can’t install every browser toolbar and desktop background changing application under the sun may not be popular with them, but in the enterprise, it not about popularity; it’s about stability and keeping costs down.”
Greater security
According to Dockery, security within Vista is improved on two fronts – not only does it come with BitLocker for encrypting data on the hard drive, but there are 60pc fewer malware attacks on Vista than on Windows XP. Consequently, there are fewer security updates needed, further reducing the administration time needed.
Energy efficiency
Reports show significant savings can be made by running Windows Vista on PCs. Dockery points out that Vista has improved power management features and can prolong battery life for laptop users. In addition, Vista has a self-healing capability, further ensuring stability. “If it falls over, it will repair itself, so downtime is dramatically reduced with Vista because of the self-healing capability,” he says.
Summary
Dockery says the features within Windows Vista are much easier to manage, which means companies don’t have to worry about their IT and instead use it as a way to really improve their business. “It allows organisations to go from being basic to being dynamic; their ideal state,” he says. According to Donnelly – who has presided over many server and desktop refreshes in the past and knows what is involved – Vista has “more than exceeded” expectations. “I believe that the gains of this move exceed those of any previous upgrade we have done. If you want to stay where you are, then do nothing. But if you want to keep your competitive edge, increase productivity and have the infrastructure to cater for the unknown, then yes, I would definitely recommend it.”
For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/
© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2008
 Solution OverviewOrganisation For More Information About Microsoft in Ireland:
|