When Western Financial Group, a Canadian banking and insurance firm, decided to abandon its application delivery infrastructure, it wasn't because the system wasn't working. Doug Bennett, Western's IT manager for networking and infrastructure, believed the carrier needed a simpler, less expensive system to operate that would benefit the brokers who sell Western's life/health insurance products.
"Cost was the biggest driver for us," says Bennett. "We were paying a lot of money for licensing, and we weren't taking advantage of the full-blown presentation server [that was] offered."
Western was familiar with Ericom Software, a provider of enterprisewide application access solutions, through the vendor's banking services. Bennett and his senior technical person attended a conference and sat in on presentations by Ericom. "Everything looked good, and we went from there," says Bennett.
Bennett also had some interest in a second product, but he was warned off the solution because the product's support was based in Europe. "It would be a challenge to work with [the other company] due to the time difference," he says. "That was a huge concern to us. It was too important for [Western] not to have something secure and supportable."
The timing of the deal in the spring of this year was excellent for the carrier, as it coincided with a planned switch from Windows 2000 terminal server platform to Windows 2003.
The switch to Ericom's product was strictly an IT strategy, points out Bennett. "Looking at it from the perspective of what we needed to do with hardware and the operating system and the fact we were licensing [the system], we decided if we could find a product that was more cost-effective but met the requirements we had, we would change," he says.
Bennett indicates he had no problem with the former system. "It offers something with hundreds of great tools, but we didn't use all of them," he says. "We simply wanted connectivity to a terminal server environment so the users could run the core application. Our users are fairly focused on a simple application tool set and don't vary out of that. In a different organization, all the other features may have more suitability, but for us, we were looking for proper load balancing on the server farm and a good, secure external connectivity. Ericom's software did this for us."
Installation went quickly. "We built the environment and put the terminal server on it," says Bennett. "We called the Ericom support folks and downloaded the application, and with their assistance over the phone, we had it configured within a half hour or 45 minutes."
Western conducted internal tests for the next month and then brought one of the business units online. "We felt it was appropriate to test a group with approximately 40 users," says Bennett. "Things worked out really well, so we continued the migration plan through the summer, and now all 600 users are off the [former] environment and on the Ericom environment."
Bennett and his technical staff had to uninstall remotely the previous system's clients off their workstations. "We explained what we were doing and showed [users] the log-on process was minimally different," he says. "It was time-consuming because we had to work with each individual user, but we wanted a soft touch with them to explain what we were doing and why we were doing it."
Bennett reports Western had one implementation issue where the authentication back to the carrier's active directory seemed to be confused. However, a call to Ericom's support team brought the issue to a resolution within a half hour, he adds. "We were able to figure out the issue, and we did a reset on it," he says. "At that point, there was a new version, so within the next few weeks we upgraded to the newer version, and we've had no issues since that point in time."
Selling the change to executive management wasn't difficult. "From my perspective, I had to look at the fact we already had bought into a technology where we're using remote computing power rather than having applications run on desktops," says Bennett. "Because we had bought into that model, my plan was to explain [to management] here is my old cost point, here is my new cost point, and the new one is substantially less. It wasn't even a sell. I found a more cost-effective solution, it didn't cause us any issues, and there really was no change from the user side."
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.