CECI Engineering Consultants, Inc.

Success Story

CECI Engineering Consultants, Inc. needed to ensure 24x7 uptime for its more than 1,800 consultants, who are involved in hundreds of projects at a time. With Novell® Open Enterprise Server and a Novell security and identity management solution, the company reduced IT management costs, improved system availability and strengthened security.

Overview

CECI Engineering Consultants, Inc. (CECI) provides engineering consultancy and design services for major construction projects in Taiwan and other countries. With more than 1,800 professionals across 70 locations, CECI has undertaken some of the region's largest engineering projects, from the Taipei rapid transit system to the Kao Ping river bridge.

Challenge

Given the scale of the projects it works on - which often have national significance - ensuring the availability of core IT systems is a top priority for CECI. An hour of system downtime could cost up to $30,000 in labour expenses related to engineering design and planning alone, with potential damage to the production value of projects estimated at ten times that figure.

In addition to making its existing systems more robust, CECI wanted to improve its ability to share documentation securely. The company's consultants work in continually changing teams across multiple sites, and need to collaborate effectively wherever they are.

CECI manages more than 400 major construction projects in a typical year, and stores several terabytes of confidential and commercially sensitive data. The company wanted to implement role-based access to its file systems, to ensure that staff can access only the information they are authorised to see.

Novell solution

"Novell Open Enterprise Server provides excellent network security and ease of administration."

Fu-Lai Chu
Vice President
CECI Engineering Consultants, Inc

CECI required a highly available and secure solution combining networking, communications and collaboration in an open, easy-to-deploy package. The company had been using NetWare® alongside Microsoft* Windows* Server 2000. Following an exhaustive year-long comparison of Novell Open Enterprise Server and Microsoft Windows Server 2003, CECI chose to upgrade from NetWare to the new Novell solution, eliminating all of its Windows servers in the process. CECI currently runs Novell Open Enterprise Server on the NetWare kernel, and will be able to smoothly transition to the Linux* kernel in future.

"Novell Open Enterprise Server provides excellent network security and ease of administration," said Fu-Lai Chu, Vice President, CECI. "Most important, it delivers superb availability, helping us to avoid the cost of unscheduled downtime."

Every project that CECI takes on requires cross-team collaboration and can easily involve more than ten departments spread across multiple office locations and construction sites. As major construction projects can span a decade or more, CECI needs to maintain a very large file store, currently almost 20 terabytes. Novell Open Enterprise Server supports this large-scale storage requirement with ease, giving CECI consultants intuitive tools to manage, share and archive their own data.

CECI uses the built-in functionality of Novell Open Enterprise Server to ensure that only authorised users in each workgroup can access project folders. With Microsoft Windows, this function would normally require another layer of infrastructure, increasing costs and complexity.

CECI implemented Novell iChain® to provide single sign-on access for all users across multiple sites, simplifying access without compromising on security. The company also implemented Novell Identity Manager, running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, to keep user identity information synchronised across all internal systems. The Novell solution accelerates the provisioning of new users, and enables immediate termination of all access rights when an employee leaves CECI, further strengthening security.

"We see Novell as the pioneer in the identity management area," said Jedi Chang, Senior Engineer of Information and System Technology Department, CECI. "With Novell Identity Manager, we can easily and securely manage user identities and passwords, reducing IT staff workload."

Results

"With Novell Identity Manager, we can easily and securely manage user identities and passwords, reducing IT staff workload."

Jedi Chang
Senior Engineer of Information and System Technology Department
CECI Engineering Consultants, Inc.

By migrating to Novell Open Enterprise Server and implementing a Novell security and identity management solution, CECI has enhanced system availability, improved file management system and increased the security of confidential project data. The Novell solutions have also simplified administration: despite a doubling in the number of CECI consultants and a six-fold increase in the number of workstations, CECI has not needed to hire any new IT staff.

"We've cut our implementation and management costs significantly thanks to Novell - and we can set up new users much more quickly," said Chang. "Novell Identity Manager makes it easy to keep user information synchronised across all our sites, saving us an enormous amount of time and effort."

CECI's teams can now access their applications and data securely from any location, improving their efficiency and responsiveness. The introduction of single sign-on saves each user several minutes each day - multiplied across the total number of users, this represents a significant improvement in productivity.

"Despite our size, complexity and dispersed operations, our teams can now operate as if they were all in the same office," said Dr. Ronald Wu, Director of Information and System Technology Department at CECI. "We tried Microsoft solutions, but Novell fulfils all of our needs and its competitive differentiation just keeps getting stronger."