CGT

CGT was struggling to manage updates to employee profiles and access rights in a timely and efficient way. By selecting Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager, the company has improved the speed and efficiency of identity management, enhanced security, and ensured that IT is more responsive to requests from the business.

About CGT
Compagnia Generale Trattori (in English, the General Tractor Company, CGT) is the official Caterpillar dealer for north and central Italy. Through its 26 branches, CGT sells, services and leases the entire CAT range of earthmoving and mining machinery, diesel engines and industrial gas turbines. The company also provides value-add services to its clients, from technical assistance through to the resale of used equipment.

Challenge
With approximately 950 employees—and this will rise to 1,350 when an ongoing merger is completed - CGT was finding it challenging to manage user identities and access rights across dozens of different corporate applications and databases. Each of CGT's two divisions operates independently, with its own sales network, service technicians and product specialists, and a further complication is that employees are spread out over multiple locations across a wide area - currently 26 in north and central Italy, and soon to rise to 39 across the whole country.

Updating a user's profile to reflect a change in personal information or to provide access to new applications was a slow, largely manual process that required significant effort from the IT department. This created delays and left the business frustrated that its requests could take several days to execute. It also meant a high level of inconsistencies in user information across different systems. Equally, users were required to spend significant amounts of time logging in and out of systems, causing further frustration and inefficiency.

CGT wanted greater speed and automation in its management of users and access rights—to reduce costs and increase responsiveness, as well as to improve security.

Novell's Solution
After evaluating several potential solutions, CGT decided to implement Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager. The ability of the Novell solutions to work across a broad variety of software environments—CGT uses the IBM i platform alongside Microsoft Windows, and also has large Lotus Domino and SAP environments—was a factor in the decision.

"We needed a solution that would work with our heterogeneous environment and that would offer pre-built connectors to standard enterprise software such as SAP and Lotus Domino," said Claudio Passoni. "Novell Identity Manager was the ideal solution. We also selected Novell because of the positive feedback we heard from other companies using the same solutions."

To design, implement and roll out its new identity and security management solution, CGT worked with three external partners. Unisys Italia was the lead partner and project co-ordinator, while Aglea handled the required modifications to CGT's SAP solutions. Finally, Netstudio was the principal implementation partner for the Novell technologies.

"The three partners were critical to the success of our implementation, helping us to get the maximum business value from the Novell solutions," said Passoni. "All three were highly competent and extremely helpful in meeting our requirements."

CGT and its partners are now rolling out the new Novell solutions across the entire company. Novell Identity Manager acts as a central point of control over user identities that were previously managed in dozens of different directories and applications. Novell Access Manager enables the company to extend authentication seamlessly over the web, simplifying and securing remote work through enterprise portals.

"The Novell solutions give us much greater clarity regarding our user population," said Passoni. "In the past, it was difficult to see who had access to which systems, and this raised some potential security issues. With the Novell technology, we have complete transparency, making it much easier to manage our users."

In the near future, CGT plans to roll out Novell SecureLogin, which will provide single sign-on capabilities to users across the network.

Results
The deployment of Novell Identity Manager has accelerated and largely automated the provisioning of new user accounts at CGT, reducing delays for employees and cutting the workload for the IT department.

"With Novell Identity Manager, we can create automated workflows to provision new users when they are created in the SAP Human Resources solution," said Passoni. "Setting up new users takes a matter of minutes, and when we make changes to user information, they are automatically synchronised across all connected directories and systems—so the Novell solution saves us significant amounts of time and effort."

The transparency that Novell Identity Manager has brought to user management helps the IT department to provide better information to the business, and enables greater responsiveness to change requests. It also resolves potential security issues around expired users still having access to some corporate systems.

"We now have an increased level of security and control over users, which also means greater control over the flow of information throughout the company," said Passoni. "Novell Access Manager enables us to extend this security more easily to remote offices, and makes it faster and easier for employees to access their applications."

• + Novell Identity Manager
• + Novell Access Manager
• + Novell SecureLogin