The Miller Group

Success Story

The Miller Group leverages Novell® Branch Office and Novell ZENworks® to reduce costs and deliver greater availability of key IT services

Overview

Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, The Miller Group is the UK's largest, privately-owned house-building, property development, and construction services company. The company is playing a major role in urban regeneration and housing developments across the United Kingdom with 1,500 employees.

Challenge

With multiple regional offices and a number of remote workers, The Miller Group was spending considerable time and resources to provide employees with the same access to information and quality of service as in its corporate head office. Each of its regional offices and sites was running its own e-mail and file/print services, making remote management extremely challenging, and a number of servers were overdue for replacement.

Backups in remote offices were unreliable as users forgot to put in tapes. Storage requirements were also increasing rapidly with greater e-mail usage forcing more server hardware upgrades.

The Miller Group needed to standardize its IT infrastructure across all offices, as well as multiple platforms including NetWare®, Windows*, Solaris* and UNIX*. The company was particularly concerned about reducing costs and avoiding restrictive licensing fees.

Novell solution

The Miller Group conducted a rigorous evaluation of potential solutions, engaging the support of the GartnerGroup, Inc. and soliciting customer references. After considering a Microsoft* solution, the company selected NetWare, Novell® ZENworks® and Novell Branch Office to manage its offices, along with a Novell identity and access management solution to provide single sign-on to network applications.

"As part of a business-wide analysis of expenditure, we completed a comprehensive review of our IT systems," said Michael Leggiero, Group IT Manager at The Miller Group. "We wanted to reduce IT complexity at our central and branch offices, as well as boost productivity for our employees. Novell offered the best solutions for our specific needs and addressed all our business and technical requirements."

The Miller Group is implementing Novell Branch Office to provide better services to its branch offices without the need for expensive servers in each location. The Novell Branch Office appliance gives users quick access to their files, as well as faster and more convenient printing. With Novell iPrint, users in any Miller Group office will simply view a map of the printers in their location and click to download the correct printer driver.

Novell Branch Office helps The Miller Group reduce its overall operating costs because it operates securely across a high-speed Internet connection, eliminating the need for a costly WAN or VPN connection. In addition, all data is backed up to central servers each night to help the company reduce the money previously spent on storage media for each office.

The combination of NetWare and Novell ZENworks has allowed the company to consolidate its servers across multiple operating platforms. The company found itself running 49 different servers, each with backup, anti-virus and system management software costs. By introducing a centralized cluster at its head office and pooling the processing power of individual machines, the company can reduce the number of servers and administer its enterprise from a single location using ZENworks, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The company is also reducing administration costs with a Novell identity and access management solution. A centralized, global directory helps the company manage user identities. When a new user joins the company or when an employee changes jobs role or leaves the business, the IT staff can easily change user identity information in Novell eDirectory®. All changes are immediately synchronized to other applications, eliminating manual updates that could take hours per user.

With Novell, the company has a scalable foundation for future growth as it considers a shift to Linux*. "We believe that the Linux option with Novell Open Enterprise Server represents a credible enterprise computing option," said Leggiero. "There is a viable road map, which from our perspective, means that our network is future proof."

Results

With Novell Branch Office, The Miller Group has been able to reduce the duplication of hardware, resulting in a cost savings running to hundreds of thousands of pounds. The Miller Group has been able to free up business costs and resources to focus on improving and enhancing the business, rather than routine administration. The IT team is spending significantly less time on server maintenance, data backup, helpdesk calls and software and anti-virus updates.

"Interoperability is a major reason Novell won the contract," said Leggiero. "Software licensing costs from other vendors were prohibitive and tied us to a specific platform. Given that one of our IT objectives was to reduce costs, Novell's offering is more cost-effective and provides a flexible basis for us to expand to multiple platforms."