Watts Regulator

Success Story

Watts Regulator needed a secure and reliable e-mail platform to support its global business, as any downtime costs the company thousands of dollars in lost productivity. Migrating from Microsoft* Exchange to Novell® GroupWise® has significantly improved security and stability, while reducing administration time by more than 30 percent

Overview

Watts Regulator is a subsidiary of Watts Water Technologies, Inc., a world leader in the manufacture of innovative products to control the efficiency, safety, and quality of water within residential, commercial, and institutional applications. The company has 5,000 employees throughout the world.

Challenge

Watts Regulator had been using Microsoft Exchange 5.5, but needed to upgrade or migrate to a new system before Microsoft discontinued support for the product at the end of 2005. The company had struggled with frequent downtime with Exchange, keeping the IT staff on-call around the clock to deal with outages occurring in different time zones.

Regular security patches consumed a great deal of administrative time and consistently required scheduled downtime. With worldwide offices, the company also needed a reliable e-mail system that would support multiple languages.

Novell solution

"Our regular Windows security patching was brutal. If we missed a patch, we could be down for hours at a time and would get nearly 50 calls within minutes. There is a huge productivity loss when e-mail goes down."

Ben Rubino
PC Network Specialist
Watts Regulator

Watts Regulator considered upgrading its Exchange system, but decided to migrate to Novell GroupWise as its corporate e-mail application. The company liked the reliability of GroupWise, as well as its ability to run on Linux*.

"We are planning to standardize on Linux at some point and want to keep our applications open," said Ben Rubino, PC Network Specialist. "We did not want to be forced to move to Microsoft Active Directory*. The fact that Novell GroupWise supports Linux and an open directory made it the right choice for us."

Working with Novell Consulting®, the company migrated users from Exchange to GroupWise in just a few months. For the final installation, the company used a batch file to install clients across its enterprise in a single day. Users can now access the same e-mail client from their laptops whether working inside or outside the company's firewall.

"We had a phenomenal team from Novell Consulting," said Rubino. "They pulled out all the stops to make sure it was a job well done. The Novell team also provided a wonderful knowledge transfer so we can maintain the system on our own."

Watts Regulator has essentially eliminated downtime, keeping its users productive in all time zones. The IT staff no longer has to install monthly patches and can spend more time working on its network.

"Our regular Windows security patching was brutal," said Rubino. "If we missed a patch, we could be down for hours and get nearly 50 calls within minutes. There is a huge productivity loss when e-mail goes down."

Many of the company's offices lack a dedicated e-mail server, but GroupWise has significantly increased speed and performance across the company's wide area network so users can work efficiently in online or caching mode.

"GroupWise just runs smoothly and never goes down," said Rubino. "It's a huge benefit to know that everything is secure and that it will be running in the morning. We no longer have to worry about troubleshooting in the middle of the night."

Watts Regulator is also using GroupWise Instant Messenger for secure instant messaging throughout the company. Communication is based on identity information stored in Novell eDirectoryTM, allowing the company to protect corporate security.

GroupWise also provides consistent language support for users in worldwide offices. For example, users in Chinese offices have an automatic Chinese interface and are no longer required to create messages solely in English. They can access the interface from a GroupWise client, as well as from GroupWise WebAccess, available from any standard Web browser.

Watts Regulator also uses a Novell identity and access management solution, storing user information in Novell eDirectory. Novell Identity Manager synchronizes user information across multiple applications, giving users a single ID and password.

The IT staff has a one-step process to create new users and can give them immediate access to e-mail, the company's ERP system and other applications in less than a minute. The company knows exactly who has access to what information and can immediately revoke network access when an employee leaves the company.

Results

"GroupWise just runs smoothly and never goes down. It's a huge benefit to know that everything is secure and that it will be running in the morning. We no longer have to worry about troubleshooting in the middle of the night."

Ben Rubino
PC Network Specialist
Watts Regulator

For Watts Regulator, Novell GroupWise is the second most-used application and the main communication and productivity tool across its worldwide organization. The company has eliminated e-mail downtime and reduced administrative time by more than 30 percent. One administrator can now manage GroupWise across the entire enterprise. The company also realized significant software savings by moving to GroupWise, rather than Exchange.

"We were very impressed with the smooth transition to GroupWise," said Rubino. "Changing a vital application, such as e-mail, also changes the company culture so it's a big deal. We now have a large-scale, reliable e-mail platform that supports different languages. The project was a huge success because of Novell."

Novell and GroupWise are registered trademarks; Novell Consulting is a registered service mark; and eDirectory is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. *Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.