During the "How is your company using SVS?" promo, members of Scott Hardie's XCEND Group were heads down and hard at work with the bright minds at Quicken Loans. Here's the report they filed; complete with some behind-the-scenes details regarding how the company is using SVS.

Company Background

Quicken Loans is America's top online mortgage lender and one of the largest home loan lenders nationwide. In 2006, the company closed $18 billion in home loans and has more than 4,600 home loan experts dedicated to getting customers into the home of their dreams. Quicken Loans has been recognized by Fortune, Computerworld, and Crain's Detroit Business as one of the best companies to work for in America.

Quicken Loans, previously Rock Financial Corporation, is a pure growth story. Founded in 1985 by Daniel Gilbert, the company soon became one of the largest independent mortgage banks in the country. After a successful IPO in 1998, Rock Financial launched Rockloans.com which quickly became one of the most popular online mortgage sites on the Internet. Then in December 1999, Intuit (makers of Quicken TurboTax and Quicken) purchased Rock Financial and renamed the company Quicken Loans. Quicken built the subsidiary into the leading provider of direct-to-consumer loans.

Seeing the continued growth and success of his former company, Gilbert and a group of investors bought Quicken Loans back from Intuit in July 2002, retaining all Quicken Loans branding and marketing initiatives. With the solid foundation built by Gilbert and Quicken, and the Quicken brand name, the company is now growing at an even faster pace. "Growth is both a great benefit and great challenge," said Noah Ravenscroft, Systems Engineer for Quicken Loans. "It creates an exciting environment for everyone."

The Challenge

• The company's rapid growth placed a strain on the IT department's ability to deliver the quality services it was known for.
• The company used a number of outdated and time consuming manual processes for preparing new servers and clients, and deploying software updates and patches.
• The company had no robust, integrated platform for IT lifecycle management to support future growth.

As a result of all their success, Quicken Loans is growing exponentially. On an average month Quicken Loans is hiring over 300 new employees and with that comes challenges such as setting up multiple labs with hundreds of computers each, and adding new offices across the country. This rapid growth has created multiple challenges for the Business and IT departments. From a system procurement and provisioning perspective, each new employee required a new desktop and/or laptop computer. Combined with the need to get the labs up and running quickly, the IT and Business department was overwhelmed procuring and preparing new machines and software.

The growing number of employees also meant additional support was required to deploy the constant flow of new patches and fixes to keep the network environment secure. In addition, the number and complexity of support issues were increasing, inundating the help desk staff and their inadequate Numara's Track-IT! help desk software. In addition, the IT team wasn't spending enough time on proactive tasks such as IT asset management.

As soon as a computer would come in the door, the IT team was in such a hurry to get it ready, there was little time to enter the information into an asset database. And since the front office was just as busy, software licenses were not being tracked as closely as they would have liked. As the IT team sat back and looked at the situation, they knew they needed a change. The team realized they were not going to be able to keep up without bringing in a solution to automate a number of their manual processes and provide the help desk functionality needed to support the increasing volume of service requests.

The Solution

In December of 2004, the IT team evaluated a number of IT lifecycle management products including Altiris and Novadigm (then Radia). Each vendor came in and gave a demonstration of their product. After a thorough evaluation, Quicken Loans decided to go with Altiris, at least until Ravenscroft, an SMS expert, joined the company. As soon as he joined Quicken Loans, he put a hold on the purchase of Altiris to make sure it was the right choice and that the IT team had explored all of their options. Ravenscroft organized a demonstration of SMS working in conjunction with Novadigm. Although the solution was tightly integrated with Active Directory, an important factor for Quicken Loans, SMS just didn't measure up in other key areas. The Altiris Total Management Suite offered a breadth of features and also provided an integrated help desk solution. During the Proof of Concept phase Scott Hardie from XCEND helped explain the differences and the strengths Altiris had over Microsoft SMS. In the end, it was Altiris Deployment Solution™ that clinched the deal. "Looking at all of the pieces together made Altiris a better value than SMS," said Ravenscroft. "Feeling comfortable that we had thoroughly evaluated all of our options we decided to go with Altiris."

When the decision was made in late 2005, the IT team went to work rolling out the Altiris Total Management Suite across the company in early 2006. To speed the process, Quicken Loans worked with XCEND Group, an IT consulting firm that specializes in the design and implementation of cross-platform lifecycle management solutions that reduce the cost of owning and managing IT assets. The Quicken Loans team felt XCEND had the right experience with Altiris to get Total Management Suite up and running quickly and successfully. The combination of a focused and motivated Quicken Loans team with the knowledge and expertise of XCEND proved to be a valuable combination. Working together, the two companies had the Altiris Total Management Suite up and running in just seven weeks. In addition, there was only one trouble ticket reported during the entire rollout period. "This is an amazing feat when you consider the breadth of the Altiris product and our aggressive schedule," said Kathy Ternes, the Quicken Loans project coordinator for the Altiris rollout. "XCEND was instrumental in making this project a huge success."

Since the implementation of Total Management Suite, Quicken Loans has also purchased Altiris Security Suite meaning Quicken Loans owns almost every single Altiris Solution to date. In May 2007 Scott Hardie returned to Quicken Loans for another 4 weeks of service to further streamline the processes around Asset Management, Software Delivery, Packaging and Deployment Best Practices with a focus of leveraging Altiris Software Virtualization Solution to cross both IT and Business units in saving them both time and money.

The Results

• Improved service levels to all employees by deploying new machines more quickly and reliably, reducing system downtime, and automating help desk services
• Equipped the IT team with the automated tools needed to support a rapidly growing organization while allowing a number of IT staff to be redeployed to more strategic and beneficial projects
• Replaced numerous point solutions and manual processes and with a broad and integrated IT management solution to support future growth

Following one of Scott's Best Practices a single Windows XP Hardware Independent Image was created for all the Dell Desktop and Laptop models within the company. In addition to the anticipation of SVS inevitably moving into server management a single Hardware Independent Image was created of Windows 2003 and Windows 2003 R2 for all the HP and Dell Servers. This provided the basis of a SOE (Standard Operating Environment) in which to build on by reducing the engineering effort of Rob Smith's team in Desktop Engineering and Noah Ravenscroft's group on the Systems team.

To illustrate the time and cost savings, Quicken Loans and XCEND built 56 machines at the Troy, Mich. facility and 26 at the Farmington Hills location in just one hour and 35 minutes. The old method would have taken over 60 hours or seven days of work leveraging DVD's using WinPE and Ghost. The return on investment (ROI) for Quicken Loans is impressive. Previously, it cost the company $33.75 to build a desktop, laptop, or server. Now, with Deployment Solution and the new image and process, it costs only $2.25; a 1500 percent improvement. For a company that is deploying more than 300 clients and up to 25 servers a month, not including the extra machines needed for new labs, this adds up to significant ROI for the company.

Altiris has also dramatically reduced the time it takes to update clients and servers with the latest patches and fixes. By automating many of Quicken Loan's manual processes, Altiris simplifies the previously time-consuming task to just a few easy operations. Altiris also increases the confidence of the IT staff. With the Altiris Total Management Suite, the IT team receives reports confirming the patches and fixes have actually been deployed, installed, and configured correctly. Prior to Altiris, the team had no idea if a given deployment was successful.

To further build on to new process and Hardware Independent Image complete, it was used as a base line for all applications both off the shelf and home grown so everything can now be built within Wise Package Studio as a MSI and conflict analysis and .DLL isolation can occur to best of the Desktop Engineering team's ability. Because application packaging with Wise is new to many of the team members these applications were also converted to Software Virtualization Solution Layers to further minimize any uncaught issues as the team's skill set improves and the overall IT maturity level grows. The baseline system is dropped onto a VMWare Virtual Machine and both the MSI's and SVS Layers created so that once each application is complete the VMWare image can be reset back to the original baseline so that the next application can be created without spending a significant amount of time in rebuilding a clean environment in which to package and or create layers in.

The SVS layers are then to be used within both Altiris Deployment Solution and Altiris Software Delivery Solution. Once the Hardware Independent Image is dropped on to any machine all the baseline applications regardless of user and or the department they work within will be layered on as SVS packages. Specific user and or departmental layers will be delivered through Software Delivery Solution leveraging both Altiris collections and Active Directory imported collections.

With the Business Office constantly having to manage the procurement and management of software licenses Altiris Asset Control and Contract Management Solutions were leveraged. A repeatable process was created for the management of Software Licenses in which they can be either imported and or entered into Altiris. This included the ability of tying the invoices to the Purchase Orders, the Purchase Orders to the Software Purchases and the Software Purchases to the Software Contracts. All with the ability to track the license keys, the licenses maintenance and the license upgrades. Furthermore these contracts tied to the Altiris Software Virtualization Solution layers created. Since the Business Office is also the keeper of the (license) keys and the associated media they are often contacted on available licenses and having to provide the media as well. This leads to a lot of time being spent unnecessarily and sometimes software having to be ordered when it's not actually necessary for a number of reasons. To improve the process Scott leveraged Altiris Software Delivery Solution's Software Portal and a repeatable process to publish Site Licensed Software and or Software that was fairly common and cheap into the Software Portal so that users could automatically download and install the software they required with no assistance from the Business Office and or IT. True self service by leveraging the Altiris Software Portal leads to an improved process and a more productive staff. The Business Office did not need to hand out media or keys and IT did not have to worry about installing it and or the application causing problems on the end user computer. For more expensive software the same process is used with one exception. In this case, applications have to be requested through the Software Portal by the user before being being automatically installed. This allows the Business Office to look at Application Metering Reports on usage in addition to looking at current number of licenses owned, authorized for install vs. unauthorized and available licenses. This allows them to make key business decisions on either to grant the user access, deny it, procure additional licenses and or have IT harvest unused licenses. By leveraging SVS, harvesting licenses becomes a breeze. Just disable and delete the layer which frees up the license for a user who actually needs it all the while providing cost avoidance to the organization. By leveraging Software Virtualization Solution Quicken will have the ability to make the next Microsoft "True Up" a whole lot cheaper and manageable.

Another key area for Quicken Loans was Altiris Helpdesk Solution™ since the company had outgrown the Track-It! system it was using. To speed the transition and improve Quicken Loans' helpdesk capabilities, XCEND customized the Altiris solution to support the company's 30 business units with full workflow and automated routing of service requests. In addition, the total cost of ownership (TCO) was assigned to the 170+ helpdesk users, so the cost of support could be assessed across each business unit. Automated tasks and validation rules were also created for common requests to remove human error and ensure a standardized process for support. To allow business units to create articles for both self-service identification and remediation, XCEND implemented a full knowledge base. Additionally users were "associated" with supported IT-related assets. This allowed Quicken Loans to take advantage of real-time inventory and diagnostics to quickly resolve end-user problems and allow surveys to be sent to measure end-user satisfaction.

Finally, Altiris allows the help desk team to print a number of reports, helping them to make better decisions and be more proactive in managing their IT environment. For example, using reports from Helpdesk Solution, the team can tell what types of hardware or software are most problematic and can adjust their budgeting and purchasing decisions accordingly.

Following both implementations, Scott Hardie of XCEND prepared a presentation for the Quicken Loans management team that walked them through every week of the engagement and implementation process, the main areas where progress was made, identified risks, results to date and proposed next steps. In 2006 the CIO was so impressed with the work that he recommended XCEND for one of the company's most prestigious awards.

"I would like to thank you for your hard work here at Quicken Loans. With your help we were able to successfully implement the entire Altiris product line. Your ability to stick to task ensured the project moved ahead according to the project plan, while your flexibility allowed us to work through any problems that came up. You excelled at keeping everyone involved informed throughout the engagement, and upper management loved how you wrapped the project up in your final presentation. The documentation provided at the end of the engagement was exceptional. This documentation provided us with a good foundation of what products were implemented and how the products were configured, and allows for future revision as our Altiris infrastructure changes."

We would like to show our appreciation by presenting to you the enclosed certificate along with some Quicken Loans trinkets. Thank you again for going above and beyond and for providing such value to Quicken Loans.

Regards,

Todd Lunsford

CIO

The selection committee concurred and presented XCEND with the Quicken Loans' Partner Recognition Award in January 2006 and Scott anxiously waits to see what 2007 brings.

"Altiris Total Management Suite has exceeded our expectations," concluded Ravenscroft. "We have saved time and money by automating many of our manual processes, freed a number of IT staff to focus on more important tasks, and have built a solid IT lifecycle management platform that will support and even accelerate our ability to provide the robust IT services Quicken Loans needs to support its rapid growth."