HP,Altiris Group

HP and Altiris... Brilliant! 

Aug 03, 2007 06:12 PM

Sometimes a little automation goes a long way. That's the case with this Juice reader who saw the immediate benefits (and substantial return on investment) of their HP Clent Manager implementation.

Business Problem:

The IT Department being stuck in a state of reactionary flux when it comes to desktop and laptop support.

Our Solution:

I really don't know where to start explaining how much the HP Client Manager piece in particular has helped out in our company. When I first started here, almost two years ago, it appeared to me that the whole information technology shop was in a constant reactionary mode. There was no time to plan for improvements that would put us in-line with a proactive mode. Having used the Altiris product at my previous employer I realized that I had the solution to make everyone's jobs easier and better.

Getting Approval

We have numerous HP/Compaq desktops and laptops scattered around our organization. It seemed that it was only obvious to take advantage of the benefits of the HP/Altiris alliance to better help us manage these devices. I can say that it was not a hard sell to management to get them to sign off on this solution. This is especially true when the initial price was zero dollars. (We have since budgeted to include the full HP suite to manage our 100s of HP servers).

Getting Started

Day one was a seamless rollout of the Altiris agent to several test boxes located in the IT test lab. This allowed me to better configure the Altiris and HP portions to accomplish what we wanted to do. Having the machines e-mail us when possible hardware problems were happening was definitely an outstanding feature. After we had tried out all of the various features associated with this product, and proved that they worked as advertised, it was time to move to step two.

Testing with a Pilot

Once we had a configuration template in place -- on what we wanted HP Client Manager to monitor -- we were then ready to roll-out to our initial pilot group. This initial pilot group consisted of 100 HP/Compaq desktops and laptops. Installing the agents was a breeze and we already had the components configured to start managing our pilot group computers. Right away (about two hours) I started to receive the first e-mails letting me know such things as low hard drive space, possible disk errors, etc. It worked beautifully. Our desktop technicians were not that excited since it greatly increased their workload -- at least initially. Once we explained to them that we are taking a proactive step to desktop maintenance versus a reactionary approach they seemed to understand our position better. What better way to increase IT customer satisfaction numbers than to have a desktop technician show up before the user had to call the service desk!

Tweaking the Help Desk

After several weeks of testing and tweaking on the pilot group we decided that having the HP Client Manager e-mail me was probably not the most efficient way to handle this product. We currently use a Mac web-based help desk system. We figured there had to be a way to tie the information we were getting from the HP Client Manager software into our help desk system. We worked with the help desk software manufacturer to activate e-mail tickets and automatically assign these tickets to available desktop technicians. This worked absolutely flawlessly and we were able to respond that much quicker to potential problems with our HP/Compaq desktop/laptop fleet.

Updating En masse

Over the course of the next several weeks we started to update BIOS versions using the HP Client Manager. We realized that it had been several years since the last BIOS update was applied to some of our systems. Not good! By being able to schedule these BIOS deployments we were able to update our entire fleet without the users even knowing that we did anything. Now we have a seamless deployment solution to ensure that the users' desktop and laptop computers are always running with the latest BIOS version available.

We figured there couldn't be much more that this product could handle for us at that point. We were wrong, of course, and realized that many of our drivers were way out of date on the HP computers around the ministry. Was there a way to deploy SoftPaqs to our system in an efficient manner? After toying around with the HP Client Manager product we soon realized that there was. We were able to update the drivers on over 1000 computers with minimal intervention from our desktop technicians. Plus once again the users were unaware that we had made changes to their systems. Now we know we have a tool in place that can ensure that our system drivers will always be up to date with the latest versions.

There have been numerous times that we have had to make system-wide changes to the BIOS. One example that comes to mind is the need to rotate the BIOS password on the desktop and laptop computers. Is there really an easy way to do this on over 1000 systems? We had really no efficient way to accomplish this task before we implemented the HP Client Manager software package. We were able to configure an Altiris job that ran our HP BIOS changes on a regular basis. In essence, we can now rotate this password out on a more consistent basis and feel confident that all of our systems out there have the appropriate BIOS password configured. This means no more guessing the last 5 BIOS passwords to find the right one on a given system.

It is quite obvious that without the Altiris/HP alliance our organization would still be completely reactionary. With the HP Client Manager it has saved both time and money in ways that we never imagined initially. Please keep this great product coming and I look forward to seeing where it heads in the future.

Return on Investment:

We factored in desktop technician time saved, user downtime, and increased efficiency. Based on the fact that HP Client Manager cost nothing we were able to save nearly $100,000 over the first year. Once again these costs were based on estimates from previous years support numbers (salaries, cost to business, loss of productivity, etc.)

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Aug 07, 2007 01:43 PM

Nice writeup, intersting and well written

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