QBE Management: Successfully Completes Vista Rollout Using Novell ZENworks and ENGL Imaging Toolkit

Successfully Delivering a Business Transformation Programme

An Australian listed organisation, QBE Insurance Group is one of the world’s leading insurers and reinsurers operating out of 45 countries with a presence in all of the key insurance markets. QBE European Operations is part of the QBE Insurance Group and operates in all major insurance centres throughout Europe and has 2,500 employees, based in 25 European offices boasting more than 120 years experience in the UK. By working in partnership with leading Windows Deployment specialist ENGL and using the ENGL Imaging Toolkit™, QBE is successfully delivering a business transformation programme by putting in place a Standard Operating Environment which has helped the company to:

Successfully deploy the Windows Vista operating system
Move to a single build for all employee computers and laptops
Dramatically improve desktop imaging and administration
Enable seamless mobility for staff across 22 European locations
Enable significant productivity gains for the IT team
Implement lights out desktop management across all European locations
Absorb future growth and acquisitions without increasing IT resources

In all, by adopting ENGL’s Imaging Toolkit, QBE IT is successfully supporting a major business transformation programme moving from being a geographically siloed organisation to a product focused pan-european business.

Undertaking a Microsoft Windows Vista Deployment

The company has just completed a Windows Vista deployment for 2,200 of its European desktops, leaving some 300 people who are still working in a Citrix environment. In total, this strategic deployment project took about 18 months to complete, from architecture and design through to engineering and build and then ultimately a phased deployment. This was a major undertaking for the organisation to standardise all of its desktops across Europe and included a number of sub-projects such as consolidating Internet gateways, merging directory services, and consolidating business data and applications onto strategic platforms.

One of the main business drivers from the outset was to establish a Standard Operating Environment for everyone in Europe so that all employees can access the same applications and data. Across Europe, QBE has several different business units and as a result of a number of acquisitions over the years quite a fragmented amalgamation of systems, functionality, and data. A key goal for this Windows Vista deployment programme was for QBE to be able to bring this all together under one common platform in order to be able to cross-fertilise business and for all departments to have access to all data with a consistent look and feel.

QBE realised that in order to achieve this it needed to establish a single desktop environment. It also needed to determine what that desktop environment should be and quickly came to the conclusion that Windows Vista was really the only viable option that the company could upgrade to. In order to be able to support and deploy this new platform, QBE would need to leverage a very comprehensive desktop management system.

Implementing a Standard Operating Environment

QBE looked at a number of different options including Microsoft SMS and Novell ZENworks of which ENGL Imaging Toolkit was part of the supplementary toolset and the organisation settled on a Microsoft Windows Vista platform using the latest version of Novell ZENworks 10 Configuration Management and the ENGL Imaging Toolkit. John Winterton, Infrastructure Manager responsible for design and architecture of the Windows Vista build takes up the story:

“The ENGL Imaging Toolkit was well positioned to help us out. It really is the only toolset on the market today that can enable you to deliver a single build for every piece of end user hardware in the estate.

In our IT estate we had a whole range of products such as Microsoft SMS, Novell ZENworks and a large bunch of deployment tools, including ENGL Imaging Toolkit. Once we had made the decision to deploy Windows Vista, we did an extensive review and decided to settle on Novell ZENworks and ENGL – we felt these were the best products for the job.

One of our objectives was to reduce the support burden and enable a centralised support model, what we needed was a single build. We didn’t want to have to test application deployments across multiple platforms or to extensively customise applications to function in different operating environments. Short time to market for new services is seen as a key business driver. We wanted one very easily managed and uniform deployment process that engineers could operate hands on or remotely or lights out across all our locations.”

A Staged Approach

The project was undertaken in three main phases with the last eight months being the deployment phase. The first part was the initial discovery phase which established the essential business requirements for the new platform, such as being able to have mobile connectivity, offline files, consistent look and feel while being highly secure. A comprehensive review of what the hardware estate looked like as well as the application estate was undertaken. Everything had to be accounted for and QBE set about a major discovery exercise visiting every machine and working out what applications were installed. John Winterton continues:

“The problem is that if you don’t have a managed desktop, people install all sorts of rubbish on their machines. For example, unauthorised software, which they may have downloaded from the Internet, where the business doesn’t have a licence to legitimately use the application. This software had to be removed or licensed. Additionally, we had to make sure we were fully licensed on all the applications that we thought we should have, and at the same time make sure that these were all compatible with Windows Vista.”

During the Discovery phase, QBE worked to establish what hardware, applications and data it had and then determined what sort of data people stored, where they stored it, how they wanted to store this information in the new world and how they wanted to share it with other individuals and departments. With over 2,000 desktops, this was a major undertaking but a key requirement in order to ensure that the deployment worked successfully. This period of discovery was a key business driver for QBE to understand and have one single view of its entire estate.

The second phase focused around the build and the associated management processes to support the European deployment and this is where QBE worked very closely with ENGL to engineer the exact requirements for their Standard Operating Environment. QBE worked closely with ENGL’s team of professional consultants who were integrated with the engineering teams at Novell to get early access and testing for the Windows Vista deployment on Novell ZENworks. Additionally, ENGL lent its weight to any issues that QBE had with Novell. John Winterton continues:

“We were guinea pigs if you like because Novell ZENworks working with Windows Vista was all so new. It was fantastic to have the experience and knowledge of the ENGL team helping us to work through any issues that we had. ENGL were on hand every step of the way and they have a lot of clout with Novell and that helped us to shortcut through any problems.”

Deployment was the final stage, where QBE focused on delivering one standard desktop to all European offices and this was successfully completed in around eight months.

Consistency Across 22 Locations

As a result of the whole project QBE’s business users in 22 locations across Europe can share the same applications and data no matter where they are located. For example, if QBE has a business user based in Madrid, this user will log onto a PC and can share the same spreadsheet as one of his/her colleagues in London. Whether it is a thin client site or a thick desktop site, users see the same data in the same way - it has all been streamlined and standardised. Today QBE has a single build environment which is a completely automated, hands off, lights out build process that the IT team can operate at a distance. Thanks to ENGL, QBE’s technicians can control a machine build remotely in Dublin overnight at the touch of a button.

QBE has witnessed a big reduction in the management overhead now that it has moved to a single desktop environment with a single build, which is far easier to manage with one delivery mechanism and a very simple environment. John Winterton continues:

“We have not really reduced costs in terms of resources, but what we have done is absorbed more business growth at the same cost. This project has enabled us to successfully achieve a business transformation programme moving to a product focused organisation instead of a geographically focused business. Distributed teams as well as our business processes can now be fully supported with the new infrastructure which is of tremendous benefit to the business and would simply not have been possible if we had not accomplished this single desktop environment. IT is well positioned to support QBE’s aggressive growth strategy without increasing headcount or overheads.”

Throughout the project ENGL was incredibly flexible and responded quickly to our issues and we found that very useful. ENGL are specialists focused on doing one thing extremely well – Windows deployment!”

Ever Evolving Needs

The desktop is a constantly evolving environment with new product launches, software upgrades and patches happening all the time. However QBE is now confident that it is well set up for future changes with one image for any desktop or laptop model that takes less than an hour to adapt to new hardware. John Winterton concludes.

“It will all change again for sure, but now we have robust processes in place so that we can easily handle that change, which was one of the key outcomes of the project. Today we are talking to ENGL about how we support our offices that are not connected to our network such as those in Canada and Dubai and create that same build environment. We plan to achieve this with a USB key fob, that will enable offline builds simple enough for business users to deploy.

In summary, ENGL were very flexible and responsive. They are extremely good at what they do, they have a market leading capability and QBE’s transformation program would not have been possible without them.”

About ENGL

ENGL specialise in the development of Windows OS deployment solutions for Microsoft System Center and Novell ZENworks.

ENGL is a member of the Microsoft System Center Alliance and a Novell ISV partner based in the United Kingdom

For more information, please complete an online enquiry form or call +44 (0) 123 522 7600.