Actebis Peacock GmbH: Novell Customer Success Story

Actebis Peacock GmbH
The Actebis Group is Europe's third-largest wholesaler of information and communication technology products, including computers, telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics. The company is headquartered in Soest, Germany, and its 1,800 employees work at locations across northern and western Europe, supplying a network of approximately 70,000 resellers. In 2007, the group achieved revenues of 3.6 billion Euros.

Challenge
Much of Actebis Peacock GmbH's day-to-day business is transacted by office-based employees, supported by core applications and databases that are accessed from desktop PCs running Windows XP. Without their PCs, most employees would be unable to work effectivelyso the company's productivity depends on maintaining, managing and replacing these machines when necessary.

The company's German operationslocated at two sites in Soest and one in Bad Wünneberg-Haarenwanted a solution that would help the internal IT team centrally manage its estate of 1,200 desktop PCs, to reduce administrative workload and enhance auditing capabilities.

"Our existing software provisioning system was quite primitive, so each new PC needed about 1.5 hours of 'post-configuration' before it was ready for the user," said Bernd Humpert, System Engineer at Actebis Peacock GmbH. "With 1,200 machines, this was very time-consuming. Moreover, without a centralised asset management system, we had to manually audit every single machine to find out how many software licences we needed."

Novell Solution
Actebis was already using Novell ZENworks® Desktop Management, and was impressed with the quality of the software. When the company decided to introduce a new solution, the IT team was keen to evaluate two new Novell products: Novell ZENworks Configuration Management and Novell ZENworks Asset Management.

"Our previous experience with Novell solutions was very positive, and we were keen to take advantage of new features in Novell ZENworks Configuration Management," said Reinhard Kriehn, System Engineer at Actebis Peacock GmbH. "The user interface is simpler now, and there is Microsoft Windows Vista support, which would be important if we decide to upgrade from XP."

Actebis Peacock worked with Novell Consulting to deploy the software across both its sites in Germany.

"The teamwork between Novell and the Actebis Peacock GmbH team was excellent," said Bernd Humpert. "We worked with Novell consultants whose competence and dedication earned our respect. Support from experts like these helped us overcome all technical challenges to ensure a successful outcome."

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