Reference story - Holland Casino
Holland Casino is the sole legal, licensed casino operator in the Netherlands. The company has fourteen sites across the country including casinos in the popular tourist resorts of Zandvoort, Valkenburg and Scheveningen and in the city-centres of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Breda, Groningen and Nijmegen. The company employs some five thousand people.
The Challenge
The stakes are high for the IT staff. They have to co-ordinate policies on a large number of terminals across the country ensuring a stable, uniform and trustworthy experience. The company must ensure that each of its independently managed IT sites run smoothly and effectively. Operational issues can potentially bring changes to the way gambling is legally organised in the country. This prompted Holland Casino to standardise and centralise its IT environment.
Holland Casino also needed a better way to maintain and renew its wide range of PC configurations. Depending on the casino, desktop PCs perform various functions. Almost all PCs offer default Microsoft Office applications. Some will be used for specialised financial and administrative applications. Others will offer specific games in each casino, while a few PCs are also primarily used for visitor registration or function as a cash registry.
The Solution
Therefore, Holland Casino needed a user workspace management tool to remotely configure and administer its 1,750 desktops across the country. Holland Casino wanted an efficient way to manage user environments, guarantee security and enable applications from a central location. Centralisation should also offer clear advantages, such as freeing up time and resources spent on manually maintaining individual desktops. Holland Casino decided to adopt RES PowerFuse for managing user workspaces. RES Software is an innovative software company that delivers solutions for managing user workspaces on Microsoft Windows® platforms and IT task automation for Windows based operating systems. RES Powerfuse allows the Holland Casino IT administrators to configure, secure and monitor all user sessions on PC’s
from one central console. Fine grained user rights permit certain staff functions, for example to access the Internet, but will restrict such applications to be installed or run on PCs that are in use at the reception. According to Greg Mulder, Infrastructure Manager at ICT Holland Casino, “RES PowerFuse provides user workspace flexibility and this is what makes it a complete and streamlined solution.” Flexibility proved important. How much so, Holland Casino discovered only after it had deployed RES PowerFuse.
“The installation and deployment of about 400 licenses was easy,” Mulder says. “Yet the company at first underestimated its impact on the organisation.” The centralisation of the technological logistics of application and workspace management frustrated the local IT administrators. They were no longer able to resolve any of the IT issues. Instead of helping their casino colleagues, they had to contact the central IT organisation and lobby for their issue to get priority. Mulder: “RES PowerFuse immediately changed the way we run the business, as was intended. We had not realised the instant impact this would have on the organisation.”
The Benefits
RES PowerFuse today helps Holland Casino to manage all applications. It has enabled the business to change its IT structures within days, rather than months. Using RES PowerFuse the company centrally prepares changes in application settings targeted at certain user groups or new tools to be rolled out only to specific PCs. Changes are not limited to this two week interval, says Mulder. “If necessary we can change applications or settings immediately, per application, per group or per PC.” All employees benefit from the central software management. It has helped to standardise the PCs and delivers a uniform user specific suite of applications.
Mulder: “Having the same desktop throughout the organisation means we can identify and deal with problems almost instantly.” Holland Casino therefore is now able to spend money on new IT structures that benefit employees. According to Mulder “We are no longer getting caught up in day to day issues.”
RES PowerFuse monitors all of the activities on the system and administrators no longer need to manage erratic applications. With a few clicks, applications, drives, and data can be restricted by user, group, or physical location. The installation of RES PowerFuse has eliminated the need for IT administrators to lock down the system by hand. Administrators are able to quickly manage the setup and maintenance of user preferences, including the redirection of data in user profiles. Using RES PowerFuse has transformed the efficiency of the entire environment.
Downtime has been reduced significantly. Many of the previous problems were solved resulting in less support hours for the IT department. Additionally, correcting or modifying the system required the system to be shut down, which disrupted end-user productivity. With RES PowerFuse, system changes are made within 5 to 10 minutes while endusers are logged in.
“RES PowerFuse has become a strategic solution for the Dutch casinos, having transformed the IT organisation,” concluded Mulder. “Our administrators are able to maintain a central deployment of applications and yet simultaneously can support local circumstances. This has made our offering far more efficient and enables us to improve the way we use IT: to benefit staff.”
RES PowerFuse has become a strategic solution for the Dutch casino's, having transformed the IT organisation.
Greg Mulder, Infrastructure Manager, Netherlands