Case Study - Government

About CIE

Córas Iompair Éireann (CIE) is Ireland’s national public transport provider. Comprised of 5 companies – Iarnrod Eireann (Irish Rail), Bus Eireann (Irish Bus), Bus Atha Cliath (Dublin Bus), CIE Tours Dublin and CIE Tours New Jersey – CIE manages a sweeping network of national, regional, local and urban transportation services and tours across the Emerald Isle. Learn more at www.cie.ie

Challenge

Every year, Córas Iompair Éireann (CIE), Ireland’s national public transport authority, makes 230 million trips around and across Ireland.

Supporting 3,500 machines shore to shore – and at offshore locations in the United States – CIE’s 13-technician IT team needed an intuitive, immediate-response Systems Management solution to support the Emerald Isle’s critical transportations systems.

Immediate Response, Far-Flung Reach

Issue’s just pop up overnight in the next county; a user can’t log into their machine. How do you solve such commonplace problems miles away? For CIE’s IT team, day-to-day troubleshooting often meant traveling across counties.

“We used to travel around the country to solve minor problems manually; resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, fixing software issues, adding printers, and resolving e-mail and user logon issues. As you can imagine, this cut drastically into our money and our time,” said Adrian Carroll, IT Service Engineer for CIE.

With Goverlan, the team now keeps the country going without having to travel, managing day-to-day issues right from one centralized office – resulting in a growing Return on Investment and a shrinking travel footprint.

Reliable Data to keep track of Windows OS Rollouts and USMT

In addition to needing to travel to fix day-to-day issues, updating to the latest Windows OS – and keeping track of the OS update across 3,500 computers countrywide – was a challenge for CIE’s 13-technician team.

“Goverlan’s been quite handy in tackling these massive OS updates. We can simply connect to the machines and get a heads up on what software is installed at that very instant,” said Carroll.

Using Goverlan’s intuitive color-coded icons, the team can also see, at a glance, the status of the update, taking the guesswork out of OS rollouts, and monitoring the User State Migration process. Goverlan’s features filled the gap where a previous systems administration tool fell short.

“We couldn’t rely on SCCM’s reporting to verify the status of the updates across all our machines, since it would often report an upgrade had failed when it actually hadn’t.” described Carroll.

At-The-Moment & In-Depth Data

With Goverlan’s easy access to real-time, instant information on machines, the team has been able to streamline OS roll outs, but they can also delve deep into the history of a machine, including software history and user profiles.

“Now we can get access to the user details on older machines, and we can see who’s been using the machine most recently. Being able to see all user profiles quickly frees up a lot of bandwidth because we don’t waste time backing up older profiles – which would have normally taken us about 20-30 minutes on each machine,” explains Carroll.

Access to in-depth intel not only drastically cut time when migrating user profiles, but it also helped the team keep track of the software on machines, preventing unauthorized – and potentially harmful – software from being inadvertently installed.

"We’ve had various instances where we needed to know what applications our users had on their machines. Goverlan makes it easy for us to see immediately a machine’s software history with one quick look,” said Carroll.

Automatic Agent Installation

One of the most timesaving features the CIE team has benefited from with Goverlan is the ability to install agents automatically on remote machines.

“We attempted to use VNC before to install agents on remote machines, but the client had to be installed on both ends manually. Goverlan’s agents install automatically – it’s the only one that provides that function and it’s saved us an incredible amount of time in that regard,” said Carroll.

Conclusion

Whether it’s accessing printers and software in real time, to taking advantage of the versatility of the drag and drop feature to not only add files, and also push updates from machine to machine, Goverlan is fast becoming an invaluable investment for the team at CIE.

“Using Goverlan, we can troubleshoot at a fraction of the time – and the cost – everything from fixing printer issues right on the task manager, to using the extended functionality of the drag and drop tool to move files right onto a remote desktop without having to map drives, to pushing out OS rollouts countrywide, all right from one office,” said Carroll.

Now the team can run Ireland’s transportation systems with more speed and efficiency, and much more room in their budget – the team estimates a steady annual cost savings of anywhere from $10,500 to $13,000.