AppSense Management Suite gives extra insurance to Gard

• Functional Applications - Enterprise Asset Management Systems (EAM)
• Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
• Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems

• Oil & Gas

• Business Operation
• Facility Management

• Predictive Maintenance
• Process Control & Optimization
• Remote Asset Management

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

Gard’s IT-department experienced downtime and a lot of time spent on administering servers and clients. When it came to managing their user environment, they were in a challenging situation, and felt that the current IT-staff level could not handle the workload. They wanted the flexibility of roaming profiles, but not the problems typically associated with them; namely corruption, excessive administration, long logon times and inflexible configuration. Gard needed to be able to customize user settings and keep them regardless of where the user logged on from. Gard expects high levels of success from its workforce, so they also needed to ensure the user environment was responsive and stable - to ensure maximum user-productivity.\n\n“We were in desperate need for a solution that could reduce the time I spent on administrating user profiles and individual settings. Since there were no roaming profiles on the Citrix servers, we encountered a lot of challenges. In short; we needed to introduce more flexibility for our users instead of restricting their IT-experience.” said Jan Ove Folgerø, Chief Systems Engineer, Gard.

Gard is a management company created to provide global insurance support to both capital providers for ship owners and operators and those involved in oil and gas markets. Gard employs more than 340 people of 27 different nationalities in nine locations around the world, with its headquarters in Arendal, Norway.

Gard was first introduced to AppSense at Citrix iForum in Edinburgh. This initial meeting was followed by an in-depth presentation of the product through a webinar, where the AppSense Management Suite was immediately identified as a solution that could solve their profile management problems. Following a proof of concept, Gard invested in AppSense Management Suite.\n\n“We were either faced with the challenges of hiring more staff to fix problems on hand, or introduce more automated solutions to avoid the problems. Instead of having to spend a lot of time finding and training new employees, we decided that AppSense would give us a far better return on investment, and was really the best way to make sure that we could deliver an IT experience that our users would be happy with. Now they can have the flexibility of a roaming profile, without IT experiencing the associated support problems”\n\n“We rolled out AppSense Environment Manager in our production environment in Arendal in just a few weeks. In order to make the deployment as efficient as possible we made some small changes on our Citrix farm, but it was a simple and smooth transition.”

• Gard discovered that it was easy to learn how to implement and configure AppSense software, and time spent on administrating users and the server farm was quickly slashed. AppSense Environment Manager’s point and click functionality is highlighted by Folgerø as a key benefit. Getting an easier working experience and a reduction in overtime is another proof-point.
• “We don’t want to lock down the users ability to maintain their personal settings. AppSense replaces roaming profiles and ensures all individual user settings are intact, without the IT-department having to reconfigure settings constantly. This enables us to provide our users the best tools and user experience possible” said Folgerø.
• Deployment of AppSense Performance Manager in the server farm was the next step in line for the global naval insurer. AppSense Performance Manager optimizes how applications use system resources so that users do not have to wait for business critical applications to execute and respond to their actions. Application and user environments are dynamically optimized to ensure maximum hardware utilization with an optimal, consistent quality of service. Gard’s document management system was a particularly troublesome application for Folgerø. AppSense Performance Manager alleviated this problem, not only improving the daily experience for users accessing this application, but manage resource use better and enabling more users to be serviced on a machine.

• Server capacity increased by 30%