Friends Provident in remote XP upgrade

Remote control software to cut PC upgrade costs for insurance firm

Financial services organisation Friends Provident has signed a deal with software supplier CA to manage a major upgrade of its staff PC desktops.

The life insurance and pensions company is upgrading 3,500 computers from Microsoft NT to the XP operating system, which it expects to be complete by spring next year.

Friends Provident will use CA’s Unicenter technology to centrally manage deployment of the XP software.

Making use of the Unicenter asset management, software delivery and remote control products, IT staff will be able to update PCs remotely rather than send engineers out to offices around the UK to install the software.

The project will save the firm money by reducing the time that IT staff spend manually installing the software, Andy Whiting, head of IT production services at Friends Provident, told Computing at the CA World conference this week.

‘Before, it was a man-in-a-van approach to installing software,’ he said. ‘We have four to five people spending their entire life doing new applications installation and testing. By using this, it won’t be anywhere near that.’

CA’s technology will also be used for future software installations and for carrying out updates and PC repairs.

Friends Provident has also adopted a strategy of consolidating the IT systems of companies it acquires, to allow all parts of the business to run on the same systems. This helps keep down IT costs and ensures that the company complies with data privacy and financial regulations, says Whiting.

‘Our market is more and more driven by regulation and compliance requirements and having everything on one system makes it easier to achieve this,’ he said.

The firm is also monitoring IT systems to see how it can further improve the way technology serves business processes in the organisation.

‘We are looking to get better value out of our IT investments, but that’s about knowing what we have out there, who is using it and what they are using it for.
‘For me, more than ever, the things we develop as an IT shop need to be aligned with the business. IT needs to deliver a real advantage,’ he said.