Get Matched with Your Perfect Systems Management Solution

Today you don’t have to have thousands of employees to have serious application management and endpoint protection challenges. Organizations of all sizes have a broad mix of operating systems and applications to deploy and keep up to date; a wide variety of desktops, laptops, smartphones and other devices to manage and secure; and geographically disparate sites that make hands-on attention from IT impractical, if not impossible.

The difference is, some organizations are struggling with these challenges while others have application management well in hand. I’d like to tell you about one of the latter: online dating firm Meetic Group. (Spoiler alert: the company was able to complete an upgrade to Office 2013 without any issues in just two weeks.)

Too Many Systems Management Tools Can Be as Bad as Too Few

Meetic Group is headquartered in France but its 500 employees are spread across Europe. The small IT team was finding it challenging to manage all the company’s desktops and laptops — Windows, Mac and Linux  —and maintain an up-to-date inventory of software assets. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t have tools; they had an open-source solution for desktops and asset management, as well as Active Directory Group Policy settings and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. The problem was that they didn’t have the right tools.

“We had multiple solutions to oversee and none of them gave us the level of insight we really needed to manage the client estate effectively,” explains Frédéric de Ascencao, internal IT manager at Meetic Group.” Ideally, we wanted a single solution that could help us obtain more value from our desktops and laptops for the business and personnel.”

Centralized Application Management Delivers a Host of Benefits

So Meetic Group went shopping. Through careful research and extensive testing, the company found a clear winner: Dell KACE K1000 and K2000 appliances. “They arrive preconfigured and can be up and running in a couple of hours,” says de Ascencao. “Furthermore, we didn’t need to spend time or money up-skilling our administrators. Using a basic knowledge of IT, an administrator can install and operate Dell KACE solutions. It’s that simple.”

Trading a hodgepodge of disparate tools for the integrated Dell solution has really paid off. Now Meetic Group enjoys:

  • Efficient software deployment — Rollout of Microsoft Office 2013 across the business was completed in just two weeks, weeks faster than previous similar upgrades.
  • Reduced inventory costs — Clear insight into its hardware and software assets enables the IT team to know exactly what spare inventory to maintain at each site.
  • Better security and performance — Effective remote management keeps software across the enterprise up to date, including critical applications like anti-virus tools.
  • Reduced licensing costs — The IT team can easily identify and reallocate unused and underused software licenses while ensuring software license compliance.
  • Easy customization — With the Dell KACE appliances, even an international company like Meetic Group needs just one image per operating system; the right language package is automatically deployed based on the location of the desktop.
  • Proactive capacity management — The solution reports on the amount of storage available on each desktop so IT staff can alert employees to archive data when needed, thereby preventing business disruptions.

Find out more about how KACE can help you streamline your systems management with the following, ‘KACE Systems Management Alliance’ datasheet.

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