Major Insurer Uses Liquidware ProfileUnity and FlexApp to Optimize Control and Reduce Costs of Application Management
An end-of-life notice for its desktop management software forced a major insurer to change how it supported its more than 70,000 employee desktops. The insurer had made many customizations over the years to meet the demands of operating a high-volume environment in a highly regulated industry. The company’s goal was to find a desktop environment management solution that could match its existing functionality. But at the outset, the IT team questioned whether they could find anything that would work and meet their needs better.
The company invited Liquidware to demonstrate its FlexAppTM dynamic application software layering solution for desktops. After some discussion, the client asked Liquidware to participate in a long proof-of-concept pilot so it could evaluate FlexApp and ProfileUnityTM. Liquidware had already served many insurers and other demanding customers, but this one was exceptional.
“This client has a highly technically advanced team; they’re in the top 1% of all those we’ve worked with,” says Liquidware’s Matt Boyajian. “They are extremely thorough in everything they do, which we learned in the pilot. Most customers just scratch the surface of what ProfileUnity and FlexApp can do. This one used about every feature ProfileUnity and FlexApp have and pushed the envelope for us to do more to support the optimizations they had developed.
The client kept coming to Liquidware with thought-provoking questions about optimizing desktop management of their environment. The questions were usually answered by directing the client to specific software features. However, the insurer wanted to do things Liquidware hadn’t been asked to do before, primarily to support customized reporting.
Liquidware created a team with technical, customer service and leadership representation to have an ongoing dialogue with the customer and respond to requests promptly during the proof of concept. These interactions revealed a gap between the insurer’s desktop environment reporting and what ProfileUnity provided. Liquidware’s leadership approved a custom software development project on behalf of the customer that was expected to take at least six months.
Approximately three months later, Liquidware delivered new reporting capabilities that did everything the insurer requested, and more.
The insurer was particularly impressed with ProfileUnity’s configurable triggers during the PoC. The triggers can automatically apply policy and profile updates based on actions; for example, they can dynamically change location-based printing based on a change to the device IP address. They can also update applications based on new location and save changes to the user profile based on application open/close and more. These functionalities allowed the insurer to fine-tune its environment management in ways it hadn’t done before.
The insurer achieved its goal of matching its previous desktop environment management functionality, identified new benefits, and is prepared to roll out ProfileUnity and FlexApp to more than 100,000 desktops.
“We were selected because we could be agile,” says Boyajian. “The customer liked our product, but it loved our support and people.”
The new environment matched and exceeded the previous functionality while making it easier to manage the desktop population. The insurer maintains 30 to 40 master golden images to accommodate different user roles. Now that it has FlexApp to stream applications to desktops on demand instantly, the IT Team believes they can reduce that number to as few as two. Cutting out dozens of master images can save the company considerable time and effort and reduce the costs of managing its environment. The IT Team can now automate more of their manual tasks and shorten the time to deploy new employee desktops,
The innovations this project produced benefit all ProfileUnity customers. The new reporting functionality was included in the general release of ProfileUnity version 6.8 and is now a standard feature.
“This customer was like some others in that it has tens of thousands of employees, and each of their desktops has hundreds of settings. That can make reporting difficult. It can be like finding needles in haystacks,” says Boyajian. “For example, what if a company wanted to know who was running Google Earth on any of its desktops? Now you can find out in two clicks.”
