AEGON cuts desktop support costs by 11 per cent

Customer overview

AEGON provides financial services and advice to more than two million individual and corporate customers in the UK. Part of the global AEGON Group, the company specialises in pensions, life insurance and asset management. It manages £47 billion worth of assets for its UK customers, and employs 4,500 staff.

Business need

To help improve the services it provides, AEGON is continually investing in technology. As a result, IT supports every area of its business, with staff relying on their desktops to perform core processes, such as making pension payments, setting up new policies and managing investment portfolios. Given this dependence on IT, it is essential that the company's desktop environment is both reliable and secure.

With vendor support for AEGON's legacy desktop environment due to be withdrawn, the company needed to take action to safeguard both business continuity and data security. As Sandra Tuddenham, Head of IT for AEGON in the UK, explains: "We needed to ensure that our desktops – and the business as a whole – were protected against new security threats. Without vendor support, it would be difficult to prevent a virus outbreak on our desktop infrastructure. If staff were unable to use their desktops, then customer service levels would be at risk as well as our ability to sell products in the future."

AEGON also needed to ensure that business development and agility were not impacted by the inability of its desktops to cope with the roll out of new corporate applications.

 

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Solution

AEGON therefore decided to embark on a transformation project that would not only involve deploying Microsoft Windows XP to 4,200 desktops and laptops but also replacing ageing hardware across more than a quarter of its estate and migrating to new TFT screens. With the 22-month deployment involving nearly every business department, AEGON had to ensure that the multi-million pound project caused minimal disruption to its operations. "We needed buy-in from the different areas of the business to make the project happen," comments Susan Shivji, Head of Programme Delivery at AEGON. "With limited internal technical resources, we had to bring in an external partner." As a result, AEGON enlisted the help of Computacenter, which is also responsible for managing the company's desktop estate in the UK. "Computacenter had the expertise to provide us with end-to-end technical assistance," adds Susan.

How Computacenter helped

Before the new operating system, 4,000 screens and 1,100-plus desktops and laptops could be deployed, AEGON had to go through a comprehensive testing and application packaging process. The company used the project as an opportunity to halve its existing application portfolio, with the remaining applications being packaged for deployment by Computacenter.

As part of this process, Computacenter also helped to determine any interoperability issues with the new environment. Alan Hill, a Computacenter Client Director, commented: "To ensure the project was delivered on time and to budget, we needed to identify and mitigate any risks to staff productivity and the performance of the new environment prior to the roll-out."

As a result, Computacenter devised a comprehensive user acceptance testing programme, and employed proven migration processes, which had already been validated in its Shared Services Factory. To help lockdown the new desktop environment, Computacenter also implemented a USB security solution from SecureWave as part of the migration. This prevents unauthorised portable devices from being connected to desktops/laptops, which could introduce viruses into AEGON's environment. Computacenter deployed this software, along with the new desktop infrastructure and amended Active Directory architecture, across more than 20 AEGON sites.

Results

Since the rollout was completed in February 2007, AEGON has already realised both financial and efficiency gains. As Sandra explains: "The new desktop infrastructure is a lot easier to support, which means the number of user queries have reduced by nearly 10 per cent. At the same time, it has improved the user experience. In particular, the new TFT screens are very popular with staff. Not only are they environmentally friendly, but also offer better quality."

By enabling AEGON to simplify its desktop support operation, the new infrastructure has delivered significant cost savings. At the same time as implementing the upgraded environment, AEGON was negotiating a new five-year managed service with Computacenter.

Thanks to the new infrastructure, AEGON has decreased its desktop cost per seat by 11 per cent as part of this contract, which runs until 2010. "The new desktop infrastructure has helped to improve the performance of some applications and speed up user log-in times, which aids productivity," says Susan. "The improved stability and security has also enabled us to maintain compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulations as well as minimise business risk."