Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
Customer Solution Case Study
EDS Adopts IT Management Tools to Improve
Internal Operations, Client Service Delivery
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Technology services
“Based on our experience, System Center is definitely
ready for the enterprise.”
Keith Halbert, Chief Information Officer, EDS
Customer Profile
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, EDS is a
global technology services company with
more than 120,000 employees.
Business Situation
EDS needed IT management solutions that
were scalable enough to both support the
company’s internal IT infrastructure and
serve as a foundation for servicing its client
base.
Solution
EDS met its IT management needs with
Microsoft® System Center solutions,
including Microsoft Systems Management
Server 2003 and Microsoft Operations
Manager 2005.
Benefits
 Mission-critical reliability
 Enhanced security through centralized
software distribution
 Improved employee productivity
 Significant cost savings
 Strong foundation for EDS service
offerings
With more than 3 million Windows®-based systems under
management worldwide, technology services provider EDS is using
Microsoft® System Center IT solutions to standardize and automate
its IT operations. Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003
facilitates centralized software deployment and user support, which
helps the company to keep its 90,000 computers around the globe
secure and running smoothly, while Microsoft Operations Manager
2005 provides the detailed monitoring capabilities EDS needs to
ensure that the servers supporting mission-critical systems such as
e-mail remain up and running. Just as important, EDS is using
System Center solutions to provide standardized service offerings
to the clients whose IT infrastructures it manages and to deliver the
high levels of reliability, security, and scalability that EDS itself
enjoys.
“With System Center,
our jobs are easier
because we get global
scalability and a high
degree of automation,
both of which are of
paramount importance
to our success.”
Matt Trevorrow, Vice President of Workplace
Services Product Development, EDS
Situation
EDS is a leading global technology services
company that serves clients in the
manufacturing, financial services, healthcare,
communications, energy, transportation,
consumer, and retail industries, as well as
governments around the world. The
company’s portfolio of services includes
application maintenance and development;
business process outsourcing; and IT
infrastructure management, including
desktop services, hosting, storage, and
networking.
As a technology services provider to Fortune
500 companies, EDS faces a dual challenge:
It must optimally manage its own global IT
infrastructure, as well as create service
offerings that enable EDS to manage the
worldwide infrastructures of thousands of
clients with the requisite levels of reliability,
security, and scalability.
“In my role, I need to look at our IT
management needs in two ways,” says Keith
Halbert, Chief Information Officer at EDS.
“From one perspective, we’re a global
enterprise with 100,000 PCs and several
thousand servers, upon which we depend to
run the business and service our clients.
From the second perspective, we’re an IT
services company with several thousand
clients that, in many cases, are even larger
than EDS itself. Given that challenge, how do
we manage, support, and protect an IT
infrastructure as globally distributed as ours,
and how do we come up with standardized
product and service offerings that can enable
us to do the same for our clients?”
The answer to that challenge is EDS’s Service
Delivery Automation (SDA) initiative. “SDA
forms the core of our future,” says Halbert.
“It’s about putting the tools, processes, and
capacity in place to best manage the EDS
enterprise, and moving to a global delivery
model that provides the same consistency
and affordability for clients. To realize that
goal, we need to understand what’s within
our IT footprint, know what we want that
footprint to look like, and push out the
changes needed to make it so.”
One area where EDS needed to standardize
was in the distribution of software to user
desktops, which employed methods ranging
from the distribution of CDs to the use of
logon scripts and e-mail messages pointing
users to download sites. “We were
desperately interested in finding a single,
comprehensive desktop management
solution for global use,” says Matt Trevorrow,
Vice President of Workplace Services Product
Development at EDS. “Software distribution
methods used in the past required a high
degree of user participation, which decreased
end-user productivity and made it hard to
achieve a high success rate.”
Another area where EDS needed to improve
and standardize was the monitoring of server
computers and the applications running on
them. As with desktop management, the
company relied on a number of tools—ranging
from generic utilities and freeware to vendorspecific monitoring aids—that differed from
region to region. “The tools we used for
server monitoring were cumbersome and
limited, requiring lots of upkeep and a high
degree of manual configuration,” says Steven
Gratz, Systems Administrator at EDS. “Even
then, the visibility into how our systems were
running was fairly limited; the tools told us
little more than whether a server was up
or down. We rarely had enough information
to be fully proactive—for example, being able
to see that a message queue was backing
up and taking action before the system
crashed completely.”
Solution
EDS is improving its ability to manage its
global IT infrastructure by standardizing on
Microsoft® System Center IT management
“Operations Manager
works better ‘out of
the box’ than other
solutions, which just
don’t integrate as
well with our Windowsbased systems.”
David Pearse, Infrastructure Architect,
EDS APAC
solutions, including Microsoft Systems
Management Server 2003 and Operations
Manager 2005. “System Center solutions
give us a single tool set that we can use to
manage our worldwide IT infrastructure—and
to deliver a similar set of services to clients,”
says Trevorrow. “With System Center, our
jobs are easier because we get global
scalability and a high degree of automation,
both of which are of paramount importance
to our success.”
Comprehensive Desktop Management
EDS began using System Center solutions
when it deployed Systems Management
Server 2003 to manage the 13,500
Windows®-based desktops in its Asia Pacific
(APAC) geographic region. Implemented over
a period of two months, the solution replaced
a combination of tools and manual processes
with a unified, automated solution for
software distribution and metering, the
deployment of security updates, and
hardware and software asset tracking.
“The speed with which we were able to
deploy Systems Management Server was
staggering,” says David Pearse, Infrastructure
Architect for EDS APAC. “We rolled out
Systems Management Server to 9,500
desktops in one week, achieving the same
penetration it had taken three months to
achieve with our previous desktop
management product. It was incredibly
quick and easy.”
The Systems Management Server
infrastructure runs on the Windows Server®
2003 operating system, with a data store
based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000
database software. EDS used the Systems
Management Server 2003 International
Client Pack to display pop-up messages that
appear on employees’ computer screens in
their own languages, and took advantage of
the Background Intelligent Transfer Service
(BITS) technology in Windows Server to
throttle Systems Management Server–related
network traffic, thereby minimizing the impact
of that traffic on network performance.
Although Systems Management Server
provided EDS APAC with several new
capabilities, one of the most useful was the
ability to centrally deploy security updates, as
required to help ensure the security and
reliability of user computers. “Systems
Management Server reduced the time it
takes to deploy security updates by 92
percent,” says Pearse. “We now achieve
greater than 90 percent coverage within five
days, whereas in the past it took two months
to achieve 60 percent success.”
Following the successful pilot program
within EDS APAC, the company expanded
its deployment of Systems Management
Server to include user desktops in its Europe,
Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region and
its Americas region. Since February 2006,
Systems Management Server has provided
EDS with a single, centralized solution for
the management of 90,000 computers
worldwide—roughly 85 percent of all the
company’s user desktops.
EDS also is using Systems Management
Server to deliver new software applications
and application upgrades. “If we have a
program that we need to push out, such as a
new SAP client, we can deliver it with great
ease,” says Darcy Wheeler, Senior
Infrastructure Specialist at EDS. “We don’t
need to bother people with desk-side visits,
nor do we need to ask them to download and
install something on their own. Instead, the
application just appears, ready to use. If
restarting is required, we can schedule it so
that it doesn’t interrupt the user.”
Another way in which EDS is reducing
desk-side visits is by using the remote
support capabilities provided by Systems
Management Server. “Systems Management
“We used to be like
firefighters, reacting to
many of the same
problems day after day.
With Operations
Manager, we have more
time to focus on optimizing our infrastructure
instead of simply keeping it up and running.”
Steven Gratz, Systems Administrator, EDS
Server enables help-desk personnel to take
over a user’s desktop and solve most
problems remotely, which is working very
well,” says Wheeler. “The help-desk
technician simply initiates a remote
assistance session, upon which he or she has
complete remote-control over the user’s
desktop and can solve the problem much
more quickly and efficiently than if working
with the user over the phone.”
Moving forward, EDS is looking to Systems
Management Server to help streamline the
deployment of the Windows Vista™ operating
system both internally and for clients. “We
did an assessment and decided that Systems
Management Server was the best way to
help customers deploy Windows Vista when
they’re ready,” says Ranjana Chopra,
Workplace Services Product Manager at
EDS. “We’ll be providing operating system
deployment, application packaging, and
software distribution—all based on Systems
Management Server.”
Adds Trevorrow, “We’re heavily focused
on zero-touch deployment as a service
delivery model. The capabilities provided by
Systems Management Server support that
model well and will certainly help save us
money when we deploy Windows Vista
upgrades in the field.”
EDS also will examine using Systems
Management Server to streamline the
provisioning of technical software for its
developers. “It can be difficult to get
applications to developers working at client
sites in a timely fashion,” says Wheeler.
“We’re looking at integrating Systems
Management Server with a provisioning
portal. Project managers would be able to
just select the necessary tools, upon which
those programs would be pushed to
developer desktops by the time developers
arrive at a client site.”
Detailed Operational Monitoring
Although the company’s rollout of Systems
Management Server started in Australia, its
use of Microsoft Operations Manager began
on the other side of the globe, in 2004, when
the EDS Americas region began using
Operations Manager 2000 to monitor its
Windows-based server computers. Today,
EDS Americas uses Operations Manager
2005 to monitor the 142 servers that host
e-mail, collaboration, and mobile messaging
services, including those running Microsoft
Exchange Server 2003, the Active Directory®
service, Windows ActiveSync® technology,
BlackBerry-based mobile-messaging
software, and EMC Documentum eRoom
collaboration software.
“In the past, we had limited visibility into the
status and performance of our e-mail
environment, with no good way to collect
performance data,” says Gratz. “Operations
Manager gives us all that and more, including
complete visibility into the health of those
network services that are needed for
Exchange Server to function properly, such
as Active Directory and DNS [Domain Name
System].”
Role-specific Operations Manager
management packs for Windows Server,
Exchange Server, Active Directory, DNS, and
Windows Internet Name Service provide the
specialized knowledge that EDS needs to
optimally monitor its servers. Created based
on knowledge from the Microsoft developers
who built the aforementioned technologies,
each pack provides a set of monitoring rules
with predefined thresholds, a knowledge
base with troubleshooting information, and
scripts that can be used to quickly resolve
issues. EDS uses third-party management
packs from VERITAS and Dell to monitor
backups and server hardware, and created
its own rules for monitoring its collaboration
and mobile-messaging servers.
“Together, the various
capabilities provided by
Systems Management
Server have helped us
achieve a 50 percent
reduction in the total
cost of supporting our
desktop infrastructure.”
Michael Partsch, Chief Information Officer,
EDS EMEA, Central Region
“The Operations Manager management
packs are great,” says Robert Braun, Systems
Administrator at EDS. “They give us a
predefined set of monitoring rules that we
can tailor to our environment, so we can
adjust alert thresholds as needed to minimize
any nuisance alerts. We can also continually
collect performance and workload data,
which is very helpful in determining server
capacity.”
Upon detecting abnormal behavior,
configurable processing rules built into
Operations Manager notify EDS IT staff by
pager or e-mail that a potential issue exists,
with knowledge base information appended
to the alert to aid in problem resolution.
Copies of each alert are stored in an
Exchange Server public folder for future
reference.
“In many cases, Microsoft Operations
Manager is configured to simply send alerts,”
says Gratz. “In other cases, we’re using its
ability to take automated corrective action.
For example, we have a known bug in our
collaboration software that requires
restarting the server. If Operations Manager
detects that condition, it restarts the server
automatically, and we get a page notifying us
of the incident.”
In configuring Operations Manager, EDS
created computer groups for different
geographies and server roles. The company
also added troubleshooting information for
collaboration and mobile-messaging servers
to the knowledge base data included with
Microsoft and third-party management packs,
thereby giving IT staffers a single source of
troubleshooting information for all monitored
server roles.
“The Operations Manager console is great,”
says Braun. “Not only does it give me all the
information I need to understand what’s
going on with our servers in one place, but it
also helps me manage the servers more
efficiently. For example, if I need to restart
our collaboration servers, I can use the
Operations Manager console to issue a single
command to all 10 servers—instead of having
to open 10 remote sessions and issue the
command to each server one at a time.”
The EDS EMEA Operations Manager
infrastructure is similar to the one deployed
in the Americas. EDS APAC, although it is not
using Operations Manager today, is planning
a deployment of Operations Manager that
will encompass several thousand servers
worldwide.
“We have roughly 1,000 servers running
Exchange Server around the world, of which
some 200 are being actively monitored using
Operations Manager,” says Halbert. “And it’s
going very well. Our goal for 2007 is to
expand our use of Operations Manager to
monitor all of our Windows-based servers.
We’ll have three regional deployments to
mimic our three regional operations teams,
with all of those deployments rolling up to a
single global reporting environment.”
Adds Pearse, who is leading the design effort
for the EDS global deployment of Operations
Manager, “Operations Manager works better
‘out of the box’ than other solutions, which
just don’t integrate as well with our Windowsbased systems. The quality of the monitoring
agent and of the alerts generated is much
higher with Operations Manager, which isn’t a
big surprise considering that nobody knows
how to manage Microsoft software and
technologies better than Microsoft itself.”
EDS now is evaluating System Center
Operations Manager 2007 (the successor to
Operations Manager 2005) and has
identified several new features and
capabilities that will prove useful as the
company expands its use of the solution.
“Several of the new features in System
“We manage more
Windows-based systems
than does any other
company in the world—
some 3 million client
desktops—and we have
every confidence that
System Center solutions
will provide the stable
foundation we need to
meet client needs.”
Center Operations Manager 2007 look
appealing,” says Gratz. “Its application model
will enable us to get a holistic picture of the
health of an application, as well as to drill
down into the dependencies. I also like that
the operational database no longer holds
performance-monitoring data, which is now
moved to a data warehouse for easier
analysis. The self-tuning performance
baseline feature also will be quite helpful:
Instead of having to specify alert-trigger
levels ourselves, we can use System Center
Operations Manager to measure server
performance for a business cycle and use
that data to tailor the alert levels to our
actual environment.”
Matt Trevorrow, Vice President of Workplace
Services Product Development, EDS
Benefits
Through its use of Microsoft System Center
solutions, EDS is centralizing and automating
IT management, thereby improving the
reliability and security of its global IT
infrastructure while reducing the effort
required to manage that environment. In
addition, System Center solutions are helping
the company to improve both IT staff and
end-user productivity, reduce overall IT costs,
and deliver scalable service offerings that are
helping EDS to deliver the same benefits to
its clients.
“System Center solutions integrate well with
our existing IT infrastructure and help us to
manage and support that environment with
the required levels of reliability, security, and
scalability,” says Halbert. “Just as important,
the same capabilities are helping EDS to
better serve its clients. Based on our
experience, System Center is definitely ready
for the enterprise.”
Mission-Critical Reliability
EDS’s use of System Center solutions is
helping the company ensure the continued
availability of key systems that support the
delivery of client services, such as its
Exchange Server infrastructure. “We recently
consolidated our e-mail servers, each of
which now supports more than 2,500 users,
so it’s critical that they stay up and running at
all times,” says Gratz. “We’re able to deliver
service levels of around 99.99 percent
because we know about issues sooner and
can easily identify the design changes
necessary to fix those problems once and for
all. We used to be like firefighters, reacting to
many of the same problems day after day.
With Operations Manager, we have more time
to focus on optimizing our infrastructure
instead of simply keeping it up and running.”
Adds Trevorrow, “Our internal success with
Operations Manager has enabled us to move
forward with a similar architecture to support
our clients. In fact, we’re using Operations
Manager to monitor Operations Manager
installations at about a half-dozen client
sites. It’s proven itself from a scalability and
reliability perspective, and it closely matches
our delivery model. In addition, because such
a large part of our business is managing
Windows-based desktops, we’re also looking
at using Operations Manager to monitor PCs
running Windows Vista.”
Enhanced Security
EDS is improving the reliability and security of
user desktops by using System Center
solutions to quickly and efficiently deploy
critical software updates. Today, a single
global delivery organization can deploy
software applications as well as operating
system updates, enabling the company to
push out any required software updates to all
computers managed by Systems
Management Server worldwide.
“With Systems Management Server, we can
click a button and push out critical software
updates to user desktops across the world,
achieving a 90 percent success rate within
the first 24 hours,” says Trevorrow. “We’re
also using Systems Management Server to
improve security in other ways—for example,
by making sure that everyone has a personal
firewall installed and running, that users have
up-to-date antivirus signatures, and that
they’re running encryption when needed.”
EDS also is using Systems Management
Server to quickly bring new systems up-todate, including making sure they have the
necessary security updates installed. “System
Center saves us time when we’re deploying
new systems,” says Wheeler. “As soon as a
new system joins the network, it’s examined
to see which software is installed and any
necessary updates or upgrades start to
download. Within a short time, the new
system is running the same software as the
rest of our environment.”
Adds Trevorrow, “In the past, we tried to
ensure security by locking down access to our
networks. With Systems Management Server,
we can operate more dynamically, allowing
people to move on and off the network while
still maintaining a strong level of security.”
In addition, EDS is taking advantage of the
reporting capabilities provided by Systems
Management Server to help ensure security
compliance. “Systems Management Server
enables us to consolidate reporting on a
worldwide basis, enabling us to more easily
understand our compliance levels,” says
Trevorrow. “Needless to say, those same
reporting capabilities help us provide clients
with visibility into the compliance status of
their systems.”
Improved Employee Productivity
EDS is using System Center solutions to
improve the productivity of the IT staff.
“System Center solutions give us a
predictable operational environment.
Because the environment now requires less
manual intervention, we can centralize and
automate more tasks—and feel confident and
secure in that capability,” says Halbert.
“System Center also has helped us reduce
rework and work force complexity because
it’s very durable, very dependable, and
predictable. Today, we can do the job right
the first time, with economies of scale that
allow us to shift additional IT resources to
client-facing activities.”
Adds Trevorrow, “By consolidating and
standardizing on System Center, we’re able to
reduce the number of subject matter experts
we need in the field. We’ve taken advantage
of our internal rollout of System Center
solutions to create a pool of talent that we
can easily turn to when addressing the needs
of our clients.”
EDS’s use of Systems Management Server
has also improved user productivity. “With
Systems Management Server, users no
longer must install security updates on
their own or sit idle while someone does it
for them,” says Michael Partsch, Chief
Information Officer, EDS EMEA, Central
Region. “Across EMEA, we’re gaining
180,000 hours a year in increased user
productivity due to the automated software
deployment capabilities provided by Systems
Management Server.”
Adds Wheeler, “Systems Management Server
is non-intrusive and doesn’t interrupt users,
which saves them a lot of downtime. Instead,
software updates just happen in the background. Personally, it’s great to know that my
desktop system is being taken care of for
me—that the company is looking after it so
that I don’t have to.”
Significant Cost Savings
Using System Center to centralize and
automate desktop management is helping
EDS to reduce the cost of supporting its
infrastructure. “Together, the various
capabilities provided by Systems
Management Server have helped us achieve
a 50 percent reduction in the total cost of
supporting our desktop infrastructure,” says
Partsch. “Even when the total project costs
are factored in, the solution still yields a 23
percent savings over five years.”
Adds Wheeler, “In the past, with IT
management and support efforts going on at
the regional, country, and local levels, it was
hard to identify all the cost elements—
especially soft costs. Today, with System
Center, hidden costs due to things like lost
user productivity and the need to manually
compile reports on security compliance are
significantly decreased, and it’s easier to
identify remaining costs because we know
where the work is being done and who’s
doing it.”
Strong Foundation for EDS
Service Offerings
Having proven that System Center solutions
can meet its internal needs, EDS is now
taking advantage of Operations Manager and
Systems Management Server to create
standardized service offerings for its clients.
“System Center solutions have certainly
proved themselves scalable, not only from an
EDS perspective, but from a client-facing
perspective as well,” says Trevorrow. “We
manage more Windows-based systems than
does any other company in the world—some
3 million client desktops—and we have every
confidence that System Center solutions will
provide the stable foundation we need to
meet client needs.”
Adds Halbert, “As we move forward with our
Service Delivery Automation initiative, System
Center solutions will play an integral role.
They give us a global view of our IT
infrastructure that we’ve never had before
and have enabled us to centralize key
operations and reporting functions, leading to
cost savings, reliability and performance
improvements, and an improved ability to
deliver the high service levels our clients
demand. Standardization is at the core of our
IT management strategy, and System Center
solutions provide one of the supporting
elements for achieving that goal.”
For More Information
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about the Microsoft
server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
Microsoft System Center
Microsoft System Center is a family of leading
IT management solutions that helps you
proactively plan, deploy, manage, and
optimize your IT environment.
For more information about System Center
solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/systemcenter
For more information about EDS, visit the
Web site at:
www.eds.com
Software and Services
 Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft System Center
 Microsoft SQL Server 2000
− Microsoft Operations Manager 2005
 Windows Vista
− Microsoft Systems Management Server
2003
 Windows Server 2003
−

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY
Document published February 2007