Arup head offices in Fitzroy Street. Arup/Hufton & Crow
The organisation in question is Arup, the global engineering firm behind a range of high-profile projects like the Beijing Olympics and the Sydney Opera House, which says by finding better ways to work with its desktop fleet has saved around £50,000 per year – or the equivalent of no less than a third of its annual PC power costs.
"The system has paid for itself in 14 months and has delivered a range of benefits, from the green aspect to lessening disruption to end users," its global automation team leader Richard Barnes told CBR.
The company has been using software from 1E that describes itself as an IT efficiency specialist. In this case, it’s provided its power and patch management packages to help Barnes and his team to put a bit more science in its PC power management.
Barnes explained why this was an issue; 25% of his 10,000 desktops were being left on each weekday evening and 20% of computers were being left on each weekend. Simply by automating the power down, he says, from a centrally controlled location, at night local time (this is across the firm’s UK, European and Middle Eastern sites, by the way), he reckons he’s saved the equivalent savings of the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 81 modern passenger vehicles – or the energy use of 40 homes.
That’s not all. Barnes says an equally big issue for the IT function was patch management and new software install, especially in the context of such a widely distributed team of devices to maintain.
"What we also did with this project, apart from the power aspect, was to look at how we could minimise disruption to users. If you have to install a big package, that can be hard to do in working hours and if you do, can impact on user productivity.
"So what we did was to use the software 1E supplied to wake the target computer up in the middle of the night – when it was obviously very unlikely to be in use – and install patches and new system updates at 3am," he says.
Barnes cites the need to roll out the latest version of an Adobe product as a very effective use of the functionality – saving him and his group time and having almost no impact on the user base.
All in all, he cites compliance, efficiency improvements, the above-stated direct power bill savings and associated carbon tax benefits, as the main identifiable deliverables from his use of this kind of desktop management software. Which isn’t bad at all, when you think about it.
Seems like any CIO wondering how to cut un-needed PC cycle time and ease updates could do worse than look at the route Arup’s taken here.
