Business Challenge: For an IT shop accustomed to the user-friendliness of Unix, a move to other platforms posed a challenge.
TIAA investments (New York, a division of TIAA-CREF, $265 billion in assets) had opted for Sun Microsystems workstations and servers running Solaris 15 years ago, and "until about five years ago, every machine we had here was a Sun machine running Unix, including all the desktops," says Harry Perrin, second vice president, systems, TIAA Investments.
ADMINISTRATION NIGHTMARE
Pushed by user preferences to migrate to the Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) desktop-in order to be able to use familiar applications, such as Word and Excel- in 1997, TIAA chose Windows NT, which brought a serious burden to IT professionals used to the ease of administration of Unix, according to Perrin. "To look at the NT desktop was a nightmare," he says. "We were Unix guys, used to central administration of desktops for years, suddenly faced with the prospect of having to visit every desktop every time a slight change had to be made."
Refusing to accept administration by "sneaker net," TIAA searched for a tool that could manage its pool of more than 450 desktops. Products from Novell (Provo, UT) and Marimba (Mountain View, Calif.) were considered, and then, "we stumbled across Waltham, Mass.-based ON Technology," Perrin says. Having been recently developed, the vendor's ON Command CCM product "was a little raw at the time, but we were prepared to live with the growing pains, because it was potentially going to do a lot for us," he adds.
