InformationWeek

June 23, 1999

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The Mobile Infrastructure

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About half of the 4,000 employees at MasterCard use notebooks, and that number is growing. Art Carapola, VP of global internal technology for MasterCard, has been working to reduce the number of notebook models and brands since he joined in 1994. He's doing that by moving all of MasterCard's users to notebooks from Dell Computer. Now IT support will become much simpler, he says, because staff will get training on just one notebook brand. Carapola recently sent 10 staff members to classes to become authorized to perform warranty work on Dell notebooks.

Prudential Insurance Co. of America is in the final stages of deploying notebooks to 12,000 sales agents, following the results of a pilot study showing that agents who used notebooks to give graphics presentations and pricing information to potential clients reported sales rates that were measurably higher than those of agents without notebooks. Prudential determined that IT staff could better handle upgrades and maintenance issues with a single model, and standardized on the IBM ThinkPad 380ED, says Roy Schwartz, VP of field technology.

Prudential recently developed a standard software configuration to further simplify support needs. Employees had been using up to six kinds of contact management databases over the past few years. Now, all notebooks are loaded with a standard set of software that includes messaging, contact management, client needs analysis, and a sales presentation application.

Meanwhile, PricewaterhouseCoopers is in the process of standardizing system software for geographic regions. The notebooks of all French financial auditors will have the same configuration, for example.

Remote management of notebooks over a dial-up line has always been a challenge, because bandwidth is low and connections are unreliable. But at companies in which notebook use is becoming the norm, dial-up networking is now the primary method for backing up employee-generated data or upgrading client software. As a result, those companies are far less tolerant of dial-up problems than they've been in the past.

Updates And Maintenance
Companies are finding value in a new breed of software for remote distribution and management that's designed to work over low-bandwidth connections on WANs. McKesson HBOC, a health-care applications developer in Atlanta, is using Connect:Remote, a mobile support software suite that Sterling Commerce Inc. began shipping three months ago. "It gives us a solid infrastructure to handle dial-up repair, backup, and recovery," says Charles Bidzit, a principal at North Highland Consulting, which provides IT services for McKesson HBOC.

In four years, the number of notebook users at McKesson HBOC has expanded from just a few people to nearly half the company's 13,000 employees. About 3,000 of those users are salespeople who are always on the road, and Connect:Remote helps McKesson HBOC protect new data that users input into their notebooks via automatic updates to a company server. One application uses an emerging technology called byte-level backup, which manages the data load on a low-speed dial-up line. A software agent running on the user's notebook recognizes any changed or new data, and sends an update with only the changed bytes, rather than the entire file, to a backup data server. Other applications in the suite manage notebook software inventory, software distribution, and the distribution of antivirus updates.

Other vendors are also working on products that address these needs. This week, CoreData Inc. will announce the availability of RemoteWorx 3.0, an upgrade to its remote backup software that includes both byte-level and block-level backup. Block-level backup can transmit some types of data more efficiently, such as large database and E-mail files, which speeds transmissions and can help IT administrators keep connection costs down. CoreData will price RemoteWorx 3.0 at $99 to $169 per client, based on the volume purchased. Each order includes one server license, which can support up to 250 concurrent users.

Prudential uses the Radia software utility from Novadigm Inc. to push out antivirus patches and updates to sales agents, such as new sales-rate data or sales illustration software. Radia monitors the connection, typically initiated from a 56-Kbit modem, and distributes software in phases to avoid a hang-up that can result from a clogged connection. "There are a lot of different tasks vying for 56 Kbits of bandwidth," notes Schwartz.

Prudential also uses Novadigm's enterprise desktop manager, a remote-management tool that checks and updates notebook software configurations over a modem connection.