Solution Background

One of the leading premium department stores in America, with a history that dates back to more than a century, our customer had constantly reinvented themselves over the past several decades to stay in tune with changing consumer trends and demands. With over a thousand locations in the US alone, they had established a formidable reputation as a trust worthy and high quality brand in the minds of customers. With over 100,000 employees, they had also built up a sizeable IT infrastructure that had grown exponentially in complexity. In an industry that is buffeted by winds of change from e-commerce and online shopping portals, it was critical to stay responsive and efficient. With technology powering every aspect of operations, it was critical to ensure that their vast network of IT assets were efficiently managed in order to keep end users productive, while at the same time optimizing on IT operations costs.

Quadra at work

Given their existing investments in Microsoft technology, and considering the fact that most of their servers and end-points ran some version of Microsoft operating systems, the logical choice for a comprehensive system management solution was System Center Configuration Manager. The challenge was however to design an solution that could scale across all their global locations, and serve as a reference architecture for every single major hub worldwide. As a Microsoft Gold Competency partner with deep experience across multiple SCCM deployments, our global award winning services team rose to the occasion and designed a highly available and scalable architecture that would serve their needs for the foreseeable future.

Given such large number of end points spread across so many locations, license management was always a challenge. The key was to plan an effective solution that would help our customer enforce policies, while not hindering valid end user needs for software tools to carry out their daily tasks. We designed a workflow that would help users request for the software they needed, and this could be deployed automatically once approved. We also standardized on a single gold OS image that would be deployed across all workstations.