Mellon Financial making strides with desktop management

Computerworld - Mellon Financial Corp.'s IT systems and employees have faced a string of staggering challenges lately, including a major merger with Bank of New York and a mammoth technology reorganization.

Despite so much ongoing work, Pittsburgh-based Mellon has stayed on top of its desktop software updates and patches, thanks to a recent deployment of Altiris client management software that cost the bank "hundreds of thousands of dollars," said Dennis Smith, first vice president of Mellon's infrastructure engineering in an interview last week.

The software helped Mellon easily handled the date change for daylight-saving time, which this year took place on March 11, a few weeks earlier than usual, Smith said. That project involved about 50,000 updates on 20,000 desktops and other client machines, and it was completed in only 48 hours, with a success rate of more than 98%, according to Smith.

"We made it through the date change very well," with Altiris, he said. "It was the first real-time proving ground, and it passed with flying colors."

Mellon tested the Altiris software thoroughly last October and installed it on more than 20,000 machines over the course of about three months, ending in January, Smith said.

Altiris, which is now part of Symantec Corp., replaced Microsoft Corp.'s System Management Server r2, which Mellon had been using for nine years. The bank started considering replacing SMS last year, when the number of application upgrades, patches and other changes it had to perform on its machines reached about 60,000 per month.

"We had reached the threshold for what SMS could support," Smith said.

Mellon picked Altiris after also considering similar products from ManageSoft Corp. and LANDesk Group Ltd., as well as an upgrade of SMS, Smith said. In all, the Altiris product cost only 55% of the only other finalist, SMS, he said.

The Altiris software also helped Mellon with a major reorganization with its IT systems that started in 2006 and continued through early this year, Smith said. That effort involved a move from what Smith called technology silos to a "functional organization." For example, all desktop-related functions had been under one management group at Mellon in the old system, but desktop functions have been moved to the jurisdictions of several different groups. Altiris "helped us identify gaps in the transition," he said.

Smith said there have been few significant problems with Altiris. He did say that the reporting aspect of the changeover "has been a little sluggish," but he attributed that problem to the fact that Altiris provides IT managers with so much information about the status of clients, systems and other assets that Mellon probably should have devoted more servers to it than it did initially.