The Power of Information

Dec 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By CORRINA STELLITANO

Ocular Sciences, a Concord, Calif.-based manufacturer and distributor of soft contact lenses, operates remote offices in 15 locations from Puerto Rico to Toronto. Every day, 4,000 Ocular Sciences employees use almost 1,200 PCs to help provide the aids to clearer vision to eye care professionals around the world.

For Ocular Sciences' IT personnel to track and manage the company's 1,000-plus computers and servers, they need another sort of vision aid: an asset tracking and inventory management service. AbsoluteTrack, the newest debut by Vancouver, British Columbia-based Absolute Software, allows IT departments such as Ocular Sciences' to gather and monitor valuable information about the company's hardware and software arsenal.

Run on the same technology platform as Absolute's ComputracePlus PC tracking and loss control system, AbsoluteTrack uses a low-level software application installed on the hard drives of the client company's PCs. This software application, or agent, reports data about its host computer to Absolute's secure monitoring center. Client companies can then access information about their PCs through a secure area of Absolute's Web site.

Besides location information essential for tracking PCs, AbsoluteTrack provides other of data to allow corporate IT departments to manage software licenses, computer leases, machine configurations, PC retirement, hardware and software upgrades and device ownership.

Staying legal

IT personnel at Ocular Sciences were intrigued by AbsoluteTrack's ability to aid in software licensing and compliance issues. Founded in the mid-80s, Ocular Sciences operates from a combination of older and newer offices, all of them essentially remote. To operate legally, the company must ensure that all of its remote PC stations of varying ages are running licensed software versions and authorized operating systems, says Aaron Fosdick, the company's director of global networks.

“We have about 1,200 PCs along with various servers worldwide, and our challenge was, ‘How do we track what software is installed on all these machines?’” Fosdick says. “It's easy for us in the United States to do a location of 150 units, but what do we do in Japan, or Italy or Puerto Rico? This becomes very complicated when you have 15 different physical locations, and some offices are too small to dedicate a full-time IT person.”

AbsoluteTrack lessens the need for an in-house IT professional dedicated to inventory management by offering “hands-free, auto-discovery of data.” Communication between the software agent and Absolute's monitoring center is conducted without user intervention via an Internet or phone connection. Customers such as Ocular Sciences can generate pre-configured or customized reports about the operating systems or software versions in operation on their computers.

Says Fosdick: “A report would show how many whole versions of Microsoft Office, for instance, are in a particular location. That way, if we have a shortage, we know exactly where that shortage is. It actually gives us a lot of detail we didn't think we needed in the beginning.

“The software came in handy for us looking at operating systems because we standardize either on Windows 95 or Windows 2000, and we do have a number of Windows 98 systems,” he continues. “Most IT people in the industry know that Windows 98 can be pretty unstable. We actually select those systems for upgrade. AbsoluteTrack will let us do a report to see how many Windows 98 systems we have and allow us to prioritize them.”

Functionality and security

When choosing a vendor from the approximately $4 billion asset management industry, Ocular Sciences sought a system that could combine functionality, security and expertise with mobile and remote facilities. By purchasing Absolute's software bundle, the company could protect laptops for the company's remote sales force with ComputracePlus, while using data gathered by AbsoluteTrack.

AbsoluteTrack and ComputracePlus are available through Dell; ComputracePlus is also offered by IBM. Absolute distributes the software free through these vendors to its 2000 corporate customers, and then charges an annual service fee of $20 per unit for AbsoluteTrack and $50 per unit for ComputracePlus. Offering asset management data was a natural extension to the security services already offered, says Absolute's CEO and president, John Livingston — allowing the company to fulfill its clients' needs to feel both secure and informed.

“A lot of our customers were saying, ‘We really appreciate that we can keep a track on all our mobiles, but it would really be helpful if you could offer a little more information about our mobiles and about our desktops too,’” he recalls. “Really what customers wanted was one dashboard view into their entire PC population. So they could track the assets, they could inventory the assets, and they could inventory the users of the assets.”

To ensure that machine capabilities match user requirements, IT professionals can create an asset inventory report detailing more than 40 system characteristics, including installed software versions, available hard disk space, and software and hardware configurations of each PC. This information can also be downloaded by help desk employees, allowing them to provide informed assistance.

Readiness reports compare a client company's computers to a set of minimum hardware requirements, proactively identifying machines that will require retirement, replacement or upgrades. Lease management reports centralize lease information and identify PCs which are nearing the end of their leases, providing IT pros with 30-, 60-, or 90-day flags. In this way, companies can avoid significant late fees.

Leased and owned computers alike fall victim to a problem Livingston calls “PC drift,” in which computers move undetected from user to user, and sometimes actually exit the business without detection. Loss control reports track computer hardware as it moves inside or outside a corporation, identifying units which have experienced changes in user name, PC name or e-mail address, or those units that have not contacted the monitoring center within a designated time period.

Employee actions can compromise the security of a corporate computer network in a number of intentional or accidental ways. AbsoluteTrack's security reports monitor the addition of modems or unauthorized software and watch for malicious code like viruses.

Ideal outsourcing

Asset management is not an entirely new concept, but AbsoluteTrack attempts to provide its service list to a specific client-type: the small- to medium-sized business for which an in-house asset management server and database is not practical or economically viable.

“A lot of the larger systems tend to be fairly intensive in terms of overhead and management, and they are expensive as well,” Livingston says. “This is a great way for small- to medium-size businesses to keep a real good handle on things without having to make that large investment.”

The ability to access asset management data on a secure Web site was especially attractive to Ocular Sciences, Fosdick says.

“The reason we selected them is they actually pull the data from your PCs and keep it in their internal database,” he says. “That way we didn't have to build and manage our own system internally to do this. Software compliance is what I call a non-productive business function. It doesn't help you sell more; it just helps you stay legal. It doesn't add to the productivity of the business. So why spend valuable internal resources, like the time of your IT staff, on something that's not productive for the business? It's a great example of an application that lends itself to outsourcing.”

Because the software agent is small, AbsoluteTrack remains almost invisible to the PC user after installation. The 27k agent, similar to the size of an anti-virus update, can be rapidly deployed on all of a company's computers, through a corporate LAN (local area network), the Internet or an e-mail. “Once it's on a machine then it's reporting back information through the Web or to your server on-site,” Livingston says.

To prepare for installation at Ocular Sciences, Fosdick ran a discovery agent on sample Dell and Compaq computers, profiling the most common types of systems used by the company. Using this report, Absolute built an auto-installer to be included in the log-in script for each PC.

The ability to gather information in stealth mode is essential for remote users, Livingston says. “We do our transactions over the Internet. With some of the traditional asset management systems, the clients are quite big and they are not very efficient; so when a remote user hooks on the network, they have to wait for 15 minutes while this agent takes over the machine,” he says. “It tends to be a fairly intrusive model. If you just want to quickly get on and do an e-mail, for example, you don't want to wait 15 minutes. We've managed to streamline that by doing data upgrades in small bursts whenever the user is on the Internet. As a user, you won't notice this activity.”

What customers like Ocular Science will notice is clearer vision, Livingston says. “It's extremely complex for an organization of 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 units to really understand what's going on with their computer population,” he says. “This is a very good way to understand your investment and keep a good watchful eye on it.”

For the record

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Corrina Stellitano is a Fairhope, Ala.-based writer and regular contributor to iSecurity.

ABOUT THE COMPANIES

Visit www.securitysolutions.com for more information on companies featured in this article, or circle the card number.

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