Bell Mobility is Canada’s leading provider of wireless communications. Operating in Ontario and Quebec, Bell Mobility provides nearly 1.8 million customers with cellular, paging, mobile radio, air-to-ground, wireless data, and mobile satellite services. The company sought a fast, easy, and manageable way to deploy mission-critical applications to employees in its activation and customer service call centers while ensuring maximum system uptime. The company developed a thin-client/server solution to support its mission-critical call activation and customer support centers. The solution, built on WinFrame, has increased LAN-based application performance, reduced the cost of application ownership, and enhanced IS productivity through single-point application management and control.
Presenting problem Bell Mobility needed to deploy mission-critical applications to employees in its call activation and customer service call centers in Montreal and Toronto. The company’s call activation and customer service applications are based on PowerBuilder. Running these powerful applications on employee desktop PCs would have required high system overhead and intensive IS support. Bell Mobility also faced the potential effort and expense associated with upgrading employee desktops to optimize application performance on the LAN.
The challenge: Deploy call activation and customer service applications.
The potential expense, however, did not begin to account for the staff time and expense associated with actually upgrading hundreds of individual desktop systems. One of the company’s senior LAN specialists commented, “I’d much rather upgrade multiple WinFrame servers than hundreds of desktops any day.”
A progressive technology company, Bell Mobility also needed to deliver “anytime, anywhere” computing capabilities to its employees. Although the company had tried several remote-computing alternatives, including remote-control software and remote-node hardware, management wanted improvements to support the corporate ethos of flexible schedules and a flexible workplace.
Hardware and software Bell Mobility’s thin-client/server networking environment includes:
Bell Mobility deploys customer service databases across a LAN.
Bell Mobility uses WinFrame Enterprise to deploy customer service databases developed by PowerBuilder to its employees across the LAN.
Solution and results Bell Mobility chose to implement WinFrame as its standard application deployment platform for its call activation and customer service centers because of WinFrame’s fast application performance over any type of network connection. The product has proven reliable, helping the company to realize its goal of maximum system uptime. The fact that WinFrame is based on Windows NT Server was another big advantage to Bell Mobility.
Bell Mobility has experienced significant performance gains in its call activation centers by accessing PowerBuilder applications via WinFrame. Support representatives verify addresses and driver’s license numbers in only a few seconds with WinFrame over LAN-based connections. As a result, the company activates more phones faster with fewer staff. In addition, several hundred mobile professionals and telecommuters can dial into WinFrame and get the same desktop and access the same set of applications as they can at the office, regardless of their location.
The WinFrame server’s single-point application management also reduces Bell Mobility’s total cost of ownership since all application additions, updates, user configuration, and support occur centrally at the WinFrame application server. The centralized support tools, including the ability to assist remote users, have resulted in a steep drop in visits to individual desktops. Bell Mobility is also experiencing a significant increase in first-call help desk resolution with WinFrame.
Bell Mobility’s solution enables telecommuting.
Additional IS benefits for Bell Mobility include accelerated application deployment through WinFrame’s standard Windows-based production and development environment. The company can now develop in the same environment it’s going to produce in—Windows—saving a great deal of development time. Bell Mobility is also able to deploy new applications to employees across its entire enterprise in less than one minute.
As Bell Mobility’s standard deployment platform for the company’s call centers, WinFrame is beginning to play an increasing role throughout the organization.