Sharjah Municipality expands network management contract

Following the launch of LANDesk® Management Suite 7 in May this year, the municipality has also upgraded its existing licences to the new version.

Sharjah Municipality, one of the oldest civic bodies in the country, serves the needs of residents spread over a wide area. As such, it delivers services to the public through offices in scattered locations. The municipality's centrally-located IT department is tasked with providing support to its network of 500 plus computer users, said Dr. Ibrahim El-Miligi, IT Consultant, Sharjah Municipality.

'With the municipality growing and the number of users increasing, management of both the user information and the IT assets became demanding. The inventory couldn't be kept up-to-date even after physically visiting those sites almost every month,' he said, adding that the procedures, in addition to being cumbersome, also failed to deliver the required results.

To meet the challenge of ensuring all systems operate at optimum level and thereby reduce downtime and its consequent impact on public services, the municipality opted for the LANDesk solution, which solved the organisation's key concerns through enabling faster support to users, and centralised inventory of all IT assets.

Sharjah Municipality obtained 100 licences in the first phase of the LDMS deployment last year. It now adds to that number with the acquisition of 100 more licences - boosting the value of the contract from the initial AED50,000 to AED75,000.

According to Naresh Kothari, Managing Director, Intertec Systems, Sharjah Municipality has also made a request for an enterprise agreement with LANDesk, which would allow them to add to the number of licences it holds at a set cost - over a specified period. 'It is the intention of the municipality to add to the number of licences as the organisation grows, to maintain the standard of IT support that the LANDesk software helps them provide,' he said.

Discussing some of the advantages of using the LANDesk software, Dr. Miligi counts among them the reduction in costs, resulting from fewer visits by IT staff. 'Besides this, being able to remotely manage the user machines, especially the finance cashiers and the east coast users, not only helped solve the problem at the support desk but also reduced response time. Having data of all IT assets in the municipality will help us in further planning future upgrades, as well as in the maintenance of current assets,' Dr. Miligi said.

Intertec Systems, Expert Solution Provider (ESP) for LANDesk Software in the GCC, is currently involved in the deployment of the 100 additional nodes.