Eircom has signed a major deal with Novell that will see single sign-on (SSO) technology be deployed across more than 800 call centre employees throughout the Eircom group.
The SSO solution for access to Eircom’s network resources will integrate Eircom’s heterogeneous networks and reduce network administration costs by removing the need to enter multiple passwords to access and use the network. The solution will be powered by Novell Nterprise SecureLogin and Novell eDirectory.
The contract for implementing the SSO deployment was awarded to DSS, which is accredited as a Novell Business Expert. Part of the Codec Systems Group with 150 workers in offices throughout the world, DSS has a 17-year track record in the Irish market and has annual revenues in excess of €35m per annum.
Paul Thornton, distributed technical services manager at Eircom, explained: “Eircom has over 800 employees in multiple location call centres who need to log in to up to 20 applications in any one day.
“Traditionally, each application needed to be individually logged in to using different usernames and passwords and typically took users 20 minutes to log in to all their required applications. This of, course, also meant that this system had security implications with employees having to remember multiple passwords, and consequently a high proportion of help desk calls were from users requiring assistance in retrieving passwords.
“The installation of SSO has improved end-user productivity and significantly reduced IT costs by cutting out the need for multiple entries of different passwords and usernames,” Thornton explained. “Staff need only sign on once, through Novell eDirectory, and it then grants them access to all approved applications.”
In related news, Eircom’s internet service provider division, Eircom.net, has implemented Similarity Systems’ Athanor technology to help it complete a major data migration project involving a number of different product, customer and billing databases.
The billing manager at Eircom.net, Sean Greenan, said: “We knew from the start that the effectiveness of the new order management system would largely depend on the quality of the source data, but with multiple data sources we couldn’t be sure what level of data quality we had.
“Athanor’s powerful profiling functionality automated the analysis and mapping of data across all source databases before the information was loaded into the new order management system. This standardisation of our data from different source databases to the new data schema was critical to the success of our new order management system.”
By John Kennedy
