Equalit Shared Service Center IT
The Dutch municipalities of Oosterhout, Hilvarenbeek, Baarle-Nassau and Oisterwijk provide services to over 100,000 citizens. These local authorities run numerous subsidiaries, including fire stations, town shipyards, sports centers, a sheltered workshop and a theater. Equalit, the Shared Service Center (SSC) of the municipality of Oosterhout, is responsible for supporting the combined IT infrastructure of these four local authorities, totaling more than 1,000 desktops.
In 2006, SSC decided to design a new architecture that was flexible, allowing new services to be introduced, and at the same time was very easy for system administrators to use. This architecture solved the often conflicting demands for flexibility and ease of administration on a small scale. However, they wanted to upscale the concept and reuse it within the Shared Service Center, offering it to all subsidiaries of the participating local authorities. About two years ago, Equalit and System Integrator Cam IT Solutions started designing a completely new and improved architecture. Because flexibility and ease of administration were a top priority, the search led to a combination of innovative solutions which included RES Workspace Manager, RES Automation Manager, Citrix XenApp and Microsoft App-V (SoftGrid).
The RES Software products offered a high level of flexibility and cost very little system administration effort. All configuration settings are maintained centrally from a management console that is intuitive and easy to use. The SSC felt that without the implementation of Workspace Manager and Automation Manager, they would have needed to hire more system administrators to maintain the environment with the same level of quality.
