Success stories University of Caxias do Sul
Nine cities, one IT estate.
UCS installed its first Tz0 module in 2002. It is still installed. Along the way the estate grew to roughly five thousand devices spread across nine cities — and taking inventory stopped being something done on foot.
The starting point
Inventory was taken on foot.
Before Tz0, knowing what the estate held meant a technician going from unit to unit, writing configurations into a spreadsheet. With nine cities and thousands of machines, the spreadsheet was born out of date. Installing software followed the same logic: one machine at a time, wherever it happened to be.
Because we have several units, there are a lot of computers spread across this large network.
Translated from Portuguese
The decision
Three tools on the table, one week of trial.
The university compared three products, Brazilian and international. The Tz0 trial began with the agent installed on a single desktop, with no dedicated server. In the first week it had already mapped between 30% and 40% of the estate — some six hundred computers nobody had to visit. Flexibility in a mixed environment, with more than one operating system side by side, also counted, and so did cost: the proposal took up a third of the budget set aside for the project.
The whole rollout went smoothly, even compared with the other software.
Translated from Portuguese
What runs there
One agent, several modules.
The rollout started in Caxias do Sul, with inventory and software distribution, and moved on to the other cities. Security, remote access and software metering came later. Ticket handling is now organised through the lifecycle module.
What changed
Delivering faster.
The gain the team mentions first is not savings, it is response time. Inventory stopped being a project and became a query. The renewal of one thousand eight hundred computers was run with the estate mapped before it started.
We are gaining time now, we are delivering the solution faster.
Translated from Portuguese
With Tz0 we get diagnostics in real time.
Translated from Portuguese
Twenty-four years of continuous renewal, from two modules to six.
Why they renew
Talking to the people who write the product.
Proximity comes up as a criterion in almost every part of the conversation. It is not courtesy: in an estate spread across nine cities, the cost of an unresolved problem is measured in technician travel.
The fact that it is a company from our own region helped a great deal too. We could talk to the developer of the product whenever we needed to.
Translated from Portuguese
Case recorded in 2015, from an interview with the university IT team. The estate figures refer to that moment; the partnership has been running since 2002. The quotations were given in Portuguese.