IBM Software
Case Study
Twin Rivers Unified School District Streamlining IT operations with automated endpoint management
Overview Challenge When the district IT team merged the IT environments of four school districts into the Twin Rivers Unified School District, it found that existing manual software distribution and update processes were costly, slow and ineffective. There was also minimal visibility into asset inventory and software usage.
Solution Twin Rivers uses IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager, built on BigFix technology, to support software distribution, patch management and power management.
Benefits Saved $127,000 on application deployment in first 15 months; increased patch management compliance; supported significant reduction in labor costs; improved licensing true-ups
In July 2008, Twin Rivers Unified School District was established in Northern Sacramento County, California, after several communities worked together to identify a common need: the unified governance of a fractured public school system. Citizens worked with local agencies, school districts and elected officials to create a grassroots movement to address educational concerns and establish a new district to better serve the needs of the children and the community. Today, Twin Rivers serves a growing and ethnically diverse community with approximately 27,000 preschool through adult education students over a 120 mile radius. When merged, the Twin Rivers Unified School District resulted in 76 physical sites, 2,700 staff members, and roughly 10,000 computers (primarily PC-based). These included Pre-K, K-12, and adult education sites, as well as nearly a dozen dependent and independent charter schools that needed to be able to utilize any of several thousand computers applications throughout the day to deliver a technology-rich learning environment for their students. To create an IT environment that would ensure the new district ran efficiently and cost-effectively, the IT team faced significant network challenges when merging the four school districts. First, four Active Directory environments and one Novell environment had to be merged, resulting in major network changes and the need to reconfigure all computers multiple times. Once completed the team discovered the existing manual software distribution and update processes were costly, slow and ineffective. There was also minimal visibility into the asset inventory and software usage. Moreover, the outcome of the merger called for the combined IT department headcount to be reduced from 26 to 15 people in two years.