For more than 20 years, the company has provided tourism and entertainment services in the famous Amsterdam canal district. Millions of international visitors have got to know Amsterdam from on board one of Canal Company’s tour boats or water bikes, and hundreds of companies have enjoyed corporate hospitality events on the water.
Since its foundation in 1984, the company has grown to nearly 200 full-time and part-time staff, working in three divisions: Canal Bike rents out more than one hundred waterbikes in Amsterdam. Canal Bus is a hop-on/hop-off waterbus service, with fourteen stops around Amsterdam and Canal Company offers group arrangements for a variety of events.
At the end of June 2005, Canal Company took over the boat touring activities of competitor Holland International. In order to manage its expanded fleet and broader scale of operations, Canal Company needed a new IT system that could easily scale, enable more efficient set-up of desktops and simplify IT management.
Back in the days...
Before the acquisition of Holland International, twenty-four staff worked in Canal Company’s head office, on desktop PCs. These workstations were connected to a central server, using the client/ server computing concept. All programmes and applications ran locally on the machines, and all data was saved centrally. Maintenance of the old system was a time-consuming task, and in addition to the company’s own IT manager Peter Duwel, required the services of an external party to manage the system. The most time was lost to installation of new applications and application updates, which had to be done on each machine individually. 'It won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that updating and patching is now a daily activity, and just keeping software and workstations up to date is a full time job. And that’s without talking about the specific 'characters' of the individual PCs!' says Peter Duwel, ICT manager at Canal Company. As the company grew, the size and complexity of the IT system also increased over the years. Alongside the much used Microsoft Office package, Canal Company also used the accountancy package AccountView, the payroll application Microloon, a back office application for the cash registers, and an ERP system for sales, planning and human resources. With the expansion of its fleet as a result of the acquisition, Canal Company decided it was time for a custombuilt system, including a better reservations management package.
Plain sailing...Canal Company chose to go with a centralised ICT solution based on the server-based computing concept. All applications and data run on central servers and are distributed via Microsoft Terminal Services to IGEL Thin Clients of the Compact Series, which have replaced the desktop PCs. This architecture has dramatically simplified the management of the system, made hot-desking possible, and enabled staff to work remotely. 'Our desks, with their big, heavy PCs were not only inflexible and noisy, but also incredibly wasteful with space, seeing how small our office is. Now we’re able to increase the number of workstations that we can fit into the office,' says Peter Duwel.
System management and administration has been made much more straightforward in the server-based computing environment. Previously, Peter Duwel had been forced to spend hours of his time just to keep the system running, in addition to the costs of the external company. Today, with no desktop PCs to manage, only 8 hours per week are spent managing the IT system, which has saved the company EUR 15.000 in system administration costs per year.
'One of the biggest advantages of the IGEL thin clients is that they virtually never crash,' says Duwel. 'In fact, since we installed the thin clients, we haven’t had a single failure. Of course, with the desktop PCs, things were very different - we had to repair one or other of them almost every day.' Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of working with PCs and local applications is that information gets lost every time that a PC crashes or has to be replaced. With thin clients, both the applications and the data are safe, no matter where the client is physically located. For Canal Company, IGEL’s thin clients have proven to be a good investment for the future. With the IGEL Remote Management Suite, adding new clients to the company network is simple, and the thin clients are considerably cheaper than purchasing new PCs.
Safe harbour...Canal Company also uses IGEL’s inbuilt SmartCard readers, giving it a security solution which ties user access rights to a passcard that is placed in the thin client’s card reader slot. As a result, Canal Company employees that need access to the company’s application set and corporate network can now get online more easily and more securely than ever before.
'During the day, there is a lot of ‘traffic’ in our office - people coming in and out who are not authorized to use our corporate network,' says Duwel. 'The IGEL SmartCard solution is ideal for controlling access to our data, and also ensures that we don’t get viruses - only authorized users can get online, in a standardized, locked-down environment. In summary, we’ve been able to significantly increase the security of our network whilst also improving its manageability.'
Looking to the futureIn the coming year, Canal Company expects to extend its implementation together with solution provider Piersma.COM to build in additional redundancy with extra Microsoft Terminal Servers. The number of workstations will have grown to 38 divided over 3 locations, all will be IGEL thin clients. In the long run, also all points of sale will be connected and provided with an IGEL thin client.
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