At WWK Lebensversicherung (WWK Life Insurance), the new standard home-based workstations feature IGEL Thin Clients. As part of WWK’s disaster contingency planning this full-service setup can be readily cloned to provide hundreds of them in just days.

For decades, the modern, independent financial services provider WWK has been one of the leading sources of equity-linked life insurance as well as lines of personal and private property insurance. Since its founding in 1884, the company has also offered its 10,000 sales partners and some one million customers a broad range of additional products from proven, established partners. To ensure that it will continue to be a positive force in the insurance market, WWK has always emphasized security and innovation: two principles that it also applies to its own IT systems.

Previous Home-Based Workstations Uneconomical
For its employees on maternity leave, WWK now has 24 home-based workstations allowing them to continue working for the company under specific conditions. These telecommuters can use a secure DSL connection and ICA client software to access the central applications on the insurance company’s Citrix terminal server farm. The primary tasks of these home-based workers include job preparation, risk assessment and research for the life insurance department. “Unfortunately, this area was causing us a lot of technical problems in the past,” explains Andreas Leis, the system administrator for IT communication at WWK. “The home-based PCs were very touchy and failure prone. The hardware maintenance and remote updating of the software, including Microsoft updates and virus protection, took a lot of time and effort and was endangering the return on investment (ROI) for the project. Time and time again, these units had to be brought into our head office and then returned to their places of use.” In addition to the computer units themselves, the home-based configuration was using standalone DSL routers with power adapters and rather cumbersome 21” CRT monitors. Although quite bulky, these large monitors did allow the job processing mask from the UNIX host system and scanned-in paperwork from the central document management system to be conveniently displayed side by side.

The customer WWK Insurance 10,000 sales partners and approx. million customers

IGEL The Only Company Able To Meet WWK’s Needs
The overall inefficiency of the IT configuration used in WWK’s home-office workstations led Leis to seek a better solution. The already existing server-based computing architecture based on Windows 2003 Server and Citrix Presentation Server 4 seemed like a good platform for launching a thin client solution. However, the new lean end units would have to have sufficient graphics resolution equal to the 1600x1200 pixels commonly used in the home-based workstations. Another requirement was that the thin clients possess DSL connectivity, which would allow the number of external hardware devices to be reduced, thus increasing user friendliness. Leis first tested devices offered by three different suppliers. When all was said and done, the decision was made to go with two models from the German market leader IGEL Technology. “The IGEL Thin Clients are robust, high-quality units that also offer an integral DSL modem as standard equipment. We were also able to find an economical way to provide the desired screen space and resolution by using the dual screen solution available with the IGEL-5200 LX Premium unit, which allows simultaneous connection of two monitors to form an expanded desktop offering a total of 2560x1024 pixels of visual real estate.”

High Quality Service and Management
Beyond these important equipment features, the system administrators were also impressed by the quality of support provided by IGEL as well as the management software included in the package. “The support from the manufacturer has been, and still is, exceptional for the IT sector. For instance, if we send their support team an e-mail inquiry, we’ll get a concrete, well-formulated response within two hours. What’s more, the bundled IGEL Remote Management Suite for remote administration of the thin clients leaves nothing to be desired. I find the availability of published applications through the IGEL’s integrated Citrix Program Neighborhood Agent to be really phenomenal. The provision of crucial applications for the user by means of Program Neighborhood is a strategic decision for our company that allows centralized applications to appear to be local Windows programs to the user. From an administrative standpoint, the agent supplied by IGEL is much faster and easier to operate than the tool from Citrix.”

The challenge Home-office workstations for employees on maternity leave as well as department/division managers In case of disaster, the ability to expand the number of home-office workstations to 1,000 in mere days.

Disaster Contingency Plan: Thin Clients in Case of Emergency
Nowadays, WKK’s new standard home-based workstation consists of a black IGEL 5200 LX Premium unit, two black 19” TFT monitors and a changeover switch that allows home-based employees to also use the monitors and input devices for private purposes. “The new equipment configuration has been very well received,” Leis reports, adding that “we’re even getting repeated requests from our internal offices for this nice looking, power-saving, compact and reliable standard workstation. In addition to using this system for home-based workers, we’re also using IGEL Thin Clients in our development department. In fact, we’re using the same management solution to economically support IGEL-3200 LX Compact units.” A strategically important user group at WWK consists of the department and division managers. So far, 20 of them have a home-based workstation of their own. Leis explains why this is so: “In addition to upgrading the telecommuter workstations, we also had another, parallel consideration. The recent bird flu scares got us thinking about possible disaster scenarios. We were looking for a solution to allow us to maintain our quality of service in the event of a major epidemic, and we found that we already had one right here in our hands. If there’s a major emergency, the pre-configurable and easy-to-roll-out IGEL solution will enable us to have selected staff members in all key functions and core systems up and running on home-based systems within a few days. If any devices fail, we’ll be able to exchange them for a new ones by mail. Our employees will then just hook up the new equipment themselves. That’s how we’re already doing it now, anyway.”

The solution IGEL LX Premium (for Dualscreen applications), IGEL LX Compact Windows Server 2003, Citrix Presentation Server 4 Access from home-office workstation via DSL

Ready for the Future: Digital Services
Leis points out that another key difference to the models from other major manufacturers is the broad range of digital services that IGEL makes available for free. “In addition to what are for us essential features like ICA and integral DSL modems, we’re also very impressed with the management tools that come with the units. Beyond that, today IGEL Thin Clients already give us such future-oriented technologies as an integrated smartcard reader.” The new solutions have also firmly convinced Jürgen Neumeier, the IT department manager at WWK: “With IGEL, we’ve found the right technology partner in the thin client sector. We know of no other manufacturer that operates so strategically and offers similar levels of quality and service. The new solution for our home-based workstations gives us the greatest security and reliability as well as future-ready services that will gradually yield even more benefits and potentials for savings.”