BT is one of the world’'s leading telecommunications companies, operating in 170 countries. Its Global Services division serves corporate and government customers worldwide, employing around 30,000 people, including more than 1,400 employees in Germany. Its German operations generated revenues of €838 million in business year 2006/07.

BT (Germany) GmbH & Co. oHG is headquartered in Munich and has several branch offices around the country. Its consultants frequently work away from the office, and tend to use notebook computers rather than desktop machines. In consequence, it was difficult for the central IT function to know exactly what hardware and software assets the company owned.

BT negotiates global software licensing deals with major vendors, and relies on its subsidiaries to report accurate figures on license use each month. There were two main business drivers for improving asset management at BT Germany: cost and compliance. The company wanted to ensure that the parent group was not paying for software that was not actively used by its staff.

Preparing the monthly licence reports was a time-consuming process, requiring several people in different departments to gather and aggregate data from multiple systems.

BT Germany approached Skytec AG to review its existing licence management tools and processes and design a new solution. Skytec recommended the implementation of Novell ZENworks Asset Management.

A single ZENworks Asset Management server now gathers data from around 2,000 client devices – mostly notebooks – producing a precise summary of all software installed, including data on versions, hot fixes and operating system updates.

As the next stage in its asset management initiative, BT will add a second Novell ZENworks Asset Management environment to manage a total of around 400 servers.

With Novell ZENworks Asset Management monitoring all client devices, BT Germany has a clear, permanent view of its hardware assets and the software installed on them.

Before the implementation of Novell ZENworks Asset Management, it could take up to three days to compile the monthly licensing reports. BT Germany can now produce more accurate reports at the touch of a button, saving time and administrative effort.