ISLANDIA, N.Y., Jan. 28, 2002 -- Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that Clark County Sanitation District (CCSD), a wastewater agency serving more than 550,000 residents in Nevada, has installed CA's Unicenter family of solutions as the integrated enterprise management foundation for its burgeoning public infrastructure.
With the Las Vegas valley growing by 6,000 citizens per month, Clark County Sanitation District recently formulated a strategic plan for the economical delivery of public services. CCSD is upgrading its physical plant with approximately $250 million in construction projects as it accelerates infrastructure development.
"CCSD's challenge is to keep costs and headcount constant, while undertaking major system migrations and upgrades in several areas," said Kelly Cartron, information technology supervisor for CCSD. "The Unicenter solution family will enable us to leverage our employees' technical skills across many functions so they can readily contribute to meeting CCSD's strategic goals."
With a fourfold increase in application servers in four years, CCSD's top priority was addressing centralized change management by providing more effective service on over 600 calls per month. Many calls were either status calls or simply redundant calls by affected users. After exploiting the workflow and problem-management features that speed problem resolution in Unicenter Service Desk, CCSD has greatly reduced the number of daily calls and call-cycle times.
"Users are delighted because response times have improved dramatically, from one day to less than one hour, for priority one calls," said Cartron. "Resolution times have also decreased significantly. Our staff has escaped from crisis mode and can now work much more proactively."
In addition, Unicenter Advanced Network Operations (Unicenter ANO) enables CCSD to manage its Ethernet backbone and T1 network from a central location. Unicenter ANO alerts support personnel to potential problems, often before inbound phone calls even arrive. "We once had a network switch overload that took three days to diagnose, but Unicenter provided the context to catch and control that problem in about 90 minutes," said Cartron.
Tight integration of Unicenter Service Desk with other Unicenter modules enhances CCSD's troubleshooting capabilities and increases productivity. Unicenter Remote Control, for example, allows Cartron's staff to assume control over desktops and servers from any location. Unicenter Service Desk routes the issue to a technician who can remotely troubleshoot it without making an onsite visit. Unicenter Software Delivery enables technicians to install software fixes across the countywide organization from a central support depot. "By using advanced Unicenter capabilities like 2-D visualization, we can often diagnose and solve an outage from afar without even talking to the user," Cartron said.
CCSD is currently adding new storage devices and will add an entire IT facility in 2003. CA is easing CCSD's migration from legacy storage software incapable of supporting its STK tape and EMC SAN systems. CCSD is evaluating BrightStor Enterprise Backup for its advanced disaster recovery features and potential to help with moving to the new facility. Unicenter Asset Management is already aiding the planning process by providing a comprehensive inventory of CCSD's IT assets.
"Unicenter not only improves plant processing efficiency by increasing the reliability and performance of supporting IT systems, but also liberates our technicians from time-consuming operational chores," Cartron said. "Unicenter provides the overview needed to think strategically about the production environment and our ultimate clients -- the citizens."
About Clark County Sanitation District
Clark County Sanitation District manages an expanding wastewater collection, treatment and disposal system-the largest in Nevada. It also provides a small potable water production system in Laughlin, Nevada. The Technology Department serves CCSD by providing for the security, retention, backup, and recovery of electronic information; planning and maintaining a communications network infrastructure for the transport of information and voice data; developing and maintaining automated information systems; and providing technical consultation in the application of information technology.
About Computer Associates
Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA - news) delivers The Software That Manages eBusiness. CA's world-class solutions address all aspects of eBusiness management through industry- brands: Unicenter for infrastructure management, BrightStor for storage management, eTrust for security management, CleverPath for portal and business intelligence, AllFusion for application life cycle management, Advantage for data management and application development, and Jasmine for object-oriented database technology. Founded in 1976, CA serves organizations in more than 100 countries, including 99 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. For more information, visit http://ca.com.
