Somerset Care provides residential and nursing care for older people in 30 care homes across the south of England in Somerset, Gloucestershire and on the Isle of Wight, and also manages a facility for adults with physical disabilities in Taunton.

hours of community support every week to help people living in their own homes remain independent. It is recognised for its award-winning ‘Petals’ dementia care service as well as care and support for adults with learning disabilities under the ‘Realise’ brand.

Acacia Training & Development, Somerset Care’s training company, provides training for company staff, external companies and individual learners across the south west.

Replacing ageing desktops

When Somerset Care was looking to replace its aging endpoints desktops the challenge was “finding the right type of equipment at the right price”, said Tim Baker, IT Manager.

The company’s existing mix of endpoints, spread across 30 care homes and 19 administrative offi ces, had reached their natural end of life and were diffi cult to manage. “The time and cost in managing the devices was becoming an issue for us,” explained Tim. There was no simple way to manage the devices remotely and no shadowing capabilities, so when there was a problem, we had to visit the site.”

Somerset Care’s IT support partner, Deverill, recommended that the company take a look at IGEL Technology endpoints. Deverill, an authorised IGEL partner, has been providing IT services, solutions and training for over 30 years to a wide range of clients, from SMEs to large enterprises, public and private sector.

Like a breath of fresh air

“We started with a small proof of concept in 2007 and it was like a breath of fresh air,” said Tim.

Since that time, the company has continued to buy IGEL products and is currently deploying the latest IGEL Universal Desktop 2 (UD2) endpoints and IGEL Zero 2 (IZ2) clients. The published desktop is delivered via Citrix XenApp 6.5 with seven physical servers hosting the virtual Citrix servers and the rest of organisation’s infrastructure, which is then connected to Storage Area Networks across two sites.

Somerset Care is a Microsoft house running Offi ce, Exchange, Active Directory and SQL Server, alongside two large healthcare applications for care planning and staff rostering.

Simple and reliable management

“Even with our mixed set of up to 650 IGEL devices, management is simple and reliable,” said Tim. “We like the way that IGEL continues to support even our oldest 2007 devices using the same management software.”

All the IGEL desktops are managed using the IGEL Universal Somerset Care a Somerset Care a 31 Care Homes a Across Southern England THE CUSTOMER a Unify desktop estate a Cut support time a Enable central management THE CHALLENGE a Deverill is a trusted, established provider of fully integrated IT solutions, services, and training. With a reputation for innovative solutions, industry leading support, and the willingness to go the extra mile Deverill has been trusted to design, implement, manage, and support the IT infrastructures of leading businesses for more than 35 years. THE PARTNER Management Suite software (UMS), which comes free with every device. The UMS can be used to set-up, maintain and upgrade all IGEL endpoints from a central location using a policy-based graphical interface. It is a simple to use management tool, which can have endpoints up and running in minutes. Intuitive to use, secure and scalable up to 100,000 endpoints, the IGEL UMS drastically reduces management time for IT administrators.

In addition, Tim said the management software was useful for helping users with any issues at their desktops. With Deverill providing an outsourced IT helpdesk service, they or the IT team can remotely take control or shadow a user’s screen to assist with support. If a device ever needs to be replaced, it can be shipped to the site where it is plugged in by one of the staff and then can be remotely confi gured quickly and simply.

Any updates can also be scheduled remotely and there are no security issues around viruses or patient data as all the information is held on the services at the Taunton headquarters.

Extended warranties

Finally, on the rare occasions that there is a problem with the device, Tim says that the long warranty terms on the IGEL devices (up to 5 years), means that they can be repaired or replaced quickly and cost effectively.

“Everyone from our care planners to the chief executive use the IGEL desktops and moving forward, we are considering using the Windows Embedded IGEL endpoints to replace our few remaining PCs,” said Tim. “We couldn’t be happier with the IGEL devices, they are dead easy to set-up, manage and use.”