Data #3 streamlines Hervey Bay City Council

Faced with an ever-increasing challenge in maintaining a standardised operating environment, the IT team at Hervey Bay City Council required a solution to assist with streamlining its burgeoning software suite.

With around 700 software applications deployed across Council desktops, it faced an uphill battle in performing timely audits of its decentralised network, consisting of offsite servers connected and mirrored to Council chambers and accessed through a storage area network (SAN) by five kilometres of fibre-optic-cable.

Council chose to invest in the Centennial Discovery solution after attending a Data#3’s asset management seminar.

The Council selected Discovery due to ease-of-use of its graphical interface, and appropriately priced functionality, ensuring positive return on investment in-line with an existing 10-year Council budget plan.

Implementation was completed remotely by Data#3, with Council providing access to its network via a remote access-key. Within a couple of hours of installation, Centennial Discovery was already relaying data back to the IT department.

Rob White, support team leader at Hervey Bay City Council said it had a good understanding of the number of Microsoft software licenses previously purchased, but required clarification on how many of these licenses were actually being used.

“We wanted the ability to quickly and easily rationalise software licenses, allowing us to more effectively identify and retire what wasn’t in use without having to perform a manual audit.”

“Following the initial audit, we were pleasantly surprised we were only about 15 licenses out from where we thought we were,” said White

Audits of Hervey Bay City Council’s software inventory were originally done manually every six months, taking two to three weeks to complete.