When Kiwibank, a bank owned by New Zealand Post Ltd, found it increasingly difficult to deploy, manage and support new applications on its corporate desktop PCs running Windows 2000 Professional and Office 2000, they decided to upgrade to Windows Vista to maintain their competitive edge.

With large staff growth and ongoing changes, Kiwibank's IT team were constantly rebuilding PCs, consuming precious resource time and increasing costs. With these challenges in mind, the bank has to achieve timely and effective IT deployments on a large scale. In addition, being a bank, strong security was another high-priority decision factor.

“A solution was needed to improve internal efficiencies and increase data security all at a manageable cost,” said Kirk Fitzpatrick, project manager at Kiwibank which operates through New Zealand Post retail outlets in hundreds of locations, giving it the biggest branch network in the country.

With 880 desktops, the bank expected Windows Vista to handle security updates and frequent deployments efficiently. In a pilot project, Vista was deployed on 50 desktop PCs.

“We found deploying and packaging for Vista was easier than expected,” said Fitzpatrick. “Previously, we had on average about 10 PC builds per week with each build taking three hours of intensive manual labour. Our Vista deployment automates PC builds and takes around one hour per PC. This allows us to channel our time more productively.”

“We deployed and packaged nearly one hundred applications for Kiwibank with very few problems,” said Bruce Taylor, director of ScriptingIT Ltd, a Microsoft partner.

In selecting Vista, application compatibility was a top consideration. As a long-time Microsoft site, Vista offered Kiwibank out-of-the-box compatibility with Office, Adobe applications and many internal Visual Basic 6.0 applications.

“The pilot project was the smoothest I've ever seen and we even came in under budget; that's the first time I've ever seen anything like it,” said Taylor.

“One of the applications we tested during the pilot was our InTouch customer relationship management application. The technology that InTouch was built on was designed to work with the previous system, but we don't have any compatibility issues on the Vista platform,” said Fitzpatrick.

“The advanced group policy management and remote management are also key to our overall cost savings because our team can focus on other tasks. Ultimately, this means better, more efficient service for our customers because our staff can put more time into adding value elsewhere,” he added.

For example, Fitzpatrick has seen a huge increase in the number of incidents resolved for level one support of Vista.

On the security front, Vista not only offers options to implement automatic malware updates, secure data deletion and encryption devices to prevent hackers stealing company information but also a built-in firewall that meets the bank’s security requirements.

A complete rollout began in May this year and within six months, users were up and running on their new system. “The fact that the firewall is built into Vista means that our data was protected before the new desktop system went live,” said Fitzpatrick. “It's also automatically updated which saves on time and we don't have to invest in third-party firewall protection.”

In addition to the firewall protection, Kiwibank limits data access to only authorised users by leaving Vista's User Access Control option switched on. “We estimate that with Vista's security capabilities, we deal with significantly less security issues than we had to with our previous operating system,” said Fitzpatrick.