Hotel giant cuts costs with smarter desktop management

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Michael Van Lare needed two things to better manage his company’s desktop environment: flexibility and control.

The two traits didn’t seem likely to come from one commercial product, but the manager of Property IT, Infrastructure and Support Systems at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide in Boston reports that ScriptLogic Desktop Authority software enabled both flexibility and control for his organization’s global, distributed desktop environment. 

ScriptLogic excels in software distribution

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Michael Van Lare needed two things to better manage his company’s desktop environment: flexibility and control.

The two traits didn’t seem likely to come from one commercial product, but the manager of Property IT, Infrastructure and Support Systems at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide in Boston reports that ScriptLogic Desktop Authority software enabled both flexibility and control for his organization’s global, distributed desktop environment. 

ScriptLogic excels in software distribution

“We work in a distributed environment in which the hotels are individual entities, like their own little companies, but we have the responsibility for managing them. Still they are responsible for managing their own environments locally,” Van Lare explains. “We have globally controlled settings, but each location also has personalized settings and controls. We needed a tool that could handle both.”

The tool Starwood decided would enable those and other capabilities was ScriptLogic’s Desktop Authority. The company purchased the software in May 2007 and it was deployed in July of the same year. The implementation involves two servers installed centrally and a client at each remote site for local operations. With more than 160 hotels and some 13,000 desktops to manage, Van Lare says the IT teams took “baby steps” to test and validate the product at several properties.

ScriptLogic, acquired in June 2007 by Quest Software, also incorporates power management features into Desktop Authority, which enabled Van Lare’s company to save $350,000 in North America annually. Desktop Authority lets Starwood’s IT group configure PCs to turn off desktop monitors after 15 minutes of inactivity and puts computers on standby after an hour. The monetary savings aren’t the only benefits of ScriptLogic, according to Van Lare. He says staff time is put to better use by virtually eliminating manual efforts and automatically configuring desktops with approved policies and settings.

“Being an IT manager, I can appreciate staff time being freed up from physically visiting desktops to apply settings and controls,” he says. “It is extremely important to us that our PCs comply with all policies and controlled settings such as those associated with PCI requirements, and with Desktop Authority, we can validate that desktops meet our standards.”

With new capabilities in Desktop Authority 8 that would help Van Lare manage unattended workstations and servers, he says the use of ScriptLogic will continue to expand at his organization.

“The new features are untested for us at this time, but we look forward to examining how we can broaden our use of the product,” he says.

Interested in freeware and shareware, open source applications and scaled down versions of commercial software and services? In the coming weeks, Network World will devote an online forum to the topic of free techie stuff, which I will compile and present for your review and potential download. Let me know what you find, what you want to hear more about and what invaluable tools that didn’t cost you a thing at ddubie@nww.com.

Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter here. 

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.