Deloitte France

Deloitte France is an auditing and consulting bureau and a member of the international network Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, one of the Big Four. With 6,000 employees in France, Deloitte operates in two major spheres of activity: firstly accountancy expertise and secondly auditing, consulting and legal services in which the personnel numbers exceed 3,000.

Employee Mobility and Remote Communication: The Key Challenges Facing the Company

The auditing and consulting professions need to have a permanent presence with their clients. Employee and communications mobility are basic business challenges. In 2005, after a test among a group of users, Deloitte opted to equip its personnel with communication devices which had a Windows Mobile operating system with a graphic interface adapted to user habits and which had interesting development prospects. Despite the attention given to the initial selection of the solution and the efforts made, Deloitte encountered recurrent synchronisation problems and had difficulty in ensuring effective remote support. After two years, the company decided to review its mobile strategy and the organisation of its support.

Benefits of the EveryWAN Solution: Improved Pool Management, Support Quality and Benefits to Remote Distribution Functions

At the beginning of 2007, Deloitte launched an invitation to tender and renewed its voice and data subscriptions, fleet and support management; 1,500 devices were rolled out during the summer among personnel who were allowed to choose between three HTC models: the S720 (chosen by 55% of personnel), S620 (30%) and the PDA Touch Phone (15%). The partners have 50MB subscriptions and receive their messages in Push mode. The employees have 5MB subscriptions with message synchronisation in pull mode, all having in parallel 3G+ cards which enable them to connect permanently with the IT system without limitation of time or data volume.

All the telephones were equipped with the Sparus EveryWAN solution. Several factors justified the choice of Sparus during the invitation to tender:

- EveryWAN interfaces with the company’s active directory, updated automatically by human resources management application. This is a key factor. It enables systems administrators to rely on the same directory security groups and avoid double entries.
- EveryWAN improves user support with remote assistance. On the one hand troubleshooting times are greatly reduced and on the other hand the end user particularly appreciates the option offered by Sparus to communicate with the technician during a remote assistance session (encapsulating a VoIP channel via a data channel).

- EveryWAN provides low-cost and effective fleet management. Deloitte defined basic parameters which are now distributed, checked and restored when needed.
- With the over-the-air distribution function, updating functions and software versions may be realised without recalling devices. This function alone justifies investment in EveryWAN.
- Moreover, the Sparus solution enables precise measurement of consumption and use, which enables the types of subscription to be reviewed and future invitations to tender to be prepared for mobile operators.

Deloitte now plans to carry professional applications onto mobile devices (time management and strategic indicators). Here, Deloitte benefits from the compression and application tunnelling functions of EveryWAN.

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