JohnsonDiversey, a leading global provider of cleaning solutions with over $3.3 billion in annual sales, has chosen Novell to help secure and manage the company’s network access, assets and information worldwide. With 10,000 employees in over 100 locations around the globe, JohnsonDiversey needed a consistent identity management solution to tie together its distributed workforce, as well as centralized desktop management to reduce IT costs. Novell(R) solutions help the company centrally manage user identities and assets, reduce administration costs, and meet regulatory requirements.

“With Novell, we now have a single ID for each of our users across the entire corporate network and we have greater confidence in the accuracy of our data,” said Richard Strong, Director of Global IT at JohnsonDiversey. “Having a standard process for provisioning and de-provisioning users has not only simplified administration, but has also greatly increased data security and improved our ability to comply with regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley.”

With sales in more than 140 countries, JohnsonDiversey is a leading global provider of cleaning and hygiene solutions to the institutional and industrial marketplace, serving customers in the lodging, food service, retail, healthcare, food and beverage sectors, as well as building service contractors worldwide. With a highly distributed global workforce, JohnsonDiversey had multiple applications with separate user databases, making it difficult for IT personnel to maintain accurate data and assign user IDs. Many of the company*s locations lack IT staff to distribute applications and perform regular desktop maintenance. Administration costs were high as the company had to send CDs to each office and hire local IT contractors to visit individual workstations.

To meet these challenges, JohnsonDiversey selected a series of Novell technologies to secure and manage identities, desktops, and corporate assets. JohnsonDiversey adopted Novell eDirectory as its authoritative source of user identity information and Novell Identity Manager to synchronize user identities across applications to reduce manual account creation and updating. JohnsonDiversey turned to Novell ZENworks(R) to manage its desktops, including centrally distributing applications and updates to the workforce in days, rather than weeks or months. ZENworks has also improved security by distributing critical Microsoft* Windows* patches much faster than before. The company*s centralized helpdesk taps the remote control features of Novell ZENworks to quickly resolve technical issues for a user, regardless of location, and has deployed ZENworks Asset Management to inventory and better manage the company’s workstations.

“We evaluated other products, however, because of our distributed and mobile workforce, we needed identity-based desktop management and no other vendor can provide that,” said Renee Turco, manager of Desktop Technology, Global IT at JohnsonDiversey. “Novell ZENworks also scales better than anything else, which is critical for our global enterprise.”

“JohnsonDiversey is a great example of how Novell solutions help companies get more out of their existing IT investments,” said Troy Richardson, president, Novell Americas. “Novell’s identity and systems and resource management offerings help customers like JohnsonDiversey monitor and manage both their users and their IT assets more efficiently and more securely, driving down cost and extending the life of existing systems. By centralizing IT management worldwide, JohnsonDiversey has eliminated much of the routine cost of administering the network, freeing up IT resources for more strategic business goals.”