Elders is an icon in rural Australia, with a rich
history of providing services to the nation's
primary producers since 1839. Today, the
company operates in three major areas: branch
network, supply management, and production.
Branch networks are the core of Elders' business,
with more than 420 branches and agencies spread
across every state in Australia. The domestic
network provides Australia's rural producers with
inputs, services, products, and support in Elders'
core areas of wool, livestock, rural finance,
insurance, merchandise, and real estate. Its
supply management division, Elders International,
connects 100,000 Australian rural producers with
the world's agricultural markets.
The vast majority of Elders' 420 branch offices are
located in rural and remote areas — many of them
hundreds of kilometres from the nearest capital
city and thousands of kilometres from Elders'
Adelaide head office. The geographical spread of the business adds complexity to managing Elders'
wide area network (WAN) of 3750 computers.
The majority of branches operate without a
server. The network provides 4000 users with
online access to internal business systems and
applications hosted out of Adelaide, as well as
email and Internet access. Asset tracking, software
updates, and security were identified as problem
areas that required attention.
Elders’ branch offices had manual processes
in place to check hardware assets visually and
post reports to the head office. Software asset
reporting was another matter. Manual tracking
of authorised and unauthorised software
installations across their enterprise wasn't
feasible. Rolling out software updates required IT
staff to travel vast distances or send costly CDs
through the mail. Addressing security threats,
such as viruses, was also an additional growing
time sink. Elders needed a closed-loop solution
to manage and monitor branch IT assets and
software licensing, deploy software applications,
and protect its systems from security threats.
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