Revolution was engaged by a leading food distribution company to help validate and integrate a best-of-breed mobility solution for the organization’s 5,000+ sales representatives. The company’s objective was to improve their communication model, ensuring availability of key systems and applications and improving access to business critical information. In addition, they wanted to enhance the security of mobile systems, centralize infrastructure and management, and reach a standardized baseline across systems. Revolution created a prototype of the solution, which included products from five separate vendors, to ensure all components were compatible and would meet the requirements of the project. This was followed in quick succession by Revolution’s design of the production environment, development of custom tools and applications, installation and configuration of pilot infrastructure, and pilot deployment and training activity. Revolution continued to play an integral engineering support role throughout the production rollout phase. Components of the solution included mobile VPN, connection management, client security, mobile device management, data backup and recovery, content distribution, and a custom user interface. As a result of this project, the sales team is able to spend more time in the field, spend less time with technical tasks and issues, and have better access to corporate resources and information.

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After working with one of our clients for several years on a project basis, Revolution was awarded a contract to provide administration and support for the company’s 250 mobile field team. The customer, a leading manufacturer and marketer of petroleum and petrochemical products in the Northeast, had made a decision to outsource their helpdesk support in order to streamline costs and improve service levels. Their concern, however, was that the mobile field team had unique challenges – including more connectivity issues, wider variety of devices, no physical proximity, and different management tools – than those of the common desktop user. As a result, they felt additional expertise was necessary to support the mobile constituency. All management servers reside at the customer’s headquarters and Revolution provides a combination of onsite and offsite service. All mobile related support calls are assigned to Revolution and tracked through a central helpdesk management solution.

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As a result of Microsoft ending support for Windows NT 4.0, several of our customers needed to migrate to Active Directory in order to stay current with Microsoft messaging. Revolution was engaged by several clients, including a neighborhood grocery store chain with over 200 locations, to analyze their current environment, determine business requirements and potential obstacles, and design and gain concurrence on a migration plan. Once the planning phase was complete, Revolution worked with the customer’s project team to construct test lab environment to simulate migration activities, construct and document administrative procedures for the migration activity, and provide administrative task assistance. Part of this activity involved implementing process automation tools to reduce the need to touch each endpoint – something that would have been very costly for their highly distributed environment.

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A government transportation authority wanted to update its process for collecting observed transit system data. They were deploying new handheld devices to field personnel for gathering data on bus and rail schedule and fare performance. They had already created the data collection application but required assistance with device management and data synchronization capabilities. Revolution won the bid to select, build and/or integrate the technologies necessary to create a seamless and easy-to-use solution. Activities included development of a remote connection process; selection, installation and configuration of data synchronization and data management products; procurement and provisioning of handheld modems; creation of reports and queries needed by supervisors to access collected data; and training of IT staff on solution components.

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Like many other organization, one of our customers in the Southeast was looking to take advantage of the benefits and cost effectiveness of higher-speed network/Internet connectivity for its large RAS user population. The customer, a leading provider of pharmacy services to America’s elder population, was not prepared to provide secure support services necessary for the high-speed broadband connections. To complicate matters, the customer had several different constituencies with different needs, including mobile consultants, field offices, retail locations, telecommuters and contractors. Revolution was engaged to help the client develop a strategy for providing services to the various groups and assist with the selection of appropriate technologies. The recommendations included a web-browser based SSL VPN technology for allowing secure remote access to the network over an internet connection and an appliance based IPSec VPN technologies for fixed point broadband users such as home based telecommuters, field offices and retail locations. In addition, plans were outlined for preparing the infrastructure and processes were defined for the replacement of low-speed RAS connections with high-speed broadband services in the homes of telecommuters.

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Many of our customers have large numbers of documents that need to be accessed by their mobile user population. One customer, a national manufacturer and distributor of health care supplies and services, had over 5,000 documents ­ including catalogs, price lists, reports, HR information, etc. ­ that they regularly distributed to users. Because some of these documents change frequently and the users are often not connected to the network and/or internet, making these files available via a CD or a web page was not practical. To complicate matters, they needed to target distribution of certain documents based on location or job function. Revolution enabled its Subscription Manager application to provide an intuitive user interface that allows workers to view documents offline and subscribe to optional files as needed. All of this is achieved over a bandwidth-efficient connection provided by the integration with the company¹s existing mobile management solution.

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