Novell Drives Improvements for the TRW Automotive Global Network

TRW Automotive, one of the world's ten largest automotive suppliers, has tapped Novell to help secure its corporate information and applications, improve communication company-wide, and streamline management of the firm's global network.

With Novell® Nsure™ secure identity management solutions, TRW has improved and simplified user access at over 150 sites globally. To enhance employee productivity, TRW has standardized on Novell GroupWise® for critical, secure collaboration needs across the network. TRW has also deployed Novell ZENworks® solution to manage its diverse network resources in a single, comprehensive way. TRW's strategic partnership with Novell is helping the company drive its network more efficiently, improving its ability to service its automotive clients worldwide.

With 2002 sales of $10.6 billion, TRW Automotive is an industry leader in the design, engineering, testing and manufacture of automotive safety systems, including integrated vehicle control and driver assist systems and braking, steering, suspension and occupant safety systems. TRW Automotive, which was spun off from Northrop Grumman as part of a corporate restructuring in early 2003, needed to store and manage user identities for its 25,000 users in 150 sites. Without a central source of user information, the company had a difficult time keeping user accounts up to date on its RADIUS servers, leading to high administrative costs. TRW also wanted to increase the security of its remote access for employees.

Beyond security, TRW had concerns over employee productivity. Some former divisions of TRW had switched to a competitive e-mail solution and TRW Automotive wanted to evaluate doing the same across the organization. The company also considered outsourcing to reduce administrative costs for messaging and collaboration.

TRW Automotive found Novell solutions offered a compelling way to address its challenges across the board. The company selected a combination of Novell Nsure and Nterprise™ solutions, including Novell eDirectory™, Novell DirXML®, Novell NetWare®, Novell GroupWise and Novell ZENworks, to tie together its diversified environment, improve employee collaboration and effectively manage its resources.

"Everyone is excited about our Novell solution because it uncomplicates the lives of our employees, developers and administrative staff," said Art Rathke, systems engineer at TRW Automotive "How can you put a dollar value on that?"

Managing More with Less
In three months, TRW integrated access to its applications with Novell eDirectory, creating a single repository for user information across its Novell, Microsoft Windows* and UNIX* environments. Novell DirXML automatically updates user information across applications, including Microsoft Active Directory*, eliminating hours of manual data entry. TRW plans to install DirXML to all its sites within the year.

Novell eDirectory is the backbone technology for the company's remote access services, providing secure authentication whether through the Internet, VPN or the company's wireless network. The company's Web developers also use eDirectory to provide user authentication for new Web applications, decreasing development time for the security portion of applications by 50 percent.

TRW performed an internal study to evaluate a move from Novell GroupWise to other options in the marketplace. The final study concluded that it would cost significantly more to move to a competitor's system, both in server and administrative costs. Because Novell GroupWise optimizes network traffic, each of TRW's 150 sites can use full clients, giving users better performance and 100 percent e-mail, calendaring and scheduling functionality. In 12 years running GroupWise, the company has never been infected with a virus via e-mail or experienced any significant downtime.

TRW is rolling out Novell ZENworks to manage 6,500 workstations and 500 servers in its mixed Novell and Microsoft Windows environment in its 30 locations in North America. ZENworks integrates with eDirectory, allowing TRW to assign and track assets according to user identity. "Software license management and hardware tracking can be a full-time job unless you keep up with it, especially in a leased environment," said Bob McInerney, manager of North America Infrastructure at TRW Automotive. "Using ZENworks to efficiently track our assets and recycle software licenses will give us a significant hard-dollar savings."

"TRW Automotive is Novell's one Net vision in action," said Alan Nugent, chief technology officer at Novell. "Like any large organization today, TRW has put a lot of money into building the network they have, and they need a better way to get value from that investment. Novell Nsure and Novell Nterprise solutions provide that value by integrating, managing and securing disparate platforms and applications. Novell solutions make the network more reliable and safe, two qualities that an automotive supplier like TRW can certainly appreciate."