Public Trust is New Zealand’s largest and oldest trustee organisation. Established in 1873, it became a Crown entity in 2001 and continues to provide New Zealanders with the legal , financial expertise and services they need at different stages of their life.
The organisation’s infrastructure supports 450 users in 40 sites, 35 of which are customer service centres located across the country. With more than 190,000 customers, Public Trust processes over 1,000 documents each week.
The challenge for Public Trust’s legacy infrastructure was keeping up with demand. Its myriad of existing servers, operating systems, and network systems were out-of-date, with many no longer being supported. Increasing demands on services were generating a growing number of outages and regular application issues, impacting on staff productivity across all business areas and draining IT resources.
The organisation wanted to consolidate its technology, to improve day-to-day infrastructure management and free up IT resources to focus on added value opportunities for the business.
In a first for a New Zealand public sector organisation, Gen-i partnered with Public Trust’s in-house IT team to overhaul its entire infrastructure, migrating towards a Linux infrastructure based on the latest Novell technology.
This stabilised and modernised the organisation’s IT platform to support future projects that would add value for staff and customers, and ultimately the business. As part of this project Gen-i also upgraded the rest of the Microsoft environment and built and upgraded the Citrix Server environment.
The project was signed off in April 2005, followed by hardware purchases and internal training and testing. Implementation started in February 2006, and was completed on time, eight months later.
Public Trust now has a supported and up-to-date, open infrastructure. The organisation has increased its server capacity, improved its system reliability, and streamlined how the IT team manages the infrastructure, which has reduced costs substantially. It has also deployed a scalable platform – enabling the organisation to investigate added value opportunities for the future of the business.