Success in today’s competitive business environments, means the need for fast, reliable and easy to access information and applications, anytime, anyplace and using any device. In other words, the mobile worker wants true ‘always connected’ mobility.
Until recently, technologies such as GSM and GPRS have allowed employees to work on the move and have fuelled the demand for permanent and more integrated wireless information access. Now with lower hardware costs coupled with the increased standardisation of wireless data access methods, in particular the widely used WLAN standard 802.11b means that
the dream of true mobile working can be realised.
United Utilities is the UK’s leading multiutlity company, supplying electricity, water, gas and telecom services to millions of people in the UK and around the world. It manages to maintain more than 600 wastewater treatment works, 100 water treatment works, 80,000 km of pipes and sewers, 60,000km of electricity cables and nearly 32,000 electricity sub-stations.
In 2004, United Utilities were keen to implement a reliable, secure and user-friendly mobile data solution, to further improve their customer service by enhancing productivity and communications. The adoption of Brand’s Apollo ‘Anywhere’ solution has
provided their field workforce with access to job critical applications using GPRS.
Brand’s Apollo ‘Anywhere’ is an innovative mobile data client / server solution. It makes mobile data a reality for business critical data applications using seamless roaming. It removes the uncertainty of using a wireless network to transfer vital information by transparently integrating GSM, GPRS, 3G and WLAN (802.11b) or WiMax (802.16) networking with consumer or enterprise LAN environments.
The United Utilities solution optimises the TCP/IP traffic to enhance the remote user’s experience and at the same time secures the data with a military grade AES encrypted VPN which removes some of the concerns about deploying enterprise data over public bearers such as DSL, WLAN or GPRS. Additionally, the Brand Apollo Anywhere solution has integrated GPRS capability which is essential for field asset tracking to optimise the remote field force and secondly to comply with health and safety regulations relating to lone worker operation.
United Utilities workforce, provide an essential service to the company and its customers, working around the clock to provide water, wastewater and electricity. It was vital that a solution was deployed whereby field-based workers could access mission critical data anywhere and at anytime.
By selecting Brand’s Apollo solution and deploying it into its corporate network, its remote employees are provided with fast and reliable access to mission critical applications such as maintenance work records, plans, maps, customer information, corporate databases, e-mail and internet.
Brand’s technology offers United Utilities secure dynamic switching across public bearer networks. For example, the mobile engineer could be using a GPRS connection out in the field but loses coverage. The Brand client automatically roams onto a switched circuit network (GSM), securely and seamlessly with no interruption to the applications or reconfiguration from the user.
Brand offered United Utilities all the benefits of business access computing on multiple wireless network standards – with the added benefit of high compression levels, fast packet loss recovery. It also offers United Utilities an assurance policy with the use of dynamic switching between bearers – GPRS and Switched Circuit and includes WLAN. Another key factor for consideration by United Utilities was security. With Brand’s enhanced security techniques, it ensured that only valid users could establish sessions and access applications throughput the day with military grade AES Encryption, improving customer information and data protection policies. The solution also offers United Utilities a GPS option – which is extremely useful for
lone-worker operations.
Now with many remote mobile users using the Brand solutions in United Utilities makes it the most successful real time GPRS Enterprise application in the market. It is a mission critical solution offering thousands of mobileworkers a rapid response solution as request and receive vital information, it also offers many thousands more across the United Utilities field force seamless access to corporate resources.
