The Ogden City IT team is responsible for maintaining computer systems city-wide across multiple organizations from police and fire to golf courses and community centers. Maintaining and updating several hundred machines with limited staff and resources was challenging, often resulting in long response times. Searching for a way to increase productivity on a limited budget, the Ogden City IT department downloaded a trial of PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory and instantly saw results. PDQs affordable solutions significantly improved the team’s ability to respond to requests and shorten deployment timeframes. Within two days of demoing PDQ Deploy and Inventory, the team recognized the value of PDQ.com’s products and signed up, boosting productivity and improving department morale.
Table Of Contents
Ogden City
With a population of over 88,000, Ogden is the 8th largest city in Utah and is the county seat of Weber County, Utah. Ogden is also a hub for many visitors seeking outdoor thrill and adventure. With easy access to hiking trails, ski resorts, fishing, biking, and many other recreational sports, Ogden attracts thousands of visitors each year, making Ogden, Utah, a very busy place.
Keeping up with a large population and a steady stream of visitors is challenging. City organizations are often pushed to their limits trying to accommodate their community. Being able to accomplish more tasks with fewer resources is a requirement for many city departments. This statement is exceptionally true for the Ogden City IT department.
Unique Challenges
Maintaining several hundred or even thousands of computers across multiple organizations and departments is a common challenge for IT departments. The obvious solution in most cases is to hire sufficient staff to meet the demands of the organization. Often, this means hiring personnel specialized in specific areas of IT. Server administrators, network engineers, database administrators, programmers, and helpdesk technicians are just a few examples of the various roles needed to support a network environment properly. With a sufficient budget, staffing these positions is just a matter of finding the right person for the job. With a limited budget, filling these positions is usually out of reach, and sacrifices have to be made, often in the form of delayed response times and personnel filling multiple roles or even forgoing certain positions altogether. This scenario is all too common for many city governments. Ogden City’s situation was no different.
With limited staff, the Ogden City IT department struggled to meet the demands of the organizations they supported. With such a drastic range of system requirements from one department to the next, building, deploying, and maintaining hundreds of computers was a very time-consuming process and a critical pain point for the department. Constrained by a tight budget and unable to hire the personnel necessary to automate these operations, the Ogden City IT team was in need of a low-cost solution that would improve efficiency and essentially fill the roles of the staff they couldn’t afford to hire.
Overcoming Challenges With PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory
Seeking an alternate solution, the Ogden City IT team came across PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory. As the name suggests, PDQ Deploy specializes in deploying applications, patches, and scripts to managed devices. PDQ Inventory scans computers to collect hardware, software, and Windows configuration data.
With a healthy dose of skepticism, the team scheduled a demo with a PDQ representative, assuming the product either wouldn’t meet their needs, wouldn’t fit their budget, or would require more staff to administer.
Within two business days, a PDQ representative arrived at the Ogden City office to demonstrate the power of PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory. That afternoon, Ashley Wilson, Ogden City I.T. Manager, and her team installed the trial versions of the applications.
After installing PDQ Inventory, Ashley and her team were able to gather crucial information from the equipment they managed, scanning hundreds of devices in minutes. They could easily see which devices had out of date applications and could target those specific machines with deployments to get them up to date. With PDQ Deploy installed, the team was quickly able to distribute packages across their network, thanks to the included package library. The package library contains hundreds of pre-built packages that are tested, maintained, and automatically updated by the team at PDQ.
On top of everything else, PDQs products didn’t require any in-depth training or additional personnel. With an intuitive user interface and hundreds of written and video guides, Ashley and her team were able to immediately take advantage of everything PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory had to offer. Needless to say, PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory were precisely what the Ogden City IT team was looking for.
Return on Investment
Product pricing is often the deciding factor when companies determine if a product is right for them. This is especially true for government organizations with limited funding. With PDQ.com’s affordable pricing, Ashley and her team were stunned to realize that PDQs products easily fit into their strict budget. Two days after demoing PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory, the paperwork was submitted for purchase.
“I was really skeptical about PDQ and what their cost was… thinking there’s no way that this can be such an awesome software and be that low cost” - Ashley Wilson, Ogden City IT Manager
With the help of PDQ.com’s products, the Ogden City IT team saw positive results immediately. The time it took to distribute devices decreased by 60%. PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory made it possible for the team to automate manual processes, freeing up staff and drastically reducing incident response times. As a result of the IT department’s increased productivity, each department they supported became more efficient.
“[PDQ] has taken us from a week to deploy ten machines, to two days... start to finish.” - Ashley Wilson, Ogden City IT Manager
Moving Forward
The Information Technology landscape is rapidly growing and always evolving. New trends and technologies are emerging all the time. New threats appear even more frequently. The Ogden City IT department is poised to tackle these new challenges by maximizing efficiency and doing more with less. By automating deployments and simplifying workflows with the help of PDQ.com, Ashley and her team can respond quickly to the needs of Ogden Cities organizations and departments, ultimately providing support for their community and neighbors.
