Austereo Group
- Industry: Entertainment
- Employees: 1,000
- Operations: Sales, marketing, advertising, multimedia, and other business units manage 13 commercial radio stations broadcasting to all mainland capital cities and Newcastle
- Financials: First half 2006: revenues $128.1 million, profit $38.1 million
Austereo's Windows defection still charting well
Concerns over the stability of Microsoft enterprise applications may have driven it to embrace Linux years ago, but national radio broadcaster Austereo Group is now singing a different tune after growing frustrations with a Microsoft-free environment finally led to a switch in allegiance. David Braue tunes into Austereo's new IT.
Sometimes, the little things slowly eat away at your sensibilities even when everything seems to be working smoothly overall.
For national radio broadcaster Austereo Group, which either manages or co-manages 13 top-rating commercial radio stations including 2Day FM, FoxFM, and Triple M, three years of little things -- including the inability to use BlackBerry handheld e-mail devices, poor identity management, administration difficulties, and a few too many irretrievable e-mails -- eventually became frustrating enough to convince the company to give Microsoft a go.
This time around, things are working much better, with a full range of Microsoft server applications providing a deeply integrated, highly effective IT infrastructure that has significantly improved productivity and transformed information management within the company.
It wasn't always that way at Austereo, which committed to Red Hat Linux years ago after concerns about the stability and security of Microsoft software. Subsequent efforts to build a robust infrastructure on top of Linux saw the company roll out a host of core applications, including HP OpenMail (later supported by Samsung) and Novell ZENworks system management.
This approach worked well enough to support the requirements of the company's 1,000 employees for some time. After three years with Linux, however, Austereo began reconsidering its choice as continued growth in the company led to increasing complexity within its IT strategy -- exposing the limitations of the Linux-based environment in some very painful ways.
For example, remote users struggled to grapple with a virtual private network (VPN) login system that required three different passwords to establish a connection. Furthermore, plans to introduce a customer relationship management (CRM) system floundered after it became clear that integrating CRM with the existing environment was simply going to be too much effort.
Ultimately, it was the failure of a network interface card and a hard drive that taught IT systems manager Ross Forgione just how wide the gap can be between vendor promises and reality. -Restoring and recovering of any messages that may have been deleted took 24 hours-plus," he recalls. -We were assured that there were procedures and processes you could follow to recover down to the individual message, but when it came to reality, it was a lengthy process and an absolute nightmare."
-Importing our network environment and applications onto a new platform required some fairly specific skills," he adds, -and those skills were not abundant within the group. As the business started to grow and we realised we needed to provide additional services to help people accomplish their day-to-day tasks, it became a very obvious and glaring issue."
The new, new Austereo
Fixing that issue took Forgione back to the doors of the same company he had shunned those three years earlier -- yet even he concedes that the Microsoft option -just made more sense". Working with Microsoft consultants, he and his team sat down to map out their future infrastructure and found that their requirements could be easily met using an integrated suite of applications built on top of Windows Server 2003.
After thorough discussions, Austereo committed to a move away from Linux onto an architecture combining Microsoft SharePoint Server, Exchange Server and SQL Server as well as Office 2003 and BlackBerry-related add-ons like the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It was a hard decision, but even Forgione concedes he was impressed when comparing the company's existing and potential computing environments.
-I'm probably the hardest sell Microsoft has ever had," he laughs. -I had to decouple myself from my love of open source because of the availability of tools. If something breaks in Linux and you've got the knowledge, you can generally fix it and get it up fairly quickly by yourself."
-The problem was that just one or two people in the group [out of 15 IT staff] could do that, and it was hard finding people who understood that [open source] isn't just about playing with these tools, but delivering something. The moment we switched to Microsoft, the field opened up."
More than a year later, Forgione's excitement about the switch is still tangible. Austereo has been able to consolidate the functionality of seven servers down to just two. A number of employees across the company -- which comprises about one-third marketing, programming, promotions, creative and other teams -- are up and running with BlackBerry handhelds.
Active Directory now manages user identities for VPN and other applications, removing the need for multiple-password logins that were the bane of remote users' existence. A number of SharePoint-based portals are providing -an excellent collaborative environment" that links employees across the company's offices nationwide. And a new 4TB storage area network (SAN), implemented concurrently with the Windows switchover, has simplified the management of the company's core data.
Although he misses some features of ZENworks, Forgione says the new Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) environment has been more than capable of helping his staff refocus energy that was often spent on resolving issues with the previous Linux environment -- for example, a nagging bug with OpenMail that was preventing some outgoing e-mails from being read by their recipients.
Ross Forgione, Austereo IT systems manager
-We haven't faced a single one of those problems since we changed platform," Forgione says. -We're seeing efficiencies in our staff utilisation, because we can actually now focus on what we should be doing, and not on just keeping the systems running. That was a key thing for us from a technical point of view. We've even got happy users now, whereas before we were hearing a lot of grumbles."
Confidence for the future
Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of Austereo's new life with Windows is that it has allowed the company to once again plan for the future in ways that were simply impossible in the past.
A growing focus on multimedia development, for example, is likely to be strengthened by the ease with which desktop multimedia tools can be integrated with the Windows back-end. The improved identity management made possible by Active Directory will soon be extended to the company's SAP environment. An increasing number of remote workers are finding that they can keep in touch from anywhere with the new collaborative environment.
Planned integration with the radio stations' digital music management and general administration systems -- -the real pointy end of the triangle", as Forgione calls it -- is expected to further enhance the benefits from the new environment by bringing the company's various operations even more closely together.
It's strange to hear such abject enthusiasm about Microsoft software from an avowed Linux supporter, but Forgione concedes that in the end the company had to go with the right solution for its needs. The new environment -has been an amazing enabler, not just for the IT team but for the actual business itself," he explains.
-It really has opened up doors that were shut, and has helped the IT guys get out of the way of the staff. Staff can now just focus on using their PCs and not having to worry about contacting us as often as they used to, just to do simple things. We've had to build up our confidence in Windows' stability, but we're really at that point where we're quite confident and comfortable with the system's abilities -- not only to be stable, but to be recovered in the event of a failure." 
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Not only does GNU/Linux make coffee (http://www.linuxsa.org.au/pipermail/linuxsa/1998-October/002868.html), a recent news report has GNU/Linux operating an instant ice cream machine (http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT9296154631.html). It's called Moobella. :-)