baramundi Success Stories
Vaillant Group
Manufacturing | OT
Vaillant Group
Since 1874, the Vaillant Group, headquartered in Remscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia, has been developing and marketing solutions in the field of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning technology.
Today, the group employs more than 13,000 people and operates 10 production and development sites.
Effective Endpoint Management
“We started out here as a pure systems developer offering very simple solutions. Major changes and recurring steps were automated using Auto-IT and then distributed as executables. Deployed systems were tracked in Excel.
However, it was already clear at that time that a better system would be needed in the medium term. With this basic automation, we were at least able to alleviate the critical ‘pain points.’ Nevertheless, the time required for basic deployments and deterministic changes was high,” recalls Renelt.
The company currently operates 700 clients in production, spread across all its locations. The operational technology (OT) environment at the Vaillant Group is managed by Marius Renelt, Senior Manager of System Automation Production IT, together with his three colleagues and at least one OT manager per plant, each of whom serves as a key contact providing traditional first- and second-level support for their respective site.
Quick implementation and time-saving use
“We were surprised at how quickly the implementation was completed in 2014. Compared to our previous solution, the server was set up quickly, and the first software packages were also ready in no time. For the agent rollout, we were able to use our old process and provide a ready-to-use executable that contained everything necessary. Within a month, we had completed the migration of all systems,” said Renelt.
“Our main area of use for the Management Suite is, naturally, the Deploy & Automate module. We primarily use the inventory functions to populate our CMDB with data. At the moment, we’re also preparing a rollout for patch management with our own GUI. After that, we plan to focus on implementing baramundi Network Device Management. We’ve calculated that by automating regular computer installations alone, we save approximately four person-months per year. On top of that, there are additional time savings from automating other processes. Avoiding system downtime is estimated to save even more.”
“Unlike other vendors, baramundi also offers a very powerful modular framework for interfacing with other tools. Since we wanted automated data exchange between deployment, monitoring, and the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), this was an indispensable element for successful implementation. Quite apart from that, the additional modules available, as well as the support provided—which had already been instrumental during our product evaluation—were a decisive factor in our choice of baramundi
.” “All in all, however, we can only draw a positive conclusion regarding customer service and support.”
"After using baramundi for several years, our experience has only served to confirm that we made the right choice back then."
Marius Renelt | Senior Manager, System Automation, Production IT, Vaillant Group
