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Special Report December 31, 2008, 6:44PM EST

Bechtel Rebuilds Its Computer Network from Scratch

(page 2 of 2)

Part of your transformation means being able to deliver everything as a service. Is that right?
We want people to have the same kind of user experience when they work for one of our projects as they do when they go to Amazon and buy a book.

So it's almost a software-as-a-service model where your employees or your contractors or partners are accessing your network via the Internet?
Exactly. We changed our security to be one based on policy, not topology. Somebody might have a very deep access and others might have a very shallow one. [Under the new system,] I know what I am exposing at that time. In a very traditional model in a corporation, when you're on the inside, well then, we automatically seem to have trusted you with everything. At one time, one-third of the people that had access to our internal network were not employees. We hadn't built it up as a service inside to be able to restrict it in those ways.

You've been able to achieve this transformation without additional funding. How were you able to do that?
In IT…you have to buy new servers or you have to expand storage and you have to do maintenance on your applications. We basically said: We know what we need to do—let us be sure that we don't [make] any investments on the old. Let us only put money onto the new. Many people think that if you want to make a change, the first thing you do is you go and ask for money. We said no, let us assume we don't have any money, but we still need to do it.

I've also heard that you're doing desktop virtualization. How does that fit into your Project Services Network?
Virtualization will give us many benefits. One, it will do that untying [of the physical device and the virtual desktop] so the front-end device that is being used isn't that important any longer—and since it isn't that important any longer, you start getting other benefits, such as [less] maintenance. Another one: As people in enterprises work, there's always constant commotion in the form of moving. So you can imagine all these offices that come and go all the time. Well, we move computers all the time. So, if you don't have to move these things anymore, you don't have to maintain them at the same level that you did before. You have user experiences that are similar at home as they are at the office. You don't have to have as much training anymore.

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