El Cid is a Resorts Company with locations in the Pacific Coast and the Caribbean sea of Mexico. The company has 5 hotels, 2 marinas, a 27 hole Golf Course and Club house, 8 Restaurants, and a wide diversity of companies related to leisure and adventure.

El Cid has 1200 employees, of which around 500 have a network login and access to the company's IT resources. The company's main network, located in Mazatlan, is spread across 4 miles and covers several buildings. This is connected via a wide area network (WAN) to two additional networks in networks in Cozumel and Cancun. The users of the equipment on these networks range from Harvard Graduates to people who had never touched a computer coming to El Cid.

Some of the computers that El Cid manage are about 30 feet from the beach, so careful consideration has to be given to issues such as robbery and weather damage and the IT Department needs to know if these things occur.

According to Alberto Gamboa (IT Director), in order to effectively manage all of this equipment the principal challenges for the IT Department at El Cid were:

• Knowing… Taking control and recording each movement we do and knowing every asset we have.
• To improve our service. We need to keep track of every support requests for internal or external clients and try to maintain timely responses in order to provide excellent support.
• To facilitate effective internal communication [for our IT Staff] and to establish a central knowledge base to take advantage of the experience of every one.
• To keep track of the life of all our equipment from birth (buy) to death (trash), knowing who sold it, price, warranty, etc.
• Identifying who is and who isn't doing his job here at the IT department.
• Identifying any users who are not using their equipment properly
• The ability to define “special” users that need priority support, and making sure we give it to them
• Knowing if we are we absolutely, completely, almost or [only] barely legal (with respect to software licensing)

"At the end of the day," says Gamboa, "we need to know and to use this knowledge to manage [the IT department] better. Enterprise Server allows us to do just this."

When asked for the main reason why El Cid chose Enterprise Server over the 3 competition products that El Cid had shortlist for consideration, Gamboa cited "The excellent cost/benefit relation [and] the simple way to download, evaluate and buy it, without complicated and dark licensing methods."

You can find out more about El Cid Resorts (or book a holiday for that matter) at: www.elcid.com.