Reference story - DTZ Zadelhoff
The Situation
In the 1990s, Zadelhoff Makelaars was one of the founders of the current international DTZ organization (Debenham, Thouard, Zadelhoff). The collaboration of these three companies subsequently developed into a worldwide organization with over 10,000 employees working from 192 offices in 40 countries. This cross-border cooperation led to the name change from 'Zadelhoff Makelaars' to 'DTZ Zadelhoff' in 1993.
Nowadays, DTZ Zadelhoff is one of the leading real-estate companies in the Netherlands. With over 500 employees, the company is leading advisor and intermediary in the field of business property. With 12 local branches, DTZ Zadelhoff is present in all economic centers of the Netherlands.
DTZ Zadelhoff in the Netherlands uses a Citrix infrastructure that consists of approximately 20 servers and 500 concurrent users. The company uses about 100 applications, most of which are virtualized using Application Streaming in Citrix Presentation Server 4.5.
The Challenge
Towards the end of 2007, DTZ Zadelhoff invited DATAD Informatisering (based in Veenendaal in the Netherlands) to help troubleshoot its IT infrastructure, which was experiencing major performance problems. Users were finding their environment slow and downright unworkable. Constant system and application failures were driving users to distraction. "We had a majore performance problem, and we also had to deal with crashing applications. It became obvious that our IT environment des perately needed to undergo some contstructive changes", says Brian Timp, Head of IT Management at DTZ Zadelhoff.
Datad quickly identified the cause of the performance problem: and undersized Citrix Presentation Server farm with manually installed applications that were not terminal-server compliant. "The biggest problem had been identified, but we were also facing major security problems. We wanted to create a working environment that would meet users' needs as well as our security regulations. We wanted to provide our employees with a fast and compatible environment, but we also wanted to secure our system by preventing users from installing non-approved applications themselves. We realized that the IT department needed something with which to control and manage this process. It did not take us long to find out that RES Software would do the trick."
The Solution
DTZ Zadelhoff chose Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 with application streaming to deal with applications that were not terminal-server compliant; RES PowerFuse 2008 for user workspace management; and RES Wisdom for physical application distribution.
"Because of the many problems our users had been experiencing, the newly created environment needed the full support of management and of the users. To serve 500 concurrent users, the environment was sized on approximately 25 concurrent users per Citrix Presentation Server and only 1 Published Application: The RES PowerFuse Desktop", explains Brian Timp.
"The initial deployment of an operating system to the servers was done by distributing an image with RES Wisdom installed. After the image was deployed, the RES Wisdom Agents initiated installations of Citrix Presentation Server 4.5, RES PowerFuse 2008 and all physically installed programs for the users."
The IT department at DTZ Zadelhoff was very impressed with RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom. "The actual configuration of the Citrix Presentation Servers is now handled by RES Wisdom, while the application and the user workspaces are handled by RES PowerFuse. These RES Software applications integrate fluently with the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system and with the Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 environment."
The Benefits
RES PowerFuse has proved to be the perfect solution for DTZ Zadelhoff. Brian Timp says that the implementation of RES Software solutions has improved the performance of the IT environment beyond their expectations: "Implementing RES PowerFuse has had a dramatic impact on our organization. Our users are now able to connect to their DTZ Zadelhoff Citrix environment through a web interface. They get secure access to a safe and stable environment that contains up-to-date information. RES PowerFuse security and configuration management ensures that users have access only to the folders and data that they are allowed to access, and managing this is now a simple task. Therefore, RES PowerFuse saves our company valuable time and money. Thanks to the widespread possibilities with Citrix clients, it was quite simple to deploy clients for users at home (Web Client), for thin-client users (built-in ICA Client), and for workstation users (Program Neighborhood Agent)".
The most dramatic impact of the roll-out has been the reduction in the amount of time that the DTZ Zadelhoff IT department spends on troubleshooting. “These days, when a user reports an issue, RES PowerFuse enables us to see exactly what caused the issue and when it happened. RES Wisdom can query the Citrix Presentation Servers to see if the reported issue is a problem on just one server or on the whole Citrix farm. This drastically improves IT downtime, and in the end saves our company money,” says Timp. He also mentions that the IT department spends far less time maintaining and configuring its Citrix servers. In an industry where time means money, DTZ Zadelhof managed to save a lot by implementing RES PowerFuse.
The Future
DTZ Zadelhoff’s implementation of RES PowerFuse has made the company’s IT environment controlled, more secure and simple to use. The roll-out is expected to continue improving the productivity of its mobile workers. The deployment of RES PowerFuse means that IT staff can put their time to better use, for instance on the
deployment of Citrix Access Gateway. Furthermore, mobile staff now have controlled access to a stable and secure IT environment as well as the information they need.
“Of course there are more options that we would like to explore within our IT environment, more options we could provide our users. We have learned from experience that every successful plan starts with a solid base. For DTZ Zadelhoff that means a structured, secured and reliable IT environment. Now that we have that, we can explore further options in IT. It is only fair to say that we see a bright future ahead of us, thanks to RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom.”
RES PowerFuse helped us stabilize our complete IT environment, providing our users with a flexible and reliable working environment. Using RES PowerFuse saves our company valuable time and reduces costs.
Brian Timp, Head IT Management, Netherlands