Reference story - LeasePlan
LeasePlan is a Dutch financial services company focused on fleet management. Established more than 45 years ago, the company has grown to become the world’s leading provider of fleet management services and is now active in 30 countries. LeasePlan employs more than 6,000 people who deliver on the company’s client promise, “It’s easier to leaseplan”.
Eight years ago, LeasePlan wished to consolidate all IT infrastructure to a centralised location. Consequently, a new company, LeasePlan Infrastructure Services, was created.
LeasePlan IS was set up in Dublin to be the IT Support engine to LeasePlan’s offices around the world. Mark Treanor, Infrastructure Manager at LeasePlan IS, is responsible for managing the company’s “Wintel” services, including networking and technical architects and services over 5,000 users in 26 different countries.
Situation
“We wanted to expand our Server hosting capabilities to a complete end to end service for our customers. We leveraged our existing investment in the infrastructure and designed the new desktop offering to be a fully redundant, highly available and cost effective solution. To this end we embarked on a Citrix project rollout over a year ago.”
Solution
To enable this centralisation Citrix, Microsoft App-V and PowerFuse were deployed.
“We needed a solution that would control Citrix end-to-end and integrate well with App-V,” stated Mr Treanor. “RES Software’s PowerFuse provides us the flexibility to centralise and control all our Citrix published desktops and virtualised applications and provides us with the highest level of security.” IP based security is a key functionality that LeasePlan required, this was requested and is now included in RES PowerFuse. “We find support of the highest calibre at RES Software. The online portal and knowledge base are superb and customer feedback is listened to and, where appropriate, built into the product roadmap.”
One of the biggest challenges was around functional requirements, such as people being able to use USB ports. Clearly, this involved a need for security. RES PowerFuse provides complete control of the Citrix desktop, plus the operational management, such as what applications are published on which desktop, group based deployment and how various different versions of the same application are dealt with. RES PowerFuse also runs seamlessly with App-V. All these considerations are accomplished with a dynamically composed user workspace using RES PowerFuse.
Mr Treanor worked with RES Software consulting partner Login Consultants, who assisted in the evaluation process and provided technical assistance during the implementation phase. “Login consultants helped us to define the structure, how we should map drives, deploy applications and highlighted the key areas we needed to consider,” commented Mr Treanor.
Benefit
“Putting in the time up front to structure your deployment and evaluate the solution ensures that your solution is easy to manage and doesn’t get out of control,” recommends Mr Treanor.
LeasePlan IS can now have centralised control over their entire and ever-growing Citrix XenApp estate, enabling their users to have a personalised workspace that is provisioned based upon the applications and printers they need to be productive.
Future Plans
Mr Treanor plans to migrate to PowerFuse 2010 once he has evaluated the new features and functions and views RES PowerFuse as an integral element of any future desktop transformation projects that will be under taken.
“RES PowerFuse provides complete control of our users’ Windows experience: from logging in first thing in the morning through to the point they log off at the end of the day."
Mark Treanor, Infrastructure Manager,