Scottish and Southern Energy
Scottish and Southern Energy is one of the UK’s largest utilities services companies in the UK. It is involved in the generation, transmission, distribution and supply of electricity; energy trading; the storage, distribution and supply of gas; electrical and utility contracting and telecoms throughout the UK. With 300 Citrix servers managed in different farms and builds, coupled with a plethora of applications, Scottish and Southern Energy needed a solution to aid the complicated management of deploying new servers across the company’s 150 sites in the UK.
Before deciding upon a single solution, Scottish and Southern Energy explored a number of other suppliers. RES Software and Visionapp were highlighted as the companies whose products were able to meet Scottish and Southern Energy’s requirements for server deployment and application delivery, but the differentiating factor was the ability of RES Automation Manager to produce instant comparative reports on the state of the servers and the estate as a whole. Flexibility was also critical in Scottish and Southern Energy’s choice of provider. The purpose of implementing a software solution was to achieve a uniform set-up across the organization, ensuring the smooth and rapid roll-out of applications. Automation Manager’s integration with both Citrix and Microsoft SoftGrid (formerly Softricity) aids the flexibility of projects, modules, queries and tasks.
Scottish and Southern Energy found that through the implementation of Automation Manager, not only did it benefit from an increase in productivity due to a decrease in the time spent solving problems and activating new applications, but also gained a broader base from which it is able to deploy developments. The ease of transferring the system from the test laboratory to full-scale commercial roll-out was rapid and intuitive. Using the unique Automation Manager building blocks, 300 servers were updated in 30 minutes.
Going forward, Scottish and Southern Energy aim to continue updating its system as new applications are developed.
