Reference story - Forsters
“As a service department, we have a responsibility to ensure our IT users are working the best they can. With RES PowerFuse™ Platinum Edition, now they can. We have absolute consistency across all desktops, so moving from machine to machine is very simple. Application provisioning is simple for IT and fast for the users, and with centralized management, we bring control back to IT. I would recommend anyone of my peers to buy it.” AJ Meade, IT Manager, Forsters.
Overview
Forsters is a leading London law firm with offices in Hill Street, off Berkeley Square in Mayfair, London. Forsters provides a wide range of services to corporate clients and private individuals. Forsters is best known for its property and private client work but also has important corporate, commercial and litigation practices.
AJ Meade is Forsters’ IT Manager and is responsible for providing all IT services.
Challenge
Having deployed Citrix 6 years ago, Meade’s users were experiencing issues with a non-managed desktop, applications that did not always behave in the same way across their infrastructure and a general lack of satisfaction with logon times. He needed a solution that would improve the logon speeds, provide better desktop control, enable better profile management resulting in less corruption and improve his user’s perception of the IT infrastructure. Users were not as productive as they wanted to be due to logon scripts not being optimised and Meade’s team having to ask users to reboot every time they called the help-desk. The situation was not helping the relationship between IT and the business.
Solution
Forsters have a relationship with a trusted advisor partner, Intercept, with whom they had been working for over 8 years. Intercept provide Forsters with advice and support on all their infrastructure and desktop environment requirements. Intercept advised Meade of two leading solutions in the market to review.
Having conducted a proof of concept (PoC), Meade chose the RES PowerFuse Platinum Edition – a combination of RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom. “The reason for choosing RES Software was simple; they offered a solution for every issue we had, and more,” explained Meade. “Once we had completed the PoC and set up our environment, there was nothing else we needed to do. Straight away the logon time was reduced to seconds rather than minutes, and on that basis, we agreed to buy it!”
“While Citrix provides the ability to centralize our applications, RES Wisdom complements it perfectly by allowing us to manage our desktop devices, as well as maintain absolute consistency across all of our XenApp Servers. It means that the behavior of all of our devices is predictable, and there are never any nasty surprises,” continued Meade. “We employed two contract staff to install the complete RES Software solution over the weekend, and we were impressed by the minimal requirements RES Software have in terms of infrastructure.”
RES PowerFuse: delivers a personalised, secure and reliable workspace to any desktop, thereby increasing user productivity. Its extensive set of features means it is not only a personalization tool but a truly revolutionary approach to managing your Microsoft Windows environment.
RES Wisdom: Run Book automation for Windows enables IT professionals to deliver any set of changes to Microsoft windows environment and automates the provisioning of IT resources. RES Wisdom makes changes easy, offering a uniform solution to routine but complex tasks. Labor intensive changes than normally take hours are completed in seconds.
Benefit
Meade’s users now have a significantly reduced logon time and recently Meade has virtualized his Citrix environment on VMware. He knows of other organizations’ attempts to virtualize Citrix that have failed, but because of his use of RES Software, with no login scripts or group policies, his virtualization project has gone extremely well and his users have suffered no performance issues since.
“The productivity of our users has increased significantly, and the relationship between my team and the users has also improved dramatically. Although we do not run 24x7 as a business, many times the partners are working on cases throughout the night. With RES Wisdom I can remotely provision an application at 2am in the morning from home if required. With RES Software, the control is handed back to IT, but the users are not restricted or prevented from doing their job,” said Meade.
By having a wealth of user behaviour and application usage data (via the reporting engine integrated into RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom), Meade has been able to identify which desktops require a memory upgrade and which ones could be left as is – providing a significant cost avoidance of upgrading machines unnecessarily.
Future Plans
In the current economic climate, Meade plans to use RES PowerFuse Platinum Edition to identify further ways of integrating Active Directory and Citrix to ensure users are empowered to be as productive as humanly possible. He also hopes to use resource usage metrics to look into applications that Forsters may be over-licensed for. “If we can renew licenses for only the applications we use, then we can ensure that Forsters is not wasting money unnecessarily,” concluded Meade.
As a service department, we have a responsibility to ensure our IT users are working the best they can. With RES PowerFuse™ Platinum Edition, now they can.
AJ Meade, IT Manager, UK