The Veolia Umweltservice GmbH is among the leading waste management providers in Germany. The company was formed in 2007 through the acquisition of the SULO Group and the merger of the environmental service partners of Veolia and SULO. Today, Veolia Umweltservice is one of only a few providers covering all sub-areas of waste management – from recyclable resources and raw material recycling by means of disposal logistics, to pipeline and canal services, street cleaning and marketing of newly emerging raw materials. The top goal for the company is a holistic approach to customer-oriented solution strategies and responsible interaction with the environment. Today, in Germany alone, more than 100,000 customers use the services of Veolia Umweltservice.

The Challenge: Faster Adjustment to Market Requirements

The VBG Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungsgesellschaft is responsible for the IT infrastructure of the company. This internal service provider currently supports approximately 2,500 IT workstations with 40 employees. During the past few years, demands for information technology have been growing steadily. “The waste management market has changed significantly,” reported Dieter Kirschner, managing director for VBG. “While contracts often used to be signed with customers for five to ten years, now the duration is more like three years, and in some cases, only for one year. Therefore, companies have to be able to adjust more flexibly, open new locations when necessary or shift existing capacities. We have the challenge as the service provider to map to these changes from the IT side as quickly as possible.”

For this reason, VBG adjusted their IT strategy in the year 2003 and consolidated the formerly decentralized infrastructure. “Until that time, each of our 20 head offices had its own datacenter,” said Manfred Schiemann, director of Information Technology at VBG. “The administration of the decentralized servers and the regular data back-up was turning out to be more and more complex. To simplify the IT operation and increase system stability, we decided at that time to relocate our software landscape to a central Citrix Presentation Server farm.”

Virtualized Application Delivery from the Datacenter

VBG was supported in the conceptualization, installation and enhancements of the Citrix infrastructure by the Cologne-based IT consulting firm sepago®, a Platinum Citrix® Solution Advisor. Since that time, VBG has delivered all core applications — from SAP GUI software modules to specific branch applications — through the central Citrix Presentation Server™, Platinum Edition farm. This strategy of application virtualization has significantly reduced the administration expense: software updates due, for example, to new legal waste management guidelines, now only have to be made once in the datacenter. The updated applications are then delivered at the same time to all locations.

The management of the server farm occurs automatically for the most part: Citrix Presentation Server, Platinum Edition management capabilities and additional tools, such as the sepagoINSTALLER, allows for installations and configurations at the push of a button and at the same time ensure efficient disaster recovery. Even enhancements to the farm can be easily implemented. With increasing user numbers, additional servers can be integrated into the farm without major effort.  

VBG has been faced with this challenge repeatedly in the past few years: in the year 2006, for example, the waste management company, Cleanaway Deutschland, was acquired by the SULO Group. From an IT standpoint, this meant a consolidation of two SAP landscapes, as well as the integration of a few additional subsidiaries. VBG used the centralized Citrix architecture to provide the new employees with all necessary applications and information resources. In this way, the integration could be completed within the specified time frame.

More Flexible Access to IT Resources from Every Location

For this reason, Dieter Kirschner is satisfied by this chosen strategy: “We benefit from the existing Citrix infrastructure during all organizational changes. We are able to adapt our IT environment very quickly and deliver applications to new locations in a very short time. In many situations, this represents a real competitive advantage for the company.”

In the past few years, VBG not only integrated additional users and applications, but also expanded the Citrix infrastructure with new technologies. So, today, more than 450 sales and marketing employees and managers use the SSL VPN solution powered by Citrix Access Gateway™ to access applications and data while on the road or from their home offices. Sensitive data is protected during Web-based access by a policy-based security model. The SmartAccess technology from Citrix identifies the terminal that is being used; then, based on endpoint analysis, verifies the local security settings and dynamically adjusts access rights based on the access scenario.

“This means, for example, that the user can indeed check their e-mail in an Internet café, but cannot gain access to the SAP application,” explained Manfred Schiemann. Local saving or printing of documents from terminals that are not recognized by the company can also be prevented.

WAN Optimization Decreases Network Costs

Another solution currently used by Veolia Umweltservice is Citrix WANScaler™. It optimizes application performance for branch offices. Based on the respective network conditions, an integrated AutoOptimizer Engine automatically uses the appropriate compression procedure. Among other things, the exchange of files between the subsidiaries and the headquarters by means of Microsoft® File Services (CIFS) is significantly faster. “We generally try to use our WAN bandwidth sparingly,” said Manfred Schiemann. “With the WANScaler appliances, we can now actually reduce the amount of required bandwidth to reduce costs, and at the same time we achieve better application performance for users.”

Thanks to its transparent architecture, Citrix WANScaler can simply be integrated into the networks and works together with existing components, such as routers, firewalls, network monitoring or QoS systems, without a problem. The data communication is not tunneled and thus the reconfiguration of other network components is not necessary. Veolia Umweltservice currently uses WANScaler for all of their locations, with more than 80 users.

Performance Monitoring, Single Sign-on and Desktop Virtualization

To improve management of application performance at the user level, VBG also recently implemented Presentation Server, Platinum performance monitoring capability powered by Citrix EdgeSight™. The solution gives administrators a complete overview of the availability and performance of applications from the user’s perspective. “Until now, for performance problems, we had to close in on the cause of the problem step by step,” explained Manfred Schiemann. “With Citrix EdgeSight, in the future we will be able to form a picture immediately, and localize failures as quickly as possible.” In order to make end-to-end monitoring possible, VBG is currently implementing both product variations, EdgeSight™ for Endpoints and EdgeSight™ for Presentation Server.

Two additional enhancements are also already being planned. As a subsidiary of the global Veolia Group, Veolia Umweltservice must increasingly deal with the topic of regulatory compliance. The IT service provider is therefore considering the use of the single sign-on solution included in the Presentation Server, Platinum Edition product that is powered by Citrix Password Manager™. The technology supports companies in the implementation of stricter password guidelines and offers auditing functionality for security-related user actions.

In addition, VBG wants to complement their strategy for application readiness. Individual applications are currently still operated locally on “fat” clients, because they are not compatible with Microsoft® Terminal Services or are only necessary for a few users. “We are planning the use of desktop virtualization technology from Citrix for exactly these workstations,” said Manfred Schiemann. “Our goal is to connect an individual user environment with the management functions of a dynamic datacenter.”

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