Alfa Accountants and Advisors is one of the largest advice groups for administrative and accounting services in the Netherlands, with more than 34 subsidiaries and 800 employees. Alfa Accountants and Advisors´ roots can be found in the agrarian and horticulture sector, but nowadays the automotive industry, the building industry, recreation and individuals also belong to the company’s clientele. Alfa´s headquarters are located in Wageningen, the Netherlands.

The Challenge: Lifting the Burden of IT Administration

Until the end of the nineties, each subsidiary at Alfa Accountants had its own IT environment. In 1999, when the company needed to replace its Novell infrastructure, the choice was made to utilize thin clients and Citrix Presentation Server™ instead of fat clients. Because WAN connections were not available or too expensive, each site got a separate server environment. The first major consolidation process, in 2003, halved the number of Citrix servers by clustering offices using the new KPN Epacity network.  

“When servers in six offices again needed replacement, we faced a dilemma: buy new equipment within the existing local networks or improve the architecture by centralizing everything. Our network was already robust enough to support this,” said Fou-Khan Tsang, member of the board of directors at Alfa Accountants. “Our product is our knowledge, and although IT is essential to manage that knowledge, IT itself and IT administration are not our core business. For almost ten years we had very good experience with the Citrix solution. Therefore we decided we definitely wanted to keep this technology and the existing workspace environment with thin clients. We wanted to continue the benefits of Citrix Presentation Server and even add some additional Citrix solutions to the architecture. So we made the strategic decision to centralize and outsource the complete IT system and IT administration to a Citrix partner that was able to support the existing as well as the new infrastructure.”

Implementing a Dynamic Datacenter

The IT outsourcing process went through different stages. After a very successful pilot, offices gradually switched to the new environment in the external datacenter. The last phase started early 2007 when Qwise B.V., a Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor, held a three-day brainstorm session with Alfa Accountants. “We were looking for an architecture that had to be very flexible and scalable with high availability. The IT infrastructure in the datacenter also needed to be able to dynamically facilitate new developments within our field.” added Tsang. “Flexible working, delivering applications to any device including workstations at the customer´s location, and giving customers access to dedicated services over the Internet: the solution should enable all this in an easy and secure way.”

Now, the complete back office is hosted in two datacenters to fit the needs of Alfa Accountants: the primary datacenter is located in Aalsmeer and hosted by KPN; and the failover datacenter is hosted by Interoute. The centralized environment consists of Citrix Presentation Server running on Dell servers, a NetApp SAN and a 300Mbps eVPN connection between the two datacenters. For secure application delivery, three Citrix Access Gateway™ appliances were introduced. In addition, to improve availability and performance for online accounting and future Web services that Alfa Accountants will offer, three Citrix® NetScaler® appliances have been installed. The desktops in the offices are Wyse thin clients. Qwise is responsible for the administration and maintenance of the datacenters, including all Citrix solutions.

Flexibility and Innovation at Lower Costs

Alfa Accountants has been a very satisfied user of Citrix Presentation Server ever since 1999. Many advantages have been gained by the organization, including improved manageability of IT, increased efficiency and lower costs of operational management. Previously, Alfa Accountants had more than 30 system administrators, who were also responsible for accounting tasks. Since the implementation of the Citrix solutions, this number was reduced to seven regional administrators.

Under the outsourcing arrangement, Qwise is responsible for the complete management and administration of IT. Alfa Accountants remotely handles the user administration in that environment. Three employees evolved into a helpdesk function. Alfa now even has a project manager tasked with looking at new, innovative IT technologies and business alignment to match IT to the needs of the organization. Tsang commented, “Cost savings are important, but business advantages are more important criteria. We did benchmarks with other accountancy agents that proved we are doing a very good job. Our organization succeeds in being flexible and doing more at lower costs and with fewer IT staff.”

Local Entrepreneurs are Offered the Best Service

Citrix made it possible for Alfa Accountants to outsource the IT environment. “Citrix provided an ideal outsourcing environment and enabled a smooth transition. The thin clients on the desks of employees still run the same environment on Citrix servers; the servers are just located a bit further away. Centralization in the outsourcing providers´ datacenters brought us a stable environment with an availability of 99.8 percent and only planned downtime. Tight service level agreements create clear responsibilities for all parties involved,” said Tsang.

The company improved decentralized local services to customers by centralizing IT. With the uniform desktop, all applications are available in all offices and from home with a “desktop as a service” model. “Citrix application delivery allows our staff to connect via the Web from customers’ offices. Further, applications are always available for employees at our branches to ensure that customers receive immediate advice and never have to wait for temporarily unavailable applications.”

He concluded, “The Citrix solutions enabled us to get out of the IT business and back into our core business: accountancy and company advice. Thanks to this, we were selected as the most customer-friendly office in an independent study.”

Future Plans

Alfa Accountants is planning to deliver more services to entrepreneurs using the Internet. These third-party applications vary from online accounting applications to hosted online payroll and paycheck administration. “We are ready to handle these services in the most efficient way possible,” said Tsang. “The Citrix NetScaler appliances ensure that our Web applications are optimized with good performance and high availability so our customers have the best user experience. The devices do their job completely transparently and after a while you even forget that they are always present. NetScaler perfectly fitted the approved company policy to grow in online services and to make sure Web applications run perfectly; the selection of Citrix NetScaler was therefore a logical decision.”

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