Swisscom IT Services was formed on January 1, 2002 through the merger of Swisscom CIT and AGI IT Services. As a strategic subsidiary of Swisscom Switzerland, the organization is not only responsible for the information technology of its parent company, with nearly 20,000 employees, but also provides outsourcing services for large Swiss corporations from all industries. Central hosting of applications plays a large role in these services. Swisscom IT Services has relied on Citrix technology for many years to deliver applications to internal users and external customers. The organization today operates 25 Citrix XenApp™, Platinum Edition farms supporting up to 25,000 simultaneous users. Among other applications, business solutions for The Swiss Railway (SBB) are delivered via the Swisscom datacenters.

The challenge: desktop provisioning for external developers

New challenges arose from organizational changes within the parent company when the previous group companies Fixnet, Mobile and Solutions were consolidated into Swisscom (Switzerland) AG effective January 1, 2008. This reorganization also brought along several standardization and consolidation projects at the IT level. Among other things, the decision was made to replace the various customer relationship management (CRM) systems of the previous group companies with a standardized, Siebel-based solution. Swisscom Switzerland commissioned an external company to develop the new CRM system.

“Before the project could begin, we first had to clarify how the external programmers were to be integrated into our infrastructure,” explained Patrick Kaeslin, head of front end engineering at Swisscom IT Services. For specialists who worked directly for Swisscom in house, local workstations were temporarily set up. However, the majority of the development work was to be done from Madrid; in addition, several programmers in Munich also needed to be granted access.

“The provisioning of physical workstations for around 80 users, including the respective leased lines and the necessary support, would have been extremely costly for us,” said Kaeslin. “The daily replication of two to five gigabytes of data alone would have generated enormous costs. There also would have been the question of how to protect the sensitive program code from unauthorized access with this model.”

Implementing a Citrix solution for desktop virtualization

At short notice, Swisscom IT Services chose an alternative access concept and combined two Citrix technologies in the process:  the SSL VPN solution, Citrix Access Gateway™, for secure Web access, which was already established in the company; and the new solution, Citrix® XenDesktop™, Advanced Edition, for the virtualized delivery of developer desktops. Within just a few weeks, the IT organization implemented the concept in practice. Initially, an existing developer workstation was cloned as a virtual machine. Based on this, the virtual desktops were then set up on several host servers in the datacenter. Each of the approximately 80 programmers was provided with a Windows® XP desktop with the complete Siebel development environment and all office and business applications.

Key benefits: performance, security, flexibility

The Desktop Delivery Controller from Citrix XenDesktop acts as a session broker and establishes the connection between the user and the user environment. The overall communication between the end device and the virtual desktop is handled via the Citrix® ICA® protocol. “High-performance access via the Internet was a basic prerequisite for the success of the virtualization project,” Kaeslin noted. “With Citrix XenDesktop we were able to fulfill user requirements: the developers in Madrid and Munich confirmed that the performance of the virtualized desktop is comparable to that of a locally installed desktop. The start-up speed is even higher since there is no drawn-out booting process. The instant-on technology from Citrix ensures that the virtual desktop is available within just a few seconds.”

In addition to high performance, other factors were pivotal for the IT managers in their choice of the desktop virtualization solution. Above all, security was a high priority. Maintaining the virtual user environments behind the corporate firewall in the datacenter ensures that the source code of the CRM application stays inside the company. In order to gain access to the development environment, the external developers must sign on via the Citrix Web Interface. The Access Gateway component then verifies their identity, automatically assigns them the respective access rights, and encodes the entire communication between the end devices and the servers. Another benefit that Swisscom IT Services attributes to the solution is flexibility. New users at various locations can be integrated very quickly and cost-effectively. If necessary, they can also be provided with different Windows environments. If developers require Windows Vista™ desktops for compatibility tests, they are also virtualized and delivered via XenDesktop.

Swisscom IT Services is currently carrying out a number of proofs of concept to test additional functions of XenDesktop. One is the management of virtual desktop images. XenDesktop includes provisioning technology to stream standard images on demand for any number of virtual desktops. This process not only simplifies administration and maintenance, but also reduces the storage requirements for desktop images by up to 90 percent. According to the expert at Swisscom IT Services, lifecycle management of desktop images and the costs for storage systems absolutely must be taken into consideration in substantial desktop virtualization projects. “We are currently considering separating the applications from the desktop image and centrally providing them for the individual user environments as streamed or published applications. The virtual desktops then boot from a standard image and the applications are dynamically integrated when the system starts.” XenDesktop supports this approach with its integrated components for application virtualization and on-demand provisioning of the operating system.

“Desktop as a service” and application kiosks

Internally at Swisscom IT Services you can already catch a first glimpse of the product line’s future: the administrators have already installed the tech preview of “Project Apollo” on test systems. Under this code name, Citrix is currently developing technology for the virtual provisioning of high-end graphics applications via the ICA protocol. The Swisscom employees tested the graphics acceleration with various applications and were impressed by the initial results. “With the new technology, the transparency and 3D effects of Windows Vista Aero and multimedia applications such as Google Earth can be presented at a high-performing level,” said Kaeslin.

In his opinion, there is a great deal in favor of desktop virtualization becoming significantly more important in the future. “In many organizations today, the traditional desktop computer with locally installed applications is already a phased-out model. Applications and desktops are increasingly being moved into datacenters. Today we are already speaking with customers about models such as ‘desktop as a service’ and a central application kiosk that provides users with the required applications according to their needs. With XenDesktop and the Citrix Delivery Center, Citrix is going precisely in this direction and has developed an end-to-end strategy that is completely focused on the dynamic provisioning of IT resources.”

About the Citrix Solution

Citrix® XenDesktop™, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, allows customers to virtualize Windows® desktops in the datacenter and deliver them on demand to office workers in any location. By dynamically assembling each user’s unique personal desktop from new, pristine components each time they log on, XenDesktop offers an unparalleled end-user experience, dramatically simplifies desktop management and reduces the cost of traditional desktop computing by up to 40 percent. Citrix XenApp™ is the industry’s de facto standard for delivering Windows-based applications with the best performance, security and cost savings.

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